"Of the 183 who observed a streak of light, 102 gave information about the origin of the streak. Six said the streak originated from the air, and 96 said that it originated from the surface."
This is from when they first noticed it. The (very) few who said it "originiated" from the air may well have simply missed the beginning. But those who reported that it originated from the surface (the vast majority) are not likely to have all seen something only airborne, and hallucinated a surface origin.
"Of the 96 who said it originated from the surface, 40 said it originated from the sea and 10 said it originated from land."
This could easily be explained by the horizon visible to those witnesses. If the view of the ocean is obscured, or if tehy misjudged the distance to the streak, they could easily place the origin on land even if it were from the water. Note that several thought it was a "firework" - which only goes a few hundred yards up into the air. If they were actually seeing a missile that ascended nearly three miles into the air, they will correspondingly infer that the launch site is that much closer. In any case, an investigator trying to determine what actually happened doesn't look at two contradictory statements and says "therefore, they are both wrong;" and it is unreasonable to imagine that any witnesses correctly understood the full 3D trajectory of a very unusual object that lasted only some few seconds. Instead, an investigator should try to triangulate each sighting, and construct for himself the full 3D trajectory of the object which these people saw. But as I mentioned, neither the NTSB nor the FBI had any interest in doing this; only Donaldson and Goddard actually attempted to do this. Why do you suppose that is?
"One hundred and twenty-eight witnesses reported an immediate end to the streak, 85 described it ending in an explosion, 32 said it ended in a fireball, and 11 said it ended in a flash."
All of these things are consistent with a missile whose rocket engine burned out before impact, which was an explosion.
Now if eyewitnesses are always reliable, and we should take their testimony as gospel, how come there are so many variances in just the 183 who said they saw "a streak."
Perspective and incorrectly inferring the 3D trajectory. The streak was so far away from most of the witnesses that they had essentially no accurate depth perception - however, they might have made assumptions about the scale of the event and (incorrectly) reported deductions based on these assumptions. Better would to for an investigator to filter out just the pure observations from each witness, and try to fold them into a consistent scenario that checks with all the observations. But again, the NTSB, FBI and for that matter CIA seemed only interested in discrediting the witnesses, leaving the job to Donaldson and Goddard. Why do you suppose that that is?
And what about the 550 witnesses who reported no such thing?
You have got to be joking! Of course not all witnesses saw the entire event - only those who were looking in the direction of the flare would have seen it at all. Those who weren't but who saw the explosion obviously doesn't either rule out a missile nor contradict the testimony of those who did see a streak.
Goddard and Donaldson both alleged that a missile
intercepted Flight 800 at
13,800 feet at
8:31:12 and shot it down.
Here's where Donaldson contends the point of impact on the 747 was:
Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, very much. Any final comments Commander Donaldson?
Commander DONALDSON. No, sir, I knew this was going to be a tough appearance. But I guess I would say just for a minute, I want to put it on record what I think actually happened. I think that somebody came in our waters. I think the boat that wasn't identified by the FBI probably contained the shooter. I think a missile was fired, that we have dozens of people that agree with the flight time of the missile, where it came from and where it went. I think it steered for the center wing tank. I think it veered forward and entered the number two main. There is 45 square feet of front spar missing in front of that tank.
If a missile exploded inside a full fuel tank, wouldn't it have resulted in an immediate and huge explosion then [8:31:12] and there - [13,800 FEET]? Goddard seems to have thought so as evidenced by his following animated graphics:
There were no credible witnesses to more than one HUGE explosion, the Massive Fireball. Note that ALL the Massive Fireball explosion altitude estimates by the Airborne witnesses were far below 13,800 feet.
Goddard and Donaldson have both left a long paper trail documenting their inept analysis of Flight 800 witness reports. As an example, Goddard's star "missile shootdown" witness at one time was Sven Faret - until it was pointed at to Goddard that all of Faret's observations of fiery events were below Faret's own flight altitude of 8500 feet.
Donaldson was so carried away with his inept analysis of witness Fred Meyer's report of what he saw that Donaldson made him a Board Member of Donaldson's "Associated Retired Aviation Professions" aka ARAP and made joint appearances with him on numerous talk shows - while never apparently noticing that Meyer did not and could not have seen a "shootdown" of the airliner at 13,800 feet at 8:31:12 only 3-4 seconds before Meyer saw the Massive Fireball explode in the 747's descending wreckage at about 5500-7500 feet at about 8:31:47 - and about 2-3 miles distance horizontally from where the 747 was when it started coming apart.
The paper trail of Goddard and Donaldson, Flight 800 witness report analyst legends in their own minds, speaks for itself as does the fact that no expert witness report analyst has ever agreed with them, not even one.
ex·pert (kspûrt) n. A person with a high degree of skill in or knowledge of a certain subject.