"Two Projectiles" from the "Hull Thread"

And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air ...
Francis Scott Key

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Was TWA Flight 800 Destroyed by Two Missiles?

Chris Baur and Fritz Meyer were NY Air National Guard pilots who witnessed the crash on July 17, 1996 and flew straight to the scene.

Baur stated:

"Almost due south [of the helicopter], 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".

Baur, who was seated on the left hand side of the cockpit, saw a streak moving from his left to his right and towards the TWA aircraft.

Meyer said he saw "a streak of light moving from my right (west) to my left (east)". The streak that he saw was traveling in the same direction as the TWA flight. The light, which was red-orange in color, ended in a hard, yellowish-white explosion that looked identical to the detonation of an anti-aircraft shell.

"It left a cloud of smoke just like a flak explosion does, one to two seconds later, there was a second, hard explosion almost pure white in color. Immediately thereafter there was a third explosion and a fireball".

On July 29, 1997 the Riverside Press reported that Meyer was convinced he had seen an "ordnance explosion'' near the plane. He commented:

"And whatever I saw, the explosion of the fuel was not the initiator of the event. It was one of the results. Something happened before that which was the initiator of the disaster.''

The two pilots were describing separate missiles. Both missiles exploded and the fuel from the aircraft then ignited in a "fireball". At least one of the missiles had an exhaust plume that was "red-orange" in color. (This color also matches that of a residue found on fifteen seats of the aircraft from rows 17 - 19 near the region where the nose broke off.  The government claims that the residue is glue but this explanation begs the question of why it was found on only these fifteen seats.)

In March 1998 Meyer spoke to the Granada Forum and described an interesting phone call that he had received which supported that he and Baur had witnessed two missiles.

"After my picture appeared on television I received a phone call one night from an anonymous person - the person just got on the phone and said: 'You don't know who I am but I work for Sikorsky'. And he said I knew a friend of yours and he mentioned the name of a friend who had died in a crash up at Sikorsky in an H53. And then he mentioned a conversation that I had had with this deceased person where the two of us were standing at a small bar, called 'The Matchbox', having a beer after we had just finished a flight so I knew that this person did in fact know my friend. He said there is a tape - and I don't think it is a tape - I think it is a digital disk - there is a tape of the Sikorsky radar which shows two targets approaching TWA Flight 800 before the impact - one a high speed supersonic and one subsonic. The Sikorsky radar is not up in Bridgehampton - the Sikorsky radar is in Riverhead - it's actually just 5 miles north of the Suffolk County airport which I was flying to.  It is a remote site run by the U.S. Navy Virginia Capes authority and they lease the digital information to Sikorsky so that when helicopters are out there being tested, Sikorsky has the most sophisticated data radar that the Navy has watching their helicopters. When I went down to talk to my congressman in Washington, an assistant of his showed me a list of all the data that the FBI said they were holding - all the documentation. I looked for this particular tape on it because the gentleman on the telephone had told me that the FBI had come in the next morning and confiscated it - he used that word. The tape was not on that list and so in an interview in Washington I told Congressman Traficant that  I didn't see this radar tape on the list that the FBI had given to Congressman Forbes. After my interview with him, Congressman Duncan sent a letter to the FBI specifically asking for this tape by name - just nailed it down and said: "Do you have this?". Even though it wasn't on the inventory that they presented to the Congress, they then admitted that they did have it in their possession - said it didn't show anything unusual - but refused to release it to anybody."

Other eyewitnesses saw several missiles describing them as "flares", "objects" or "streaks".

Rosa Gray Khalilch saw "double orange flares" streak upward and explode into a large orange fireball. The flares were arching and trailed by gray smoke.

Barbara Pacholk, interviewed by Tom Stalcup on January 28, 1998, said she saw "two objects" rise from the surface. The first object exploded near the tail and the second near the nose. She also noticed two large navy vessels on the ocean. One of these vessels, Pacholk declared, quickly left the area after the tragedy, an observation to which I shall return later.

Frank Lenahan and his wife were sitting on their outside deck when Frank saw "two red streaks", very vivid in color, ascend. He brought this to the attention of his wife who turned and saw one of the streaks go west to east, straight across the horizon just above the dune line. They didn't follow the streaks all the way up as they assumed they were fireworks.

These direct eyewitness reports are markedly consistent with those of the two NY Air National Guard pilots.

Other circumstantial evidence supports the proposition that more than one missile was launched as TWA Flight 800 flew overhead. On August 25, 1996 the Times of London reported that U.S. officials were investigating reports Islamic terrorists had smuggled Stinger ground-to-air missiles into the United States from Pakistan. The Times stated that senior Iranian sources close to the fundamentalist regime in Tehran claimed TWA Flight 800 was shot down by one of three shoulder-fired Stingers of the type used by Islamic guerrillas during the Afghanistan war. Three missiles are claimed to have been employed in the attack and one of the missiles is stated to have made a successful engagement. The sources said the missiles arrived in America after being shipped from Karachi via Rotterdam and on to the Canadian port of Halifax. They claimed an Egyptian fundamentalist group backed by Iran was responsible for smuggling the weapons across the Canadian border into the United States. The group, the Gama'a al-Islamiya, comprises followers of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric jailed in the United States over the 1993 New York World Trade Center bombing. Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman's associate in the bombing, Ramsey Yousef, while living in Pakistan stayed in a house provided by Osama bin Laden. (See also Threads from the Hull Thread).

