THE DOWNING OF TWA FLIGHT 800: 'Hey, look at the fireworks'

It arrived shortly before noon, Washington time, on July 17 – a fax sent to Al-Hayah in London, the most prestigious Arabic language newspaper. Sent by the Islamic Change Movement – the jihad wing in the Arabian Peninsula – the warning came one day after the group had taken responsibility for the destruction of Khobar Towers. It was as serious as a truck bomb:

As the sun was about to rise on the Arabian Peninsula, it was about to set on Long Island. At 8:31 Dwight Brumley, whose long Navy career included special expertise in electronic warfare, put down the book he was reading and glanced out the window of US Air 217. Night had already fallen to the east, the direction in which he looked.

"I noticed off the right side what appeared to be a small private airplane that was flying pretty much at a course right at the US Air flight," Brumley recounts. "I followed it until the fuselage and the inboard wing cut off my field of view. My first thought – that was awfully close!" Brumley estimates that the plane passed a mere 300 or 400 feet beneath him.

About 15 seconds after the small plane had passed, Brumley noticed "what appeared to be some kind of a flare," but he realized quickly that this bright, burning object ascending off the ocean was no flare. "It was definitely moving pretty much parallel to the US Air Flight and it was moving at least as fast, perhaps even faster."

As the flare-like object raced north, and Flight 800 ascended slowly and innocently east along the Long Island coast, Mike Wire, a millwright from Philadelphia working on a Westhampton bridge, saw a streak of light rise up from behind a Westhampton house and zigzag south, southeast away from shore at about a 40 degree angle, leaving a white smoke trail behind it.

Richard Goss, upon seeing the same object, turned to his friends at the yacht club and said, "Hey, look at the fireworks." Everybody turned to look, and they all watched it climb. "It was bright, very bright," says Goss, "and, you know, that almost bright pink … and orange glow around it, and it traveled up."

Vacationer Lisa Perry, on her Fire Island deck, watched an object shoot up over the dunes of Fire Island.

"It was shiny, like a new dime," says Perry. "It looked like a plane without wings. It had no windows. It was as if there was a flame at the back of it, like a Bunsen burner. It was like a silver bullet." The object was heading east, southeast toward the Hamptons.

As Paul Angelides walked out onto his Westhampton deck, he picked up what was likely the same object now high in the sky. From his angle, it appeared to be a "red phosphorescent object ... leaving a white smoke trail." At first he thought the object a distress flare, but he soon realized it was too large and moving too fast. Spellbound, he followed the object as it moved out over the ocean in the direction of the horizon.

Goss followed it, too. "It seemed to go away in the distance toward the south, and that's when I saw it veer left, which would bring it out east. It was a sharp left."

From a Westhampton school parking lot, Joseph Delgado saw Brumley's streak, the one heading north toward shore and slightly west. As he told the FBI, he saw an object like "a firework" ascend almost vertically. The object had a "bright white light with a reddish pink aura surrounding it." The tail, gray in color, "moved in a squiggly pattern." From Delgado's perspective, the object "arced off to the right in a south westerly direction."

At 8:31, FAA radar operators out of Islip saw an unknown object appear on screen and head toward Flight 800. At the same moment, FAA radar picked up something else unusual – a ship of good size nearly right under Flight 800's airborne position.

The two National Guard pilots in their nearby helicopter now picked up the streaks high in the sky. Capt. Chris Baur saw the streak Brumley had first observed: "Almost due south, there was a hard white light, like burning pyrotechnics, in level flight. I was trying to figure out what it was. It was the wrong color for flares. It struck an object coming from the right and made it explode."

Maj. Fritz Meyer, a winner of the Distinguished Flying Cross for his service over Vietnam, saw the southbound projectile clearest. "It was definitely a rocket motor," says Meyer.

Delgado saw a second object "glitter" in the sky and the first object move up toward it. He thought at first it was "going to slightly miss" the glittering object, TWA 800, but it appeared to make "a dramatic correction at the last second." Then Delgado saw a "white puff."

"From my vantage point," says Goss, "there was a direct explosion that followed, and then after that there was a second explosion that was off to the east a little farther that was much larger."

Meyer saw a bright white light also. "What I saw explode was definitely ordnance," he said. "The initiating event was a high velocity explosion, not fuel. It was ordnance."

"I then saw a series of flashes, one in the sky and another closer to the horizon. I remember straining to see what was happening," says Angelides. "There was a dot on the horizon near the action, which I perceived as a boat."

