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Interesting analysis. Conforms with my obeservation... in that if it was the military that brought the plane down, than the government would be interested in covering up and no group would be looking to "take credit". If it were terrorists that brought the plane down, it's somewhat unlikely that they would have a motive to keep quiet, and often a strong motive to do the opposite.

If it was the military, it does stand to reason that there are a lot of military and ex-military people walking around who would have direct knowledge. And those people are bound to feel pretty terrible about what happened - the type might that have too much to drink and might start talking about strange things at 1 or 2 in the morning to someone who would listen. Doesn't make it impossible, but the bigger the conspiracy, the harder to keep it quiet.

There was a sign on Carlos Marcello's office wall (Mob leader in New Orleans around the time of JFK) "If you want to keep a secret tell two people and then kill them both".

As you may have noticed in my earlier post, it would not be difficult to keep the shootdown secret. The Navy personnel who were directly affected would be limited to the sub commander, sub missile officer and any on board the P3 who may have had a view of what happened. If there were other ships in the area containing observers, I am not aware of any by name. I did hear of a helicopter touching down on a ship after the accident to pick up some contractor personnel who may have been involved in the test. An earlier private Email to me stated that the target sled was let down early and contributed to the test going badly. I am now involved in trying to place the back and forth mystery plane and see if it overlayed the missile track. Both the missile direction and the back and forth direction were on a SE to NW line. I feel that the back and forth mystery plane was a drone and may have been there as a backup target in case the missile missed the sled. It was flying on a repeated course at around 350 knots. Aviation Week stated that it flew from 10 minutes before the crash to 35 minutes after the crash. If we center that time period to equal parts maybe that was to be the test time for the missile to be fired. I still need to see an overlay of its flight path as compared to the missile path. I now guess that the missile path would be NE of where the drone was flying if the target sled were early. A twelve minute delay may have allowed TWA800 to clear the test area. The TWA flight definitely was held to a lower than normal altitude for some reason. A trailing TWA900 was at 19,000 feet. ATC allowed 6,300 feet vertical separation between the P3 and TWA800 and told the TWA flight to climb after the P3 crossed the projected path of the TWA800. A possible sled differential of two mile trailing would likely sag one mile and 6,300 feet vertical separation would be conservative. The P3 flight definitely had an effect on the TWA800 flight. When the missile actually fired, the sled, the submarine and the B747 were all in close proximity.