Original subtitles

[ surf pounding, gulls calling ]

Hank Hughes: I have thought about the TWA investigation

very often over the years.

It's almost been a nagging thought.

It's the one assignment that I was given

in my entire career of 42 years as an investigator

in one form or another that I didn't finish.

And I like to finish my work.

Woman on radio: TWA 800, you're allowed to climb and maintain 13,000.

Man on radio: TWA 800, climb and maintain 13,000.

Man: It was about 8:30.

I was standing on a bridge looking south.

Woman: I was at Davis Park with my two young daughters.

[ airline radio chatter ]

Man #2: So I'm actually heading east

and I just got done talking to my coworker.

Woman #2: It was a very warm night

and it was just-- it was kind of stifling almost.

Man #3: We were taking a walk that evening.

Man #4: We were taking a nice night flight.

Woman #3: I was walking with a friend of mine.

Man #5: I was standing on the dock and I was looking out

in a southeasterly direction.

Woman #4: I was on my boat.

Woman #5: I was at Meschutt Beach.

Man #6: We just happened to look up at the sky.

And all of a sudden I see something rise up from behind these trees over here.

Reporter: The US Coast Guard tonight is reporting an explosion

about 10 miles south of Long Island.

The 747 was on its way to Paris

from JFK in New York.

Reporter #2: We now have it that TWA flight 800,

a commercial 747 aircraft

carrying 212 passengers, a crew of 17,

has exploded in midair

about 10 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean.

Reporter #3: Bodies are being pulled out of the water right now.

No survivors so far.

Reporter #4: There's a lot of search boats.

Reporter #5: One witness described a big fireball

with pieces coming off it.

Tom Kennedy: I was pulling my boat back in.

I was tying it up and the guy next to me

was tying his boat up.

And the guy said, "Hey, look at the flare."

And I turned around and I'm like, "Wow.

Somebody must have some trouble in the bay."

No sooner I said that, the thing just exploded.

Robert Young: The beeper went off.

It was our flight operations dispatch.

As the head of flight operation safety

and the chief safety investigator, I was hoping it was a drill.

But it wasn't.

I was in Atlanta getting ready to support the '96 Olympics.

My phone rang, which was my unit chief

from the explosives unit telling me to catch

the first plane out to New York tomorrow morning.

I was at home and my pager went off

and I was on the go team.

We gathered all the people that we thought we would need

and we arrived about 4:00 in the morning at JFK Airport in New York.

[ speaking French ]

Heckman: The command post was at the East Moriches Coast Guard station,

which was the closet Coast Guard station to where the plane actually went down.

Hughes: We went to the Coast Guard station

at Moriches immediately.

There were hundreds and hundreds of police officers there.

James Speer: My first impression

of the investigation was

martial law.

There were approximately 1,000 cops, it seemed, there

of which half of them were FBI agents.

They had guards on the hangar,

they had cops at the Coast Guard station,

and it seemed very unusual for an accident investigation.

Young: Helicopters were landing and taking off

like every three or four minutes.

Wreckage was coming in and bodies were coming in.

One of the people who went out with me on the first morning

was a former Army helicopter pilot

who had significant experience with Black Hawk helicopters.

One of the helicopters came in and he said,

"That's odd. That's a Special Operations helicopter."

And I said, "Oh, that is odd.

I guess maybe they just couldn't find one and they borrowed it."

He said, "Well, I don't know."

Reporter: Just a little while ago, a temporary morgue

was set up on the beach in Long Island.

Robert Golden: Right in here is the temporary morgue facilities.

This is where the boats would dock

and unload the victims.

Notice that hoses and various bottles of chlorine

would be here to hose down the boats if there was any spillage

in the back of the boats of biological fluids.

The bodies would be photographed.

A tag would be placed on the body.

And if there was any jewelry present,

that also would be photographed.

Speer: The FBI supervised the transport of the wreckage.

It was put on Army National Guard trucks

and trucked to Calverton, Long Island,

which is about 10 miles away.

I can still smell the hangar.

It smelled of death.

And it just was not a pleasant place to be.

It was very--

it took a toll on all of us.

You walked in the hangar through all the guards.

And it was not a pleasant work environment.

Hughes: We set up the staging area at the hangar

and I noticed there was a great deal of friction

between the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

The ATF agents, most of whom have significant

more experience in investigating explosions than any FBI agent,

were relegated to sitting at picnic benches and tables.

