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Cape man buoys theory missile downed jet (TWA Flight 800)
Boston Herald ^ | Tuesday, July 18, 2006 | Joe Dwinell

Posted on 07/18/2006 7:13:58 PM PDT by PajamaTruthMafia

Cape man buoys theory missile downed jet By Joe Dwinell

A Bay State physicist is taking on the National Transportation Safety Board in federal court in Boston to help bolster his theory a missile is to blame for taking down TWA Flight 800 a decade ago.

“I don’t want this 10-year anniversary to go by without paying attention to this plausible theory,” said Tom Stalcup, a Falmouth resident who holds a doctorate in physics and heads up the Flight 800 Independent Researchers Organization.

Flight 800 exploded and crashed in the sea south of Long Island, N.Y., at 3 p.m. on July 17, 1996.

Stalcup’s group, linked mostly by the Internet, has filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in Boston seeking documents relating to the crash, including a “wreckage item” that exited the plane’s airframe at “apparent supersonic speeds.”

Stalcup alleges the Navy recovered this “smoking gun” wreckage.

Federal officials say the crash was an accident - not a missile strike from a Navy exercise or anything else


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: anniversary; callingartbell; conspiracytheory; fearuncertaintydoubt; nutjob; terrorism; twa800; twaflight800
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To: ElkGroveDan
A bolide coming in on a low trajectory would describe a path exactly as the one which was reported to have been seen.

Mid-July, every year, this is a common event around the world as the Earth travels through one of several debris trails left by an ancient comet.

Sometimes the debris is larger than usual. Sometimes it's not. 8 PM is a good time to catch sight of any larger ones coming in toward North America. They'll appear to be arriving over the horizon, that is "going up".

201 posted on 07/19/2006 6:39:42 AM PDT by muawiyah (-/sarcasm)
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To: Alberta's Child

Yes, patently absurd is a good characterization alright. It does amaze me what type of misinformation (censorship, if you will) eminates from a free society. I will continue to believe to my dying day that the truth was censored in this situation.


202 posted on 07/19/2006 6:49:45 AM PDT by DoughtyOne (Al Qaeda / Taliban operatives: Read the NY Times, for daily up to the minute security threat tips.)
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To: art_rocks

LOL Their cake-boy was the one who oversaw that.


203 posted on 07/19/2006 6:50:42 AM PDT by DoughtyOne (Al Qaeda / Taliban operatives: Read the NY Times, for daily up to the minute security threat tips.)
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To: muawiyah
Mid-July, every year, this is a common event around the world as the Earth travels through one of several debris trails left by an ancient comet.

If you are describing the annual Delta Aquarid meteor shower, then you're off by about ten days. The Aquarids peak around July 28th every summer.

204 posted on 07/19/2006 6:57:28 AM PDT by Alberta's Child (Can money pay for all the days I lived awake but half asleep?)
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To: Alberta's Child
No ~ but virtually all the time the Earth is traveling through the path of something that went through long ago leaving parts behind. We only NAME the big ones that provide us significant swarms.

This is an ancient track that's pretty thin, but it's got some big ones in it. Just last Friday one came in on a low trajectory and broke up over Norway. They had people out looking for pieces.

Kind of an "anniversary" meteor eh?!

205 posted on 07/19/2006 7:06:55 AM PDT by muawiyah (-/sarcasm)
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To: Mr. Quarterpanel
Mr. Quarterpanel:

An infrared seeker looks at the total amount of IR, and that is not always directly reallotted to temperature.

The amount and spectrum (color) of IR is determined by the "blackbody equation" or Planck Energy Distribution Law (and the Stephan-Boltzman Law)

http://www.egglescliffe.org.uk/physics/astronomy/blackbody/bbody.html

There is another factor and that is the "emissivity" of the hot body. Basically this is the amount of IR that the body emits. If I have two pieces of aluminum, one flat black and the other mirror bright, at the same temperature, the flat black one will emit much more IR than the shiny one because it has a higher emissivity. Both will emit the same spectrum of IR, though.

What I'm getting at is the plume of hot air does not necessarily emit a larger quantity of IR than a black surface at a lower temperature, because the emissivity will be lower.

There is a picture posted above that shows internal engine components and the AC vents all glowing a cheery white, and nothing for the air plume, which is, as you remarked, quite warm and large.

http://www.mikroninfrared.com/news/mbrc.htm

Here is an IR calculator (you must register to download) that lets you figure out how much IR is emitted from a surface at a given temperature. You can look up emissivities online, or just pick a temperature and vary the emissivity to see what happens.

