An acquaintance of mine’s father was a Boeing crash inspector. He went out and figured out wht went wrong when a plane went down. Several years ago I asked him about TWA800. He said, “It was a Missile.”
Maybe “Sandy Burglar” knows........
This is problematic for two reasons. First, that is right at the altitude limit of most MANPAD systems of the time. That would mean the launching platform would have to be directly under the aircraft and fire just about straight up. Possible, but not likely.
If you were planning to bring down a 747, don't you think you'd put your team in a position more inside the engagement envelope?
That brings up the second point. If I remember correctly, -800 was too low. At that point in the departure path, it should've been at a higher altitude. It was held down for some inbound traffic or some such. So even if you were planning on a max altitude engagement, you wouldn't put your team there, because at that point departing airliners should have already been too high.
So a missile team wouldn't have been there, and (probably) wouldn't have engaged something right at the limits of their system. It was just luck that -800 was at that altitude at that position. You don't plan for luck. A terrorist team would've been someplace else.
I don't buy the Navy shoot-down theory either. I know for a fact the Navy is forbidden from generating a fire control solution on commercial aircraft, and they would never in a million years illuminate one with the X band terminal guidance radar. Without either of those engagement elements, there's no way a semi-active radar homing missile would've found it's way into -800.
Of course, I don't really buy the official line either. Have there been any cases of modern airliners' fuel tanks exploding? Sure it is possible, but is it even remotely probable? I honestly don't have a theory as to what happened to -800, but there are some things I'm pretty sure didn't happen to it.