Incidentally, three weeks to the day before TWA Flight 800 was shot down, on June 26, 1996 in the evening, at approximately the same location as the TWA Flight 800 downing, and within hours of the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia conducted by Saudi dissidents funded by Iran and directed by Osama bin Laden, the Coast Guard received a report of "three red flares" launched 25 miles south of Shinnicock Inlet.  An air and surface search was carried out which found nothing out of ordinary. There was no one in distress on the ocean.  TWA Flight 848 from Kennedy to Rome blocked out at exactly 10:00 p.m. that night and assuming normal handling, it would have passed about 11 NM South of Shinnecock Inlet at 10:29 p.m. EDT.  TWA Flight 884, traveling from New York to Tel Aviv, was scheduled to depart before FL 848 but blocked out late at 10:19 p.m. EDT. and would otherwise have been over that location during the launch of the "three red flares".

Four months after the downing of TWA Flight 800, on November 16, 1996, Pakistan International Airlines Flight 712 left Kennedy at 9:25 p.m., bound for Frankfurt. One of the pilots reported an orange light which he described as a "rocket" coming from the left hand side to the right hand side of the airplane and he stated that the "rocket" had ascended through the aircraft's altitude. Boston apparently confirmed "two unidentified blips" on radar. The tapes were turned over to the FBI and NTSB since the object(s) rose directly out of Long Island Sound. Radio 5 in the U.K. reported that the object which crossed the Pakistani aircraft had exploded. TWA Flight 884, traveling from New York to Tel Aviv was following close behind the Pakistani flight and was diverted by the controller. (See The Tale of the Tapes). The government dismissed the incident as a meteorite observation.

On December 17, 1996 an article in The Washington Times stated that: "An official with the Defense Intelligence Agency, spy arm of the Pentagon, has informed congressional staff members that, in his opinion, a shoulder-fired missile brought down TWA Flight 800. The same DIA official, described as an expert in missile technology, told the staff members that he personally was called in by the FBI in the days following the explosion of the TWA jet to assist with witness interviews. "In his opinion, the plane was brought down by at least one shoulder-fired missile," said the congressional source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "When he said that, we all took a deep breath," the source added."

After seeing the CIA video depicting the U.S. government's explanation of the crash, Barbara Pacholk commented on November 19, 1997 in the New York Post.

"I know what I saw, I saw several fires go across the sky. One hit the plane at the tail and the second hit at the front, just before the wings. The fire came from both ends and met in the middle and exploded. Then the nose dropped, hung there for a minute. I understand that when a plane bursts into flames the flames fall, but this was a fire going up towards the plane. I wouldn't accuse anyone of wrongdoing, but I'm definitely still wondering what happened."

Commander William S. Donaldson USN (Ret.) - Former Officer in Charge of Carrier Battlegroup's Air Traffic Control Center, pilot and military accident investigator, developed additional eyewitness evidence that several missiles were fired towards TWA Flight 800. Donaldson located the firing points of the missiles by triangulating (see http://www.twa800.com/images/triangulation_update.gif - fast download - or http://www.twa800.com/images/triangulation_update.pdf  - slow download but can be zoomed to higher magnification using Acrobat Reader) witness bearing lines as described in his 'Interim Report on the Crash of TWA Flight 800 for The Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Subcommittee on Aviation, U.S. House of Representatives, July 17, 1998'. The report may be read on the internet at twa800.com.

Donaldson has access to over one hundred witnesses on four aircraft, nineteen boats, and thirty-one locations ashore. They were located in a 360° circle around the missile engagement.

A missile was fired from a location one nautical mile off shore and three nautical miles east of Moriches Inlet. In an earlier article written for Newsmax.com (Witnesses Saw Missile Destroy TWA Flight 800), I indicated that circumstantial evidence shows TWA Flight 800 was brought down by the Osama bin Laden organization and that this terrorist attack was only one of a series of missile attacks in the New York metropolitan area which began as early as November 1995 and continued through the summer of 1997.

Two other missiles were fired from out to sea, one of which came from a surface vessel that sailed away from the disaster at 30 knots. Was the missile from the 30 knot target fired from a naval vessel responding to the firing of two in-shore 'hostile' missiles?  Or did the 30 knot vessel fire a drone which was to be "shot down" by the two missiles launched from the north in some classified military exercise?  These questions arise because of a statement made by James Kallstrom, the former FBI agent in charge of the investigation, who admitted in a telephone conversation recorded by Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media that there were U.S. naval vessels directly under TWA Flight 800 on a "classified mission". His use of the word "mission" and not "exercise" may be revealing.

What was the objective of this classified mission? Was it an "anti-terrorist" mission which failed in its objective and in that failure unfortunately contributed to the downing of TWA Flight 800 by the firing of a missile from the '30 knot target'? On August 9, 1996 The Seattle Times reported that investigators had chronicled an "unusual" amount of radar use among slow-moving ships along the coast for several days before the crash. What was it that these ships were monitoring? Were they in that area because of the June 26, 1996 "three red flares" incident? Was the U.S. government aware that terrorist missile launches had occurred in the Long Island area prior to the TWA Flight 800 incident and was it trying to stop them?

On April 8, 1999 Congressman Traficant wrote (http://twa800.com/Letters/Cohen.htm) to Defense Secretary Cohen in which he stated:

"Regrettably, despite numerous assertions by my office, the NTSB and the FBI that there has not been a "cover-up" relative to the Flight 800 investigation, many people continue to contact me with allegations that the U.S. Navy was responsible, in some shape or form, for this tragedy. In order to "close the loop" on my investigation, I would appreciate it if you could answer the following questions for the record:

1. How many U.S. Navy vessels, including submarines, were within 300 miles of the crash site of Flight 800 at the time of the crash?
2. Could you please detail the names, vessel types and location for each of these vessels?
3. Did any of the above-named vessels fire any missiles at any time on July 17, 1996?"

Perhaps Secretary Cohen will also explain why none of the U.S. naval vessels sought to render assistance to a U.S. aircraft that had just crashed in the sea in the middle of a "classified mission".