I remember at the time reading about a small boat making odd maneuvers. Here is a 1999 article from something called The Observer (a web offshoot of the New York Observer?).
Radar Shows ‘Getaway Boat’ Fleeing Flight 800 Crash, by Philip Weiss.
Excerpt:
The third anniversary of the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 is July 17, so it’s a good time to look into what even the Government reluctantly concedes is a mystery about the crash: “the 30-knot track.” The 30-knot track is the radar trail of a boat that was the closest vessel to the 747 when it exploded and that then headed out to sea on a beeline from right under the burning wreckage.“That boat is extremely suspect,” said William S. Donaldson, a retired Navy commander who supports the missile theory of the plane’s destruction. “He not only doesn’t turn to render assistance, he runs.”
“It’s like the getaway car,” said Graeme Sephton, an electrical engineer who is active in an Internet researchers organization that is highly critical of the Federal investigation.
The Government doesn’t think the unidentified boat is such a big deal. “It does not intrigue me,” said Peter Goelz, the National Transportation Safety Board managing director. F.B.I. spokesman Joseph Valiquette added, “In an ideal world, it would be nice to know everything, but I don’t think the F.B.I. or the N.T.S.B. claims to know everything that happened in the crash.”
This is a convenient position for the F.B.I. to adopt now. The most unsettling thing about the 30-knot track is that the F.B.I. essentially suppressed knowledge of it when the crash was foremost on the public agenda. Two years ago, the F.B.I. closed its criminal investigation into the crash, and James Kallstrom, then the lead F.B.I. investigator, testified before Congress that the agency’s “exhaustive” efforts had included “tracking of all air and waterborne vessels in the area at the time of the explosion followed by appropriate interviews.”
[snip]
The closing of the criminal investigation allowed the N.T.S.B. to hold hearings on the crash, one month later, where it offered hundreds of exhibits, a few of which depicted a “30-knot track” 10 miles out in the Atlantic. Radar data collected during the last minute of the T.W.A. flight revealed the two closest objects to the plane, both between three and four miles away, as a Navy P-3 airplane and what the exhibit called simply a “30-knot target.” Radar data for the next 20 minutes showed the mystery boat heading on a beeline out to sea, on a south-southwest course, even as other boats rushed to the crash to try to help out. It was nearly 9 o’clock at night, not the usual time for an excursion.
“I looked at that and said, ‘Wow, what is that guy doing leaving the scene?'” Commander Donaldson said. “And of course I assumed he was identified.”
-PJ
But this doesn’t solve the problem of a missile that can reach the airliner. No, a small boat can’t hold a Standard Missile launcher. It would tear a boat apart. That’s pure James Bond stuff.
So a boat does not equal a missile.
So if the radar caught a boat, it surely would have caught a missile, right?
Radar data from where?