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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.