View source for SGU Episode 901

=== TWA 800 Lawsuit <small>(58:55)</small> ===
* [https://lawstreetmedia.com/news/citing-new-evidence-surviving-family-members-sue-feds-raytheon-and-lockheed-martin-over-1996-twa-crash/ Feds, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin Over 1996 TWA Crash]<ref>[https://lawstreetmedia.com/news/citing-new-evidence-surviving-family-members-sue-feds-raytheon-and-lockheed-martin-over-1996-twa-crash/ Lawstreet Media: Feds, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin Over 1996 TWA Crash]</ref>

'''S:''' All right, Evan this is one of those stories that never completely goes away. The TWA 800 crash is still embroiled now in a new lawsuit. Tell us about it.

'''E:''' Sure is. Yeah, I read this at Law Street Media is the website. Headline reads, citing new evidence, surviving family members sue feds Raytheon and Lockheed Martin over the 1996 TWA crash. So this was an amended complaint filed in Massachusetts federal court. The original complaint was filed back in July of this year. This one's amended. I'm not quite sure exactly what parts of it were amended. I didn't see a link to the original one. But that aside-

'''S:''' There's always little technical shit that they're doing.

'''E:''' Yeah, right. Yeah, there may be another amendment coming. Who knows? But the complaint accuses the U.S. Department of Defense, the United States Navy and the contractors Raytheon Technologies Corporation and Lockheed Martin Corporation of a cover up of the 1996 aviation incident, resulting in the death of all 230 passengers and crew members aboard TWA flight 800. It's a wrongful death case claims that Freedom of Information Act or FOIA evidence has emerged proving that TWA 800 explosion was not caused by any defect in the airplane, but instead by an errant United States missile fired at aerial target drones flying nearby. And the suits brought by the survivors of the disaster for those of us who have been alive long enough to remember when this happened, I definitely remember when it happened. I remember being woken up in the middle of the night with a phone call to get down to my office. I was in the video production industry at the time. I had to prepare a lot of equipment needed for crews to head out to Long Island, New York, who needed more cameras, more reporters and things from France and from the United States all needed a local shop to get more equipment to cover this. It was a huge story. So I definitely, definitely remember that myself. But here are the basic facts. TWA flight 800 took off from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport around 8:20 PM on July 17<sup>th</sup>, 1996. It was bound for Paris. Within 12 minutes of takeoff, the plane exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Long Island, New York. In the United States, we have a federal agency that investigates all airplane crashes called the National Transportation Safety Board, the NTSB. And they issued their official report on August 23<sup>rd</sup>, 2000. It took four years to conduct this entire investigation. Here's the relevant summary from that report. The NTSB determined that the probable cause of the flight accident was an explosion of the center wing fuel tank, CWT for short, resulting from ignition of the flammable fuel/air mixture in the tank. The source of ignition energy for the explosion could not be determined with certainty, but of the sources evaluated by the investigation, the most likely cause was a short circuit outside of the CWT that allowed excessive voltage to enter through electrical wiring associated with the fuel quantity indication system. Contributing factors to the accident were the design and certification concept that fuel tank explosions could be prevented solely by precluding all ignition sources and the design and certification of the Boeing 747 with heat sources located beneath the CWT with no means to reduce the heat transferred into the CWT or to render the fuel vapor in the tank non-flammable. That's the relevant summary there. Now, according to this lawsuit, the wrongful death complaint, this report is false and it supposedly can be proven due to a series of FOIA information that has been uncovered primarily by a physicist, Dr. Thomas Stalcup. And Thomas Stalcup has been basically looking into this for, well, almost as long as the case has been a case. He's actively involved in offering testimony and basically talking about this and how it's always been a cover up and there are alternate explanations exactly as to what happened. So this particular physicist has been on this case for a better part of two decades now. He says that according to his evidence, instead of a fuel tank explosion, the cause of the explosion was the testing of the Aegis weapons system developed and managed by Raytheon and Lockheed. It explains that the defense system fired SM-2 missiles with live warheads from warships at aerial missile targets off the coast of New York in close proximity to commercial flight paths. The filing states claims for negligence, wrongful death and survivorship, kind of the technical things that you have to have in these kinds of suits. The complaint specifies that the contractor defendant missile system suffered from system specific software problems. It is further contended by plaintiffs that the defendants engaged in a top down cover up to prevent the public from learning the truth about TWA 800. So yeah, there's a couple different things kind of really going on here. They're saying it was a cover up and that these FOIA requests have revealed evidence to the fact it was a cover up and the evidence they're saying also discredits the exploding fuel tank narrative. Now, Bob, Steve and Jay, I know you guys have some information regarding this that you did some investigating yourself on this particular case.

'''S:''' We deeply investigated this for a pilot that we were filming, if you recall, and this is pretty open and shut. Bob actually went to the debris of the plane, right, Bob? And you could see how it was an explosion from the inside out.

'''B:''' Yeah, it was in a warehouse, basically the most intense three dimensional jigsaw puzzle ever. They put this plane back together from all the exploded pieces. And of course, there were pieces missing and bent and all this stuff, but it was an amazing sight and so impressive, so impressive, extraordinary feat just to get that thing back together. And yeah, you could clearly see that.

