When Pierre Salinger, at a press conference in March 1997, declared that TWA Flight 800 had been shot down accidentally by a U.S. Navy missile,Pierre was the victim of one of the biggest frauds perpetrated on the internet:
"After his debacle of last November, when he mistook a widely circulated Net posting for a "secret" government document, "The overall story from: TWA 800 and Friendly Fire: The Rest of the Story
Media BombEditor’s Note: Here at 60GCAT, we honestly don’t know how much our readership overlaps with that of the New York Times, but a few of our more devoted followers may have noticed that back on Nov. 17, your humble (read: self-aggrandizing, career-obsessed) authors published a little piece in the Times’ Sunday magazine detailing how the TWA 800 conspiracy theory got started and the tortured path it took through the Internet and into the mainstream media. As much as we’d like you to believe that it was just a little something we dashed off in our copious free time, in between checking the point spread on the Nebraska game and desperately trying to get the VCR to tape Xena: Warrior Princess, the fact is, we actually worked on this thing. We wrote plenty more than the Times could fit into its 1,670 word space.Here, then, is an earlier, much longer version of the story. This version runs through developments up to Oct. 15, 1996. Plenty happened after that, so for updates, consult Conspiracy Currents No. 26 and Conspiracy Currents No. 30. But for now, just remember that the whole thing is
© 1996 by Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen
A scant 11 minutes after 230 people settled in for a sleepy, seven-hour night flight to Paris from New York's JFK International Airport, their Boeing 747-100 burst into a fireball and plummeted, in pieces, 2 1/2 miles into the ocean waters off of Long Island. No one on board survived. The known facts of the July 17, 1996 TWA Flight 800 calamity remain sketchy to say the least. Investigators continue looking at three possibilities: a massive mechanical failure, a bomb or a missile. None of them have been confirmed or ruled out.
That, anyway, is what they want you to believe.
But we, the people, are not fooled. We know the dark secret of TWA 800. A United States military missile shot it down and now the government, right up to President Bill Clinton, is determined to cover up the terrible truth.
Another crazy conspiracy theory? [Yes]
Just like the theories that crop up anytime there's a major public crisis, tragedy or scandal? Perhaps. And there doesn't seem to be any strong evidence to support it. So why should we give this conspiracy theory any further attention? Because the TWA 800 theory ushers the culture of suspicion into the age of the Internet. And it shows how conspiracy theories -- traditionally dismissed with a sneer or a chuckle by the "mainstream" media -- are beginning to play a part in shaping important public debates, thanks largely to the buzz they generate on the global information network.
With an alternative media as ubiquitous as the Internet, and one capable of transmitting large chunks of information withthe speed of a mouse click, conspiracy theories are no longer easy to ignore. Unlike most pre-Net conspiracy theories, the TWA 800 theory made a swift impact on the major media. In mid-September, with little else besides the rampant discussion of the theory on the Internet to go on, reporters began quizzing crash investigators about the "friendly fire" scenario.
...
As Kallstrom put it earlier in the investigation, conspiratorial speculation is bound to flourish "in a vacuum of information, because the evidence is sitting at the bottom of the ocean." The complicating factor that few anticipated was the Internet, a potent new medium that would rush to fill that informational vacuum with an ether of instant conjecture, prompting the traditional media to respond, in turn triggering a whole new round of speculation on the popular bandwidth of the information superhighway.
Perhpas not classified, but how about covered in a Clinton Executive Order, awaiting retribution?
HF
Perhpas not classified, but how about covered in a Clinton Executive Order, awaiting retribution?
HF