They weren't allowed to do anything.

Speer: On my first day there

when I had the tour of the Calverton hangar,

there was a structural piece of the aircraft

lying on the floor that had three holes

blown through it like a .22 through a tin can

with an obvious entrance and exit side of the penetration.

I was about to take a picture of it

and somebody tapped me on the shoulder

and said, "Don't take that picture."

And I said, "Who are you to tell me not to take the picture?"

And he said, "FBI. Don't take the picture."

The word was in the press at that time

that eyewitnesses had already begun to report

smoke trails corkscrewing up toward the airplane.

Reporter: The FBI today raised new questions

that a missile or some kind of streaking object

was seen in the sky at the same time

TWA flight 800 exploded.

We do have some information that there was something in the sky.

A number of people have seen it.

A number of people have described it very similarly.

Hughes: The attitude of our senior management was,

"Don't get too involved. The FBI's gonna handle it.

It's a missile or a bomb and we're not gonna get involved in it."

Young: Most all of us felt

that it was only a matter of time before we found the piece

that would confirm that it was a criminal event.

Explosive traces of unknown origin

have been found relating to TWA flight 800.

Heckman: The FBI,

we had our own mini lab set up on the site.

We got multiple positive hits.

Anything we had a positive hit off

had to be sent down to the FBI laboratory

where they could actually run a confirmatory test.

Three examples of that--

it was rather disconcerting because the test at the lab

was confirmatory on those,

meaning that those were actual explosive residues.

[ speaking French ]

Young: It was very early on,

we didn't have many pieces in the hangar.

And Jim said, "Hey, I've got something here you need to look at."

So I went over and looked at it and it was the leading edge

of the right wing, as I recall.

Speer: The part was really a very sturdy piece of metal.

I was convinced that the part had been damaged

by a high explosion because of the entrance hole

and the exit hole where you could obviously see the entrance side

and obviously see the exit side.

Young: 'Cause Jim wasn't allowed to take a picture of that part,

he looked around the hangar and found other parts

with similar holes. And I'm looking at this

and I just don't know how these could occur normally in a fire.

I decided to take it over to the FBI field lab.

Young: The FBI has a little room that they controlled

and, of course, we couldn't go in there.

Speer: I knocked on the door and said,

"I hear you have a couple of machines that test for nitrates in here."

And they said, "Yes, we do."

And I said, "Can you show me how it works?"

They said, "Sure. We'll run a test sample for you."

And I said, "Well, how about you running my test sample?

Swab this piece and check that for me."

And so they did and sure enough it tested positive,

which I was sure it would do.

Positive for residue of high explosives.

So they picked up the phone and called somebody,

and in 90 seconds, three FBI agents

ran in the room in their coats and ties

and physically pushed me aside

and wouldn't let me hear the conversation.

Then they turned to me and said the machine

has frequent false positives.

There were a considerable number of positives

because the EGIS machine

is susceptible to false positives.

Interviewer: He was told that the machine

frequently yields false positives.

That's not true.

At the point of TWA 800, the EGIS detector

was very specific

and very sensitive.

Tom Stalcup: The FBI are saying there were

frequent false positives with the EGIS.

Is that possible?

No, on the contrary.

The EGIS is extremely sensitive.

It's sensitive down to about 50-100 picograms.

It's a very small amount of material.

It's very rare, if ever, to see

a false alarm with the EGIS.

So they ran the test four more times they said,

but they physically would not let me watch them run the tests.

And they turned to me then and said,

"The last four tests are negative.

We're going to declare the first test a false positive

and the overall results negative."

The FBI then said,

"Oh, we've got to take this down to our lab in Washington..."

"And verify that diagnosis."

I don't understand why material would be taken

from that hangar to the FBI laboratory.

It could be sampled right at that hangar.

When you take it anywhere, you're exposing it

to potential contamination factors.

And the part disappeared never to be returned.

It never returned.

[ laughing ]

Stalcup: I talked to Jim Kallstrom about this

and he laughed when I told him things disappeared

from the hangar never to return.

I laugh that he'd laughed. He knows better than that.

What would happen to the wreckage once it got to Washington?

After it was reexamined down in Washington,

whether it was-- if it was positive

where it was indicating it could be an actual piece of evidence,

then it wouldn't come back.

Charles Wetli: Many of the bodies had parts of metal

imbedded in the bodies.

