Posted on 05/21/2002 11:52:48 AM PDT by Asmodeus
"8...[The] streak of light reported by most of [the streak-of-light] witnesses was burning fuel from the accident airplane in crippled flight during some portion of the postexplosion preimpact breakup sequence...[1]
"A careful review of all available witness documents has shown that most witnesses who observed the streak of light said that it ascended.[2] And a large majority of the witnesses who described the origin and/or trajectory of the rising streak of light gave accounts that were inconsistent with every stage of Flight 800’s radar-recorded breakup. sequence and its trail of burning fuel. Many said the streak rose straight up from the surface, and others said it impacted with the accident airplane (see item nine below)."
Even if Stalcup was qualified by experience and training to expertly analyze the Flight 800 witness reports [does anyone including Stalcup himself contend that he is - he couldn't possibly know what most of them actually saw because most of them were interviewed by FBI agents using the unprofessioanl & untenable "302" interview procedure.
The "Missile Witnesses" Myth is a detailed and documented rebuttal of the allegations that there were any"missile witnesses". None of those alleging there were "missile witnesses", including Tom Stalcup, have been able todate to provide anything remotely resembling a meaningful rebuttal of it.
Similarly, none of those making the "missile(s) shootdown" or "bomb" allegations, including Tom Stalcup, have been able todate to publicly present any physical evidence that a missile or bomb was involved in the disaster, much less anything remotely resembling a meaningful rebuttal of The Sworn Testimony of FBI Chief Metallurgist William Tobin that there was no physical evidence of either a missile or bomb in the wreckage.
They KNOW and we KNOW.
Slick willie didn't want to jeopardize the Olympics, which turned out to be the worst Olympics in history anyway.
Look, I know people can be expert surgeons, and expert mechanics on particular cars, and experts at designing electronic circuits, or even experts at Pre-Raphaelite art. In all those cases we can make some factually based measure of expertise.
But "expert" at analyzing witness reports? To me that sure seems a far more subjective art, rather than a hard expertise than can be reliably and repeatedly demonstrated by nonsubjective, factual measures. Subjective enough that criticism leveled on the basis of being "a witness report expert" comes off as a whine, and discounts the rest.
What Clinton Knew, by Dick Morris
Look for the line where he refers to the "downing" of Flight 800.
Mrs Kus
My daughter went to college near Montoursville and some students from that town were also students at her college. The kids were shell shocked and I can imagine the families.
So many kids take school trips abroad, for a few weeks, a semester, etc. and then we have such a tragedy as Pan Am #103 and this coverup.........HEARTBREAKING
Sorry my OldFriend, you are wrong. Clinton didn't care about the olympics. He just wanted to hide the murder of two more of his enemies.
God Save America (Please)
Flight 800 Independent Researchers Organization (FIRO) sponsored the first public hearing on the crash of TWA Flight 800 that included eyewitnesses. Eight witnesses testified before a five member panel of FIRO representatives at the July 14, 2001 hearing. The witnesses described their observations and answered questions from the panel. The media and public questioned the witnesses after the panel, followed by a summary of an independent study of 670 official FBI eyewitness documents...
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) planned to discuss these and other witness observations at the first of two public hearings on the crash within a month of the animation's broadcast. But the FBI intervened...
Five days before the NTSB hearing, FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom wrote a letter requesting that all witness testimony and related discussion be banned from the hearing...
Brumley: "No, the CIA never contacted me. The FBI never re-contacted me...nobody with any aviation expertise...went through it with me to try to really understand, you know, to get down in black and white--a diagram or whatever--what I had seen."...
Wire: "I never knew that the CIA was involved in anything about the case at all. No, they did not contact [me] at all...or the NTSB for that matter." ...
There is no record of any CIA interview with Mike Wire or Dwight Brumley. In fact, Congressional investigators reported that the CIA "did not interview any of the eyewitnesses"[6] in connection with the Flight 800 animation. Instead, the CIA relied upon scant notes and summaries from 244 preliminary FBI witness interviews. ..
Here is a link to FIRO:
There were two gentlemen on the plane who in clintons eyes would have been enemies. One was named Hank Gray, who was involved in preventing an insurance company takeover by a clinton associate and the other was named Samir Ferrat who was a close associate of Ron Browns who missed the flight that Brown was killed on. Mr Ferrat also bought a large insurance policy when he heard that Browns plane went down.
Both men are covered in the linked thread. You'll have to read through it to find them though. The parts about them are about 1/3rd of the way down the thread.
Warning, the thread is from the old days and is long. however it has tons of good info and an explanation of the shoot down that satisfies all the evidence and witness accounts.
GSA(P)
[quote]On the fourth anniversary of the crash of TWA Flight 800, two witnesses criticized investigators Monday for doing too little to determine the source of a light they say they saw in the sky near the doomed plane. [end quote] [quote]Dwight Brumley, who watched as a passenger on another flight 5,000 feet above Flight 800, said he told his story to the FBI but felt it wasn't taken seriously. "I could not positively say that what I saw was a missile. What I saw was a very bright flame of light moving parallel to my aircraft", Brumley said at a news conference. [end quote]
The same clickable reference source includes the transcript of a recorded inept interview of witness Brumley. It isn't clear if it was at that press conference. Note the elapsed time between the fiery streak and the Massive Fireball explosion in the falling wreckage at 5500-7500 feet was only 1-2 seconds.
