You can try to trivialize over 200 independent witness who unknowingly corroborate each other's stories all you want, but it won't wash with me, nor many thousands of others.
So help me understand, who should I belevie? The two hundred plus people with no axe to grind who tell remarkably similar accounts of what happened, or the Government agency that buried those accounts and came up with a cock-a-maimie theory that they cannot demonstrate or replicate and has never happened before or since despite millions of potential opportunities?
Do you believe that the US Navy shot the plane down??? The 200 witnesses would collaborate that.
From the NTSB report
“Numerous witnesses in the vicinity of the accident reported a streak of light. As the NTSB noted, “There was intense public interest in these witness reports and much speculation that the reported streak of light was a missile that eventually struck TWA flight 800, causing the airplane to explode.”[8] The NTSB Witness Group concluded that the streak of light reported by witnesses might have been the accident airplane during some stage of its flight before the fireball developed, noting that most of the 258 streak of light accounts were generally consistent with the calculated flightpath of the accident airplane after the CWT explosion.[8]
However, 38 witnesses described a streak of light that ascended vertically, or nearly so, and these accounts “seem[ed] to be inconsistent with the accident airplane’s flightpath.”[8] In addition, 18 witnesses reported seeing a streak of light that originated at the surface, or the horizon, which was “not consistent with the airplane’s flightpath.”[8] With regard to these differing accounts, the NTSB noted that in previous investigations witness data was “often inconsistent with the known facts or other witnesses’ reports of the same events.”[8] The interviews conducted by the FBI focused on the possibility of a missile attack (some suggested interview questions given to FBI agents were “Where was the sun in relation to the missile launch point?” and “How long did the missile fly?”), and as a consequence there was possible interviewer/interviewee bias.[16] The NTSB concluded that given the large number of witnesses in this case, they “did not expect all of the documented witness observations to be consistent with one another”[8], and “did not view the apparent anomalous accounts as being persuasive evidence that some witnesses might have observed a missile.”[8]
The investigation determined that if witnesses had observed a missile attack they would have seen the following: (1) a light from the burning missile motor ascending very rapidly and steeply for about 8 seconds; (2) the light disappearing for up to 7 seconds; (3) upon the missile striking the aircraft and igniting the CWT another light, moving considerably slower and more laterally than the first, for about 30 seconds; (4) this light descending while simultaneously developing into a fireball falling toward the ocean.[8] None of the witness documents provided to the NTSB described such a scenario, and the investigation concluded that “the witness observations of a streak of light were not related to a missile and that the streak of light reported by most of these witnesses was the burning fuel from the accident airplane in crippled flight during some portion of the post-explosion, pre-impact breakup sequence.”[8]