Emissivities:

http://www.raytek-northamerica.com/cat.html?cat_id=9.5&PHPSESSID=publicRaytekNorthAmerica
206 posted on 07/19/2006 7:21:49 AM PDT by DBrow
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To: Alberta's Child
And there's no reason to assume that this involved a U.S. Navy ship, either.

I thought the initial speculation centered on a Navy P-3 Orion aircraft in the area armed with practice missiles that had no warheads. Someone even posted a picture of a P-3 on the ground with its missile complement after Kallstrom or someone connected to the investigation denied that P-3's were armed at all. The theory was that a practice missile from the P-3 missed its drone target and went on to hit TWA 800 in the center of mass, ripping it apart and neatly explaining all of the odd symptoms that investigators later found. No one said that a Navy ship was involved, which would make the number of Navy personnel needing to be silenced in the event of such a mishap quite a bit smaller.

207 posted on 07/19/2006 7:27:46 AM PDT by Mr. Jeeves ("When the government is invasive, the people are wanting." -- Tao Te Ching)
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To: Non-Sequitur; UCANSEE2

http://www.usor.com/pdfs/msds/fuels/Jet_Fuel_MSDS.pdf

Flash point is 38C, autoignition over 200 C, and the vapor concentration in air must be between .7% and 5%. Higher than 5%, no ignition (too rich).


208 posted on 07/19/2006 7:30:01 AM PDT by DBrow
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To: DBrow

and nothing for the air plume,

I took a closer look, and there is IR from the hot air, but it is not as bright as the solid objects.


209 posted on 07/19/2006 7:34:19 AM PDT by DBrow
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To: Mr. Jeeves
I do remember reading something about the P-3, but I wasn't sure how serious that speculation was. The presence of a drone in the sky was one of the more plausible explanations for some discrepancies among the eyewitness accounts. A number of different witnesses who claimed that they saw some kind of object rising up toward the airliner had conflicting descriptions of the tracks these objects took, but most of them fit into two fairly well-defined tracks -- which suggested that two objects (possibly a drone and an errant missile) were involved.

The one thing that makes this all difficult to sort out is not just the inherent inaccuracies in any eyewitness account, but the clear disconnect between different events as described by individual witnesses (mainly a function of the distances involved).

For example, a witness who claimed that they saw a flash and then almost immediately heard an explosion will understandably assume there is some connection between the two discrete events. But in the case of TWA Flight 800, this is not the case at all. Sound travels much slower than light, and since Flight 800 was about nine miles offshore when it went down, there would be a 45 second lapse between when an explosion occurred and when a person on the shore would have heard it. So it is entirely possible that a person saw a flash and heard an explosion almost simultaneously, but the sound could not have been caused by the flash in question. Investigators would have to work backwards to a point 45 seconds earlier to determine what exactly caused the sound that was reported to have been heard on the shore.

Just think about the time intervals we're talking about here. 45 seconds is an incredibly long period of time in any kind of incident like this.

210 posted on 07/19/2006 7:42:20 AM PDT by Alberta's Child (Can money pay for all the days I lived awake but half asleep?)
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To: maine-iac7
and responses to the K Towers, the Cole, the 93 Twin Towers bombings...we know the luke warm response they got... TWA 800 fits into this pattern - ignore the eyewitness accounts, for ex., who say they saw a streak of light shoot up from the ocean and then the plane exploded...

One question. If it was terrorists, why didn't they take credit for it like they did with Kobar, the Cole and 9-11? It seems to me that the object of terrorism is to create terror --- not to pertend it was an accident.

211 posted on 07/19/2006 7:53:02 AM PDT by Ditto
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To: Mr. Quarterpanel; DBrow

It's also worth noting that a heat-seeking missile does not tend to just chase after any source of heat. Oddly enough, it isn't as easy for a Stinger-type missile to take down a passenger airliner as people might think. These missiles are designed to shoot down military aircraft whose engines tend to burn hotter than even a large passenger jet, so the possibility that a missile would lock on a minor heat source on a 747 seems a little far-fetched to me.


212 posted on 07/19/2006 7:56:51 AM PDT by Alberta's Child (Can money pay for all the days I lived awake but half asleep?)
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To: muawiyah
A bolide coming in on a low trajectory would describe a path exactly as the one which was reported to have been seen.