"About two seconds later," claimed Meyer, "lower, I saw one or two yellow explosions, from that the fireball, third. The first two high-velocity, the last low-velocity petrochemical explosion."

"Then a moment later there was another explosion, and the plane broke jaggedly in the sky," says Perry. "The nose is continuing to go forward; the left wing is gliding off in its own direction, drifting in an arc gracefully down; the right wing and passenger window are doing the same in their direction out to the right; and the tail with its fireball leaps up and then promptly into the water below. The sounds were a huge BOOM! – then another BOOM!"

"You could feel the concussion like a shock wave," reports Mike Wire of the initial blast. Indeed, it shook the bridge on which he was standing in Westhampton even at ten miles distance.

"The sounds shook the house," remembers Angelides. "My wife, who was on the bathroom floor drying our son from his bath, felt the floor shaking as she heard the noise and I heard her cry out, 'What is going on?'"

And then confusion, a hellish, horrific confusion. "There seemed to be a lot of chaos out there," says Angelides. Now he, Wire, Perry, Meyer, Baur, Goss, Delgado and Brumley watched as the plane's fuel tanks exploded, and Flight 800 morphed into what Delgado described as a "firebox" and others as a "fireball."

"It got much larger, maybe four or five times as large," says Brumley, who was watching the explosion from overhead. "It was the same explosion. It just got bigger. My first thought was, 'Boy, what was that?'"

"When that airplane blew up it immediately began falling," adds Meyer. "It came right out of the sky. From the first moment, it was going down."

Brumley saw the burning debris hit the water and turned to summon a flight attendant. As he did, a passenger in the seat behind him, James Nugent, cried out, "Did you see that too?" Brumley and the others were hardly alone in what they had seen. On that soft summer eve, thousands were watching the sea and the sky. More than 700 of them would share their stories with the FBI.

Do you believe the "official" explanation of the crash of TWA Flight 800?

Of course not. But there's a BIG difference between it having been shot down by terrorsts and haviing been shot down by our own Navy.

As I said earlier see "It wasn't terrorists. It couldn't have been." for some of my observations here. The whole terrorist thing is disinformation put out so that the uninformed will discuss things that are easily disprovable about TWA 800, and by association discredit those of us who are not.

ML/NJ

One theory postulated was there was a drone launch off one of those naval facilities on Long Island and a missile launch to take out the drone that went awry.

That's why some witnesses reported more than one rocket trail in different positions in the sky (drone booster and missile launch).

Again, just going on witness reports and the books I read. So pick it apart if you must, I wasn't an eye-witness. I was in Europe. It wasn't me.

Finally, looking at the eyewitness accounts in the article you have missiles coming from different directions and in different shapes and sizes and colors. A lot of it still makes no sense.

I thought the article attempted to show that a lot of people in different places saw the same object, but in different trajectories, based on their positions.

You're right, we weren't there. But I have seen launches of Terrier, Standard, and Sea Sparrow missiles by day and by night. And none of the descriptions of any of these eyewitnesses comes close to what I've seen. So you can go down the list of missiles and show pictures of each but there is still no evidence that a missile fired from a U.S. Navy ship or aircraft brought down the 747.

Do you have any sources for this?

There's a lot of references in the various OKC threads on here - there's been witnesses describing a man strikingly like Atta, for example. Drawings and comparisons are in the threads here. Also, it looks like the cover may be coming apart at the seams, with govt sources starting to leak. All on here, but don't remember the thread titles. Just search for OKC, or maybe there's an OKC master list.

Look at the descriptions in this article alone:

"From a Westhampton school parking lot, Joseph Delgado saw Brumley's streak, the one heading north toward shore and slightly west...
""It was shiny, like a new dime," says Perry. "It looked like a plane without wings. It had no windows. It was as if there was a flame at the back of it, like a Bunsen burner. It was like a silver bullet." The object was heading east, southeast toward the Hamptons."
"Mike Wire, a millwright from Philadelphia working on a Westhampton bridge, saw a streak of light rise up from behind a Westhampton house and zigzag south, southeast away from shore at about a 40 degree angle, leaving a white smoke trail behind it."

It's hard to believe that they could be talking about the same object.

So you can go down the list of missiles and show pictures of each but there is still no evidence that a missile fired from a U.S. Navy ship or aircraft brought down the 747

Well, if there was unsupressed evidence of the fact then we wouldn't be having this conversation, would we?