'''S:''' Yeah, this was an internal explosion. The other thing is, is we spoke to Jay and I blanketed a lot of witnesses. We did our own sort of witness investigation. Then we read the testimony of many witnesses. And also you can reconstruct what happened. I'll try to give this really briefly. Here's basically what happened. There were two explosions, right? There was an initial explosion, then Flight 800 went streaking down, billowing smoke and then exploded again as it broke into two pieces. So and you can calculate distance from the witnesses to where this was happening. And because sound travels at a predictable speed through air, we know how long it would have taken for the sound of the explosion to reach the witnesses. We know exactly how long it would have taken. Some witnesses were 42 seconds away from from the in terms of the speed of sound from the explosion. So when you reconstruct what the witnesses say. And this is both contemporary and even currently. And they're remarkably consistent, actually. They heard an explosion, turned toward the explosion and saw a streak in the sky. And they they saw the the Flight 800 on fire. Some people say that they saw the ship blow up, the plane blow up. And then either either at the same time that they heard the explosion or they heard the explosion two or three seconds later. Now, their brains just we were just talking about this. When you see and hear something that fits together, your brain constructs that narrative. So it makes perfect sense that they saw and heard an explosion within a couple of seconds of each other. And they thought that that was the explosion. What they were seeing was what they were hearing. And so imagine if you see and hear an explosion and what you're seeing is a trail of smoke leading to the plane. So that's why their brains put that together as a missile hit the plane and then exploded. But what was actually happening and this is unequivocal, demonstrable laws of physics kind of stuff. They were seeing the second explosion at the near the time that they were hearing the first explosion. Forty two seconds or 50 seconds or whatever previously. The trail of smoke was from flight 800 itself, which had already been burning for 50 seconds or whatever. Does that make sense? So it's just that they they didn't in real time calculate the time delay of the sound versus the versus what they could see and intuitively know what the distance was. They didn't realize that they were miles away from what they were seeing. And so their own testimony, even people, we spoke to people who were convinced it was a missile and yet their own testimony proves that it wasn't. You know what I mean? So the evidence, the "evidence" that it was a missile is not. And here's something that's that's critical. No one, no single witness saw a missile hit the plane and then the plane blew up. Nobody saw that. They always saw it in process and and then had to sort of reconstruct what was happening. And they just did it wrong because they didn't factor in the time delay of the sound. That makes sense?

'''B:''' Yeah, totally.

'''J:''' It's remarkable how remarkable over time and, people's memories will become so distorted. And this is all of us. I'm not I'm not pointing fingers at anyone. We all do this. Just reviewing memories in your head and then hearing outside information that is that's related to those memories can significantly alter them. It's it's so liquid. That's why all of our ability to perceive reality and our memories of reality are all in flux.

'''E:''' Especially when there's a time factor involved. There's no I don't know how you can possibly actively correctly come up with the time sequence, as Steve described, and be able to talk about that after the fact with to the detail that the evidence otherwise suggests. I don't know a case where that can where someone can possibly really do that. Unless, Steve, like you said, they actually saw actually witnessed a missile hitting a plane and then having all those events unfold. Instead, people are hearing things, turning and then seeing the phenomenon. And then their brain is piecing together what they think.

'''S:''' Here's the other thing. I think there's another factor here is that our expectations are trained by cinema and television.

'''B:''' Right?

'''E:''' That's true.

'''S:''' People expect to see what things look like on the big screen, what they look like on television and not in the real world where you have to factor things in like extreme distance, a 50 second delay between the explosion and the sound reaching you. So, yeah, of course they were confused. No one's ever seen anything like that before. This is a one off unexpected bizarre event and their brains reconstructed it wrong. But careful analysis can reconstruct it correctly. So I have no doubt this lawsuit will fail because now they have to, they can't just do the typical conspiracy thing where they anomaly hunt and and try to just make everything sound sinister. They have to positively prove a conspiracy to cover up evidence. And of course, one doesn't exist. So they're not going to be able to do it. Conspiracies don't fare well when they have rules of evidence, like in a courtroom, because you can't just be just asking questions. That doesn't get you very far.

'''E:''' What they're saying in this particular complaint, and this is on line 85 of the complaint. They obtained several at, this part of the FOIA, they obtained several FBI records never released to the families or the public. One described as an original Navy radar tape showing an object heading straight for TWA 800. Another describes an object on radar impacting TWA 800 and then spiraling away, while also stating that witnesses described seeing a flare going up orbit circle another object. Subsequently, debris fell from the sky. And so what they're implying here and through these suggestions is that the FOIA requests have revealed that these tapes, apparently, exist somewhere. I don't think they have them. I doubt it. But that's what they're apparently suggesting is that from the Freedom of Information Act requests that have been disclosed now, they say that there is video evidence that suggests otherwise. And that's what I believe they're going to base this whole thing on. We'll see how far that gets them. I don't know.

'''S:''' Yeah, but we know it's bullshit. What always happens is they're doing three levels deep of inference about what this could mean. And they're reading between the lines or just misinterpreting evidence. It's the same thing with UFO evidence. It's always the same thing. It's just inferential and wishful thinking, but there's never any there there.

'''E:''' And then when you actually do wind up seeing tapes, you get things like you have the UFO Navy tapes, right? K, we can explain this now. Yes. And here is exactly what happened. Actually, it doesn't support your complaint here. It actually further supports what the what the investigation.

'''S:''' Yeah. So again, because we have a lot invested in this particular story, not only because of just regionally, it's something that happened in our backyard, basically, but also because we investigated it so thoroughly. Definitely will follow this story and give any what the ultimate conclusion is. I definitely would like to see what they're calling evidence in this case. I bet you it's UFO level evidence.

'''E:''' Right. That's that was my thought as well. But we will see and keep it going.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Evan.

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