If you have a report of Michael Wire you want to post, do so. The following is from the Archives of the LSoft Flight 800 Forum: [excerpt][quote]That one eyewitness is Michael Wire, a machinery expert who was working on a new drawbridge on Beach Lane, a road running from Westhampton, Long Island, to the beach. Wire's FBI report says that standing on the bridge, looking toward the beach, he saw a white light just above the rooftop of a house about 900 feet away, ascending from the ground at about a 40 degree angle. It "sparkled" and he thought it was fireworks. It "zig zagged" as it traveled upward and was going south-southeast when it "arched over" and disappeared from view. Two or three seconds later he saw an orange light that appeared to be a fireball in the sky about half a mile away. It was falling at about a 30-degree angle, with a fire trail burning behind it. According to Wire, the fireball disappeared behind a house two houses away from the one where he saw the white light. He then heard the first and loudest of four explosions. It shook the bridge. Eight or nine seconds later he heard two more explosions followed by a fourth a second later. [end quote] Note that the elapsed time between the fiery streak and the Massive Fireball explosion in the falling wreckage at 5500-7500 feet is two or three seconds.
Neither Brumley nor Wire could have possibly seen a "missile shootdown" of Flight 800 at 13,800 feet and the explosion of the Massive Fireball in the falling wreckage at 5500-7500 feet only 1-3 seconds later.
The timeline and location of the major events of the disaster was approximately as follows:
8:31:11 Intact and climbing 747 approaches 13,800 feet.
8:31:12 Initiating Event at 13,800 feet followed immediately by the commencement of the decapitation process.
8:31:47 explosion of Massive Fireball in the falling wreckage at 5500-7500 feet.
8:31:55-8:31:57 splashdown of the Massive Fireball flames.
Source.
None of the fiery events seen by the witnesses commenced until 30+ seconds after the Initiating Event at 13,800 feet. By then, the wreckage clearly must been falling for quite some time.
Washington - As investigators have sifted dozens of eyewitness accounts of the destruction of TWA Flight 800, they have had to keep in mind a growing scientific literature on the fallibility of first-hand descriptions.
In the immediate aftermath of the July 17 disaster, FBI agents interviewed several hundred people who had claimed to see the breakup of the airliner.
Some of them also described streaks of light, suggesting the possibility of a missile attack on the doomed plane.
But specialists say eyewitness accounts - no matter how credible those giving them - can be distressingly unreliable, particularly those gathered days after the fact.
"In general, memory researchers recommend that the most fruitful interview is the first interview,'' said Stephen Ceci, a Cornell University psychologist.
"And that's if the person hasn't been tainted or biased in some way by being given a theory or expectancy by the media or the interviewer or a friend."
In highly publicized incidents such as the TWA crash, investigators must be especially wary, Ceci said, since there is so much information - and misinformation - available from media reports and word-of-mouth.
A law enforcement source familar with the TWA investigation said FBI agents use interview methods intended to assess the consistency and reliability of witness accounts. They look for any signs that the witnesses may be repeating news accounts or seeking to give interviewers what they believe they want to hear.
"There is a science to interviewing people", the source said. But even witnesses who have been carefully interviewed and are reporting what they sincerely believe they saw can make mistakes, Ceci said.
"There is not a snapshot in the brain of that fireball in the sky or a streak of light prior to the explosion", he said.
Memories are stored in neurons distributed throughout the brain, he said, and the information stored in those brain cells "must be rounded up and put back together to tell a story . . . many things can go wrong in reconstructing it.''
Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist who has written extensively about eyewitness testimony, said people tend to fill in gaps in their recollection with information they get from other sources.
"I don't mean to belittle the crash witnesses", Loftus said. But in some cases, particularly traumatic events, the perceived memories can be both vivid and incorrect. "People have claimed to see things a lot more bizarre than flashes of light," Loftus said.
Loftus has studied accounts of serious auto accidents. "You have cases where a witness says the blue car was traveling south and the yellow car was traveling north,'' Loftus said, and the witness will stick to that account even after it has been proved that just the opposite was the case.
There are ways to improve the reliability of accounts, Loftus said. "Some banks train tellers in anticipation of a bank robbery,'' she said. "You are to sit down, don't talk to anybody else and write out your own version of the event". Loftus said that professional training or expertise can affect the reliability of eyewitness accounts. She has done experiments in which she shows arson investigators a video of a fire scene, with fire officials giving orders to their personnel on how to fight the blaze. The arson investigators remember how many hose teams the chief is ordering into the building and other details that untrained viewers disregard, Loftus said.
But experts caution that trained professionals also can make mistakes. Howard Egeth, head of the psychology department at Johns Hopkins University, said studies have found that police officers often do no better than lay persons when trying to identify suspects.
And even when witness testimony is carefully couched, it can be misinterpreted by others.
Investigators in the TWA case have been interested in the accounts of National Guard air crews who were doing search-and-rescue training on the night of the disaster. One pilot reported seeing a "streak of light'' on the same trajectory as a shooting star. His remark was viewed by some as supporting the missile scenario.
But the pilot, a Vietnam veteran who has seen missiles fired in combat, dismissed that notion. He said the orange-red streak was descending across the sky and, as he followed it, eventually erupted into the large fireball described by other witnesses.
Experts also say it is understandable why some witnesses hold strongly to their accounts even as contradictory information comes to light.
As Loftus and a co-author have written, "We want to believe . . . that our minds work in an orderly, efficient way, taking in information, sorting it, filing it, and calling it back later in full and vivid detail. In a chaotic world, where so much is out of control, we need to believe that our minds, at least, are under our command.'' [emphasis added]
You indicate your reference source is long so why not extend the readers the courtesy of quoting exactly what you're referring to.
< /sarcasm>
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.