Here is some more stuff to throw in the mix:

Drone theory and missile theory

I've read about the drone theory and other missile theories and rather than take them up with you I'll just concede that nothing I could post would ever convince you that it wasn't a Navy missile.

Right back atcha...with a change:

I've read about the drone theory and other missile theories and rather than take them up with you I'll just concede that nothing I could post would ever convince you that it was a Navy missile.

So it goes. See Ya!

There is plenty of evidence that something launched from the surface brought down Flight 800, and the more I read about this incident the more convinced I am that it was, in fact, the U.S. Navy.

The ongoing misinformation that had been produced by the Navy about its military exercises in the area that night, coupled with the fact that the NTSB's tests on the so-called "exploding fuel tank" were rigged (by their own admission), leads me to believe that they've got plenty to hide.

Then I stand corrected. The location of a U.S. military installation on Long Island was not a major factor here -- I was simply responding to speculation about why it would be necessary to conduct a military exercise in that area.

Having said that, I'll mention a couple of things that need to be addressed before I will ever be convinced that this was not a shoot-down:

1. Why the fraudulent testing by the NTSB?

2. Why the idiotic animated re-construction of the incident, showing the aircraft climbing a few thousand feet even after everything from the wings forward had been blown off?

3. Why the secrecy about what the Navy was doing in the area that night?

4. Regardless of the discrepancies between the various eyewitness accounts, you simply cannot discount the number of people from a wide range of points along the south shore of Long Island who saw something (or things) resembling a missile climbing through the sky that evening.

5. Why were the FBI and CIA involved in the investigation from Day 1? This was the first indication that something was highly unusual about this incident -- the FBI and CIA do not get involved in "ordinary" airline disasters.

I don't understand why you cannot accept the notion of the U.S. Navy shooting down a civilian aircraft -- it's not as if it hasn't happened before.

I would be willing to accept almost any cause for the downing of TWA 800 from Navy missile to a tick-off Sasquatch, so long as the evidence is there to support it. Support for your theory of a Navy shoot-down isn't there. Nothing I have read in any of the eye witness descriptions of the missile bears any resemblance at all to any surface to air missile in the Navy inventory, and I base that on personal experience and 23 years of active duty are reserve service. With all due respect, you and the others are taking bits and pieces of information and innuendo, a lot of it conflicting, and trying to tie it together without any sort of personal experience or knowledge of the military, it's weapons and it's procedures. It's just not working. I don't see any point in trying to convince you otherwise.

Nothing I have read in any of the eye witness descriptions of the missile bears any resemblance at all to any surface to air missile in the Navy

I don't buy the Navy shootdown either. Some earlier accounts claimed that the missile went up from land, not out at sea.

Is there ANYTHING reasonably portable (not necessarily in the US inventory) that resemble the descriptions?

I don't know a lot about shoulder fired SAMs. From what I've read the 747 was at the extreme range of the missiles existing at the time but I'll defer to any experts who may be out there. One thing that would tend to indicate that a shoulder fired SAM was not what brought the plane down was the fact that people who say that the 747 was hit by a missile all say that the missile hit it in the fuselage. A believe that all shoulder-fired weapons use an infra-red tracking system. If that is true then the missile should have gone for a heat source, one of the four engines, rather that the fuselage.

about why it would be necessary to conduct a military exercise in that area.

We have to be able to fight in populated areas where there is beaucoup radio noise. There is a limit to how much simulation can be done 300 miles out at sea. That's why there have always been (or at least there have been for a long time) areas just off the coast here where these military tests are conducted.

ML/NJ

The point you raised is precisely why I've discounted the whole terrorist angle in the first place. Not only was the aircraft flying at or near the range of most portable SAMs -- the aircraft was not supposed to be there in the first place. It would have been flying higher, but had been instructed to reduce its altitude to provide adequate spacing between itself and a northbound flight to Providence, Rhode Island.

Any terrorist who wanted to shoot down a passenger jet like this would not have done so by firing a "Hail Mary" from a point so far to the east -- their chances of bringing down an aircraft would have been much better if they were closer to JFK Airport.

BTW, I'm reading through a long series of informal (i.e., almost conversational) information about this incident (it happens to be 200+ pages long). Some of the technical know-how is quite fascinating, particularly the information from someone who swears that the wreckage photos bear all the trademarks of a non-explosive impact by one or more tungsten-carbide fragmentation warheads.

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