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From the paperwork: 45. Two other eyewitnesses, Air National Guard pilots, Captain Christian Baur and Major Frederick “Fritz” Meyer, similarly stated that they
by leetrout 4y ago
From the paperwork:
45. Two other eyewitnesses, Air National Guard pilots, Captain Christian
Baur and Major Frederick “Fritz” Meyer, similarly stated that they witnessed events
that indicated a missile struck TWA 800.
46. On the day TWA 800 went down, Captain Baur and Major Meyer were
flying in a Black Hawk helicopter near the area of the TWA 800 incident. Captain Baur
recalled seeing an object with a “rocket type motor . . . moving quick” toward TWA 800.
After the crash, Captain Baur flew to the area and conducted a search and rescue.
- jeffbee 4y agoNone of that is new. They said that at the time. Dozens/hundreds of witnesses said same. Exactly zero of whom have ever seen a missile before and would know what one looks like.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- StanislavPetrov 4y agoIn fact many of the witnesses were active duty military and military veterans who knew exactly what a missile looked like.
- jeffbee 4y agoJust like in civilian life, most people in the military are truck mechanics, cooks, and suchlike. Imputing expertise upon such people is misdirection, just the same kind of misdirection this filing is using to impute authority on a person by citing him as "a physicist" and consistently referring to him as "doctor" out of context.
- sudosysgen 4y agoEven truck mechanics, cooks, and the like have plenty of opportunities to see missile launches. EDIT : Missiles are far faster, and crucially, are on fire from the ground up. They go much straighter and produce much more consistent light than a burning half-plane, which is not capable of ascending anywhere close to vertically. They also make drastically different sounds, as one is supersonic and the other very much is not. They really do look and sound very different. I would expect someone who has seen and heard dozens of launches of that exact missile to be able to make it out quite easily. There are plenty of videos of that online and the difference is quite obvious. Especially someone who is used to this exact model of missile would be able to tell them apart.
- ceejayoz 4y agoYes, but how many have seen a mid-air explosion of a 747 to compare against? "It looked like a missile" may be entirely true. It may also be true that a burning, rapidly climbing half of a 747 looks a bit like a missile from afar. Re: edit: > Missiles are far faster Speed is notoriously hard to measure visually. Watch a A380 come in for a landing and you'll swear it's barely moving. > are on fire from the ground up Most of the eyewitnesses were over the horizon from any potential launch site. > They go much straighter and produce much more consistent light than a burning half-plane, which is not capable of ascending anywhere close to vertically A tail-heavy half of a 747 could absolutely go vertical for a bit with the entire nose missing. > They also make drastically different sounds, as one is supersonic and the other very much is not. People largely reported hearing an explosion, not a sonic boom.
- avh02 4y agoOf everything you said > A tail-heavy half of a 747 could absolutely go vertical for a bit with the entire nose missing. Is doing some very heavy assuming.
- woodruffw 4y agoI don’t know about “vertical”, but the pitch-up theory is the NTSB’s own, not the sole assumption of the person you’re responding to.
- ceejayoz 4y agoIt's not an assumption. Here's what a tail-heavy 747 does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sUWC2jfjqI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sUWC2jfjqI
- avh02 4y agoyou will notice a rapid lack of upwards ('vertical') movement in that video.
- sudosysgen 4y agoMissiles don't really look any different to what you'd think it would. They look just like very big fireworks until they burn out (and then they are basically invisible, just like fireworks).
- ErikVandeWater 4y agoPretty sure plenty of people have seen missiles on the evening news at some point in their lives.
- jonnybgood 4y agoMissile launches perhaps, but not missiles in flight.
- barbacoa 4y agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B6wsujROvXg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B6wsujROvXg Missile videos like the one above are common. 1996 was soon after the gulf war, tons of missiles were broadcast in the news during that time.
- jeffbee 4y agoAt the point of impact, 15000 feet in the air and 120 miles downrange, it would not have looked anything like that. The missile would have been in a terminal glide and there would have been a huge trail of smoke all the way back to Philadelphia.
- 13of40 4y agoAh, I'm finally in my element here. I went through a few years in which I saw many anti-aircraft missiles, and there's nothing so unintuitive about them that a layperson would confuse them with, say, a cloud. In other words, it's a thing in the sky with fire and smoke coming out one end, traveling way faster than you would expect. Probably making a loud, high-pitched roar, depending on where you're sitting. I can't imagine 40 people giving the same mistaken testimony. On the other hand, mass hysteria is a thing, so who knows.
- jeffbee 4y agoThe witness accounts of the supposed missile cited in the official account all describe the missile as ascending, but to fit the theory of this lawsuit it would have been fired from 120 miles away - let's just ignore that this is far out of the effective range of the rocket in question - and would have appeared to have been travelling horizontally to observers on the ground.
- ceejayoz 4y ago> I went through a few years in which I saw many anti-aircraft missiles... How many exploding, breaking-up 747s, though?
- 13of40 4y agoI don't think we ever had the training budget for that.
- salawat 4y agoCome now. If you've seen one detonation compromosing a man made structure, nevermind one that is carefully constructed specifically to repeatedly take off under its own power you've seen about all you need to see.
- ceejayoz 4y agoQuite simply, “that looks like a missile” and “that is a missile” are not the same. Especially from 20+ miles away.
- synu 4y agoI’ve now seen hundreds of missiles striking their targets thanks to the Ukraine war. It looks pretty much exactly like you would guess it looks like.
- PraetorianGourd 4y agoIn person or via videos online? I have to imagine a video, where you know ahead of time what the topic content are, is different than mowing the lawn one evening and seeing an explosion with no context or immediate explanation.
- icehawk 4y agoWhat exactly differentiates a missile from any other sort of rocket, that someone who hadn't seen a missile before would not know what it looks like?
- jonnybgood 4y agoA missile in flight looks like a small aircraft from the ground.
- tgflynn 4y ago> None of that is new. What appears to be new is the claim that they have FOIA documents describing radar tapes that show something hitting the plane. > Exactly zero of whom have ever seen a missile before and would know what one looks like. I think the two Air National Guard officers cited in the parent comment likely had seen missile launches before.
- fortran77 4y ago> Exactly zero of whom have ever seen a missile before and would know what one looks like. I'm very skeptical of these claims, but many, many people--including people on Long Island--have seen missiles. I've seen many, and I've seen them get diverted out of the air by anti-missile systems, and I've seen them strike the ground near me. (This is all from spending at least 4 month/year in Israel over the past 59+ years.)