Thursday, June 22, 2006 270 people saw plane shot out of the sky Posted: June 22, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern July 17 marks the 10th anniversary of the destruction of TWA Flight 800, the investigation of which represented the most conspicuous and consequential misdirection of justice in American history. This column is part of an in-depth look at the incident, presenting several compelling reasons why the investigation must be re-opened.
By Jack Cashill
On Long Island's south shore, on a sweet summer eve like that of
July 17, 1996, the temperature a perfect 71 degrees, they would
all be out watching. They would be watching from their boats,
from the beaches, from the decks of their summer rentals.
At 8:30 that evening, a minute before sunset, Lisa Perry
enjoyed the view from her elevated deck on Fire Island. Paul
Angelides walked through the sliding doors to the deck of his
summer rental in Westhampton. Richard Goss and his friends
relaxed on the deck of a nearby yacht club.
Also in Westhampton, Mike Wire took a breather from the switch
gear room on Beach Lane Bridge, where he had been working, and
looked out over the dunes and beach. Joseph Delgado had just
completed a few laps at a school track in Westhampton, and he was
looking south. National Guard pilots Maj. Fritz Meyer and Capt.
Chris Baur likewise looked south as they maneuvered their HH-60
military helicopter in for a landing at Gabreski Field a few
miles away. And 22,000 feet overhead, Dwight Brumley, a retired
25-year United States Navy master chief, relaxed on US Air 217 as
it headed north to Providence, R.I.
TWA Flight 800, a workhorse 747 wide body, had left the JFK
runway at 8:19, made a wide turn to the south, and then turned
back east. It ascended slowly to more than 13,000 feet and held
there to let Dwight Brumley's plane, US Air 217, pass comfortably
overhead. There were 230 people on board.
The evening of July 17 was not as peaceful as it appeared to
be. Not nearly so. In Iraq, July 17 just happened to be
National Liberation Day, Saddam's evil 4th of July. To
celebrate, Saddam had made some of his most serious threats yet
against the United States. Iran was restless as well. The White
House believed it responsible for the lethal bombing of Khobar
Towers in Saudi Arabia three weeks earlier that killed 19
American servicemen.
On that fateful eve, just two days before the start of the
Atlanta Olympics, the United States military was on its highest
state of home-front alert since the Cuban missile crisis.
Shortly before noon, Washington time, on July 17, the Islamic
Change Movement sent a fax to Al-Hayah in London, the most
prestigious Arabic language newspaper. 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 put down
the book he was reading and glanced out the window of US Air 217.
He 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, bridge worker Mike Wire
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 an ascending 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, you know, 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. "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 towards the Hamptons.
Engineer Paul Angelides picked up a streaking object now high
in the sky. From his angle, it appeared to be a "red
phosphorescent object … leaving a white smoke trail." 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
towards the south, and that's when I saw it veer left, which
would bring it out east. It was a sharp left."
School principal Joseph Delgado 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
southwesterly 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. Said Capt. Chris Baur:
"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 missile clearest. "It was definitely
a rocket motor," says Meyer.
Delgado saw TWA Flight 800 "glitter" in the sky and the
ascending object move up toward it. He thought at first it was
"going to slightly miss" the 747, 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."
"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 Lisa 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 10 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 described as a
"fireball."
"When that airplane blew up, it immediately began falling,"
adds Maj. 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. By the FBI's own count, 270 eyewitnesses saw a flaming
object ascend towards TWA Flight 800. Scores of those tracked it
from the horizon all the way to the doomed airplane.
The New York Times would not interview one of them.
To rationalize what the witnesses saw, the FBI and the CIA
conspired to create an alternate scenario, the notorious
3,300-foot zoom-climb of the crippled 747. The FBI presented an
animation of the same to the world 16 months after the crash.
The first article
in this series and the next reveal how thoroughly corrupt this literal conspiracy was.
Related special offer:
Get Cashill's groundbreaking exposé, "First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America"
Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.
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