WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?
EPIX doc raises yet more questions about doomed TWA Flight 800
SEVENTEEN years ago today, TWA Flight 800 took off from JFK bound for Paris. Twelve minutes later it exploded over the water near East Moriches, Long Island — killing all 230 passengers on board.
Before a day had passed, reporters, particularly John Miller, found eyewitnesses who swore they saw at least one streak of light fly from the surface of the earth, weave to the side, aim directly and then strike the plane, causing a massive explosion.
The FBI and the CIA took over the investigation determining, finally, that the crash had been caused by an explosion of unknown origin in a fuel tank. It was not, the government insisted — and attempted to prove — anything other than an accident. There was no missile, they said.
But the nearly 200 eyewitnesses, the original TWA investigators and one physicist who did the calculations would not take no, or at least “no missile,” for an answer.
Tonight, EPIX premieres an outstanding documentary, “TWA Flight 800,” by Emmywinning journalist Kristina Borjesson and physicist Dr. Tom Stalcup, who has spent the last 16 years investigating the crash.
Stalcup began with the eyewitnesses and moved onto the investigators who were told to keep their mouths shut — investigators who finally couldn’t keep quiet any longer. What emerges is something so startling that it’s hard to comprehend. Witnesses come forward here who are still shaken and upset at what they saw and also how, they say, they were pressured by the feds into assuming that they “misperceived” what they saw.
But it didn’t matter what they saw, because no witnesses were allowed to testify before Congress at the hearing. One was even told by the FBI that if she wanted to get her US citizenship, she’d better keep her mouth shut.
You’ll see the CIA animated video — complete with cheesy music and graphics straight out of a Tom Cruise action movie — that was shown to Congress and fed to the news media as gospel.
The investigators here, though, tell of how the FBI snuck into the crash hangar in the middle of the night (seen on video surveillance) to change tags on evidence — and to even hammer out dents on pieces of evidence.
But the real smoking gun is proved by the radar images. The government conclusion is that it was a lowvelocity explosion that brought down the plane. Radar however, shows debris flying out of the aircraft at 4,000 mph—more than four times the speed of sound — which could only be caused by a missile.
Sometimes even a great whitewash just doesn’t wash. It still looks dirty.