Except that there is is no record in all of human history of a bolide causing any damage to anything whatsoever. What a wild coincidence that the first destructive one in human history happens to impact a high-speed jet in flight. And since a bolide is an exploding meteorite, it would have to time it's explosion to the exact moment it encountered the airplane -- wow! coincidence upon coincidence! Go read about Occam's Razor. Besides, that kind of wild theory might work for one witness observation from one angle, except that when you add up the hundreds of witnesses from different angles and perspectives up and down the curving coastline that saw the event, you get an object rising from the ocean as the only geometric possibility.

You are entitled to your theory, and a rare exploding meteorite makes about as much sense as the previously unheard-of exploding fuel tank, an event that has never occurred in the hundreds of thousands of operational hours of similar planes in hotter environs.

Occurrences of planes being shot down at the end of a streaking trail on the other hand, are far more common. Occam says go with that theory.

213 posted on 07/19/2006 8:09:39 AM PDT by ElkGroveDan (California bashers will be called out)
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To: ElkGroveDan

Just couldn't get past your first sentence. Try: http://imca.repetti.net/metinfo/metstruck.html


214 posted on 07/19/2006 8:12:11 AM PDT by muawiyah (-/sarcasm)
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To: ElkGroveDan
BTW, Occam says many more meteors hit the Earth every year than all the rockets fired in history.

So, go with that one eh!

215 posted on 07/19/2006 8:14:59 AM PDT by muawiyah (-/sarcasm)
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To: AmishDude
What good is a terrorist attack if (a) nobody knows you did it and (b) you never repeat it (I.e., not a dry run.)?

What kind of terrorists don't contact media and everyone else under the sun and make sure they know that they did it.

Al Quada, would have been harping on this, as most groups would have by now.

There are just to many reasons (now, not then) to believe this wasn't a missle attack or a terrorist attack.

216 posted on 07/19/2006 8:15:25 AM PDT by Sonny M ("oderint dum metuant")
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To: muawiyah
BTW, Occam says many more meteors hit the Earth every year than all the rockets fired in history. So, go with that one eh!

That statistic is true but unrelated to the reasoning behind Occam's Razor.

The point is that not enough meteors encounter the Earth to hit one stationary person in all of human history, let alone a speeding jet. The only recorded fatality in 6000 years of written history was of a dog in Egypt a hundred years ago.

Your theory is wild, unsupported by the facts, and bordering on ludicrous. The CIA's theory isn't quite so absurd, but it's close.

217 posted on 07/19/2006 9:39:12 AM PDT by ElkGroveDan (California bashers will be called out)
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To: ElkGroveDan
All of history didn't get written down. You are aware that up until "recent" times folks who said rocks were falling from the sky were dealt with harshly.

That didn't mean rocks weren't falling or that people weren't getting hit with them.

BTW, the cat's out of the bag now ~ rocks fall from the sky!

218 posted on 07/19/2006 10:08:15 AM PDT by muawiyah (-/sarcasm)
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To: Sonny M

If somebody said it was a shoe bomb attack, I might believe it -- dry run and all. But all of this hinges on people seeing explosions in the night sky.

I don't doubt they saw what they said they saw, but there are a couple of problems. First, were they all staring at the sky or did they look after the flash? Hundreds of Long Islanders stare into the sky for hours on end, apparently. I don't know a lot about missles, but at night, it would seem to me that you wouldn't see much of the missle -- if you weren't looking for it -- until it causes an explosion. What they saw could have been the aftermath.

Second, what other evidence is there? Where's the launch site? Where are the fragments? Where's the rest of the ammo? Long Island is a pretty densely populated place. They'd have to get really lucky to find a place where NOBODY would see them launching a rocket, even out in the water.

Third, this is legendary accuracy. Even the Star Wars system isn't this good. Think about it: There was only ONE shot. And they got a plane travelling at incredible speeds at the edge of the range of these missles. Now I have no doubt that a barrage of missles would have brought down 800, but exactly one?

Fourth, we addressed. If you have a terrorist attack, you want people to believe that you or your compatriots did it. At the very least you want people to believe that it was terrorism in general so that the population will be afraid. The motivation here is not clear.


219 posted on 07/19/2006 10:44:06 AM PDT by AmishDude (Posting from Lake Balaton, Hungary.)
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To: Ditto

you mean, like with Oklahoma City?


220 posted on 07/19/2006 12:15:26 PM PDT by oceanview
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