Accuracy in Media
Weekly Column
By Reed Irvine
On Sept. 24, 1996, The New York Post reported that the FBI had interviewed 154 "credible" witnesses who described seeing a missile streaking through the sky just before TWA Flight 800 exploded on July 17, 1996. On Sept. 18, The Washington Post had reported that the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) had sent letters to members of Congress saying that there was no evidence that a missile or bomb had caused the crash.
The New York Post said that of 400 people who said they had seen something in the sky, 115 had seen something ascending. Even if all those people were accurate in their observations only one time out of ten, the probability that they had seen something ascending would be virtually 100 percent, but the FBI and NTSB dismissed their testimony as invalid. Their justification for this decision was that visibility at the time of the explosion was 6.95 miles and they said "the closest eyewitness to the disaster was over 10 miles away." That is false. The crash site was seven nautical miles south of the barrier island, where many of the eyewitnesses were located. There were eyewitnesses on boats who were even closer. One was an FBI agent, George Gabriel, who reported that a missile had brought down the plane. Most of them saw a missile that was launched from a point estimated to be only a mile or two offshore, and some of them both saw it and heard its sonic boom.
One of these was Paul J. Angelides, a consulting engineer, who was on the deck of his beach house when a red phosphorescent object caught his eye. He says, "The object was quite high in the sky (about 50-60 degrees) and was slightly to the west and off shore of my position. At first it appeared to be moving slowly, almost hanging and descending, and was leaving a white smoke trail. The smoke trail was short and the top of the smoke trail has a clockwise, parabolic shaped hook towards the shore. My first reaction was that I was looking at a marine distress flare which had been fired from a boat. I said to myself, someone must be in trouble. "I quickly realized that the object was too large and then began moving too fast to be a distress flare. I followed the object as it moved out over the ocean in the direction of the horizon. I lost sight of the object, as it was about 10 degrees above the horizon. In the same area of the sky out over the ocean, I then saw a series of flashes, one in the sky and another closer to the horizon. I remember straining to see what was happening as there seemed to be a lot of chaos out there. There was a dot on the horizon near the action, which I perceived as a boat. The flashes were then followed by a huge fireball, which dropped very quickly into the sea. My first reaction was that I had seen a military exercise that went awry.
"Then the sounds started. There was a very loud and prolonged boom, which reminded me of thunder rolling above the house. The noise continued and concluded with a series of two distinctly louder bursts and a final extremely loud burst. The sounds shook the house. My wife felt the floor shaking as she heard the noise and I heard her cry out 'what is going on?' After some silence there were two more extremely loud explosion-like bursts of sound which also shook the house. I thought to myself that I had witnessed some big weapons being used." The thunder was the sonic boom. The first two bursts were from the two white flashes and the third was from the explosion that produced the fireball. The last two bursts came when large parts of the plane hit the water. Angelides said that after phoning a report to the Coast Guard, he returned to gaze out on the ocean. He said, "The dot on the horizon, which I thought was a ship, had disappeared." (An unidentified ship was recorded on radar tape fleeing the crash scene doing 30 knots.) Angelides said one of the prepared questions the FBI agents asked was, "When did you first see the missile?" He was sure they would try to discover who fired it. Disappointed in their progress, he called them again early in 1997 to remind them of what he had seen and to stress its importance. They were not interested.. Paul Angelides is typical of the eyewitnesses that have been dismissed and dissed by the FBI, the NTSB and most recently by Rep. James A. Traficant, Jr., D-Ohio, who issued an 18-page endorsement of the official findings on the TWA 800 crash. Rep. Traficant said, "While a few eyewitness accounts are not consistent with the break-up scenario posited by the NTSB and the FBI, the bulk of the eyewitness statements are consistent with the break-up scenario."
Try telling that to Paul Angelides and 114 others who know the difference between a rocket ascending a few miles in front of them and a burning plane on the horizon falling into the sea.