Pieces of metal we couldn't identify.

We initially separated out these particles of metal

in plastic containers categorized by a number we gave them

and whether they came from the surface of the body

or they came from the internal tissues of the body.

And these were turned over to the FBI.

Normally, I'd expect to receive the parts

as he had discharged them from his office.

But then at some point, someone from the FBI

presented some plastic containers

with metal parts in them.

They weren't separated as Dr. Wetli had described.

They were pretty much together.

We certainly lost identification

as to who the parts were associated with.

If you can associate a wound

with a certain particle,

it tells you something about direction,

it tells you something about velocity

of those parts.

But once they're combined,

there wasn't really much analysis we could do.

Witness: That early evening, my wife and I

were walking up this road right here at Smith Point County Park

and I happened to notice on my left-hand side

just over the dunes--

I seen a streak of light going just about straight up.

It was, you know, leaning a little to the right.

We started to get witnesses calling in.

And then we sent agents out to interview these witnesses.

And eventually, we interviewed

several hundred witnesses

that actually witnessed the event.

The initial witness statements all indicated

that it might have been a missile

because they were all describing

seeing a streaking object

in the sky

and then a big fireball.

Sounded very much like a missile.

Witness: Half a second after that,

there was this bright starburst, all white light.

And it just expanded

in a matter of a split second and it was huge.

Vernon Grose: What the FBI did,

which was so onerous to me,

is that they did all the interviewing of eyewitnesses.

It was the FBI now being sole interrogators.

They kept the NTSB out.

Hughes: We've always conducted our own interviews.

We're pretty good at it.

We've been doing it for years.

The vast majority of witnesses have never been interviewed

by the National Transportation Safety Board.

I find it unconscionable.

My name is Vassilis Bakounis.

I'm from Greece.

I worked for 25 years in Olympic Airways.

In the mid-'90s I went to the United States

to get my commercial pilot license.

On that day, as I was flying at approximately 2,000 feet

over the shore of Long Island,

I saw the light coming out of the sea.

I followed that light

for many seconds

before it makes

a kind of radius to the right.

And then I saw the explosion.

And then it's aflame

and was falling down like

an umbrella of flames.

When I saw the light starting climbing,

it was really, really low. Very low.

And then it start climbing, passing my altitude

and the explosion.

Kallstrom: We will know what happened on that airplane.

And I guarantee you that the resources of the FBI

and the great law enforcement team we have at every level

will be used on that investigation.

Virtually nothing that the FBI learned

about the investigation

was provided to us.

We didn't have much cooperation from the FBI

on any part of the investigation.

They had their own explosive techs in the hangar.

They had their own metallurgists in the hangar.

Heckman: We actually had FBI agents on the Navy ships.

And as soon as the divers would bring a piece of debris to the surface,

our agents would take possession of it.

They controlled the access to the wreckage.

We were never allowed to see it

until all the evidence techs from the FBI had looked at it

and decided that we could see it.

I mean, this was unheard of.

They had video recordings

of the ROV searches under the water.

Speer: It became almost adversarial.

One time, they asked us to watch underground video

looking for engine parts.

There was a VCR tape and they got the machine set up and running.

It was a basic machine.

The FBI guy stayed there.

And I said, "You know, you can go off and do whatever you need to do.

We can run this machine."

"No." "Okay."

Anyway, in looking at the tape,

there'd be a little time clock on the top

that had all the data like the heading, the depth, and time.

And after a while, I began noticing

that on the same heading

there'd be interruptions of the time clock.

And I turned to the FBI guy and said, "This tape has been edited."

And I said, "I want to see the unedited version."

And he said, "No."

Man: Death is nothing.

I have only passed into the next room.

I am me, you are you.

We were for each other, we are always.

Call me by the name you have always used.

Speak to me as you have always done.

Change not your tone,

but be solemn or sad in manner.

Laugh at the things we laughed at together.

Pray, smile, think of me,

pray for me.

Speer: They had barges that they would load parts on.

And they were to keep a log on all the parts they recovered

so they knew where all the parts came from

because they were trying to assess

the breakup sequence of the airplane.

Not all of the evidence from one part of the airplane

is gonna fall in one spot.

So there's actually three debris fields.

Rocky Miller: We had tags and they were color-coded

according to the area that they were found in.

They also had latitude, longitude on them,

the date that they were recovered.

Hughes: About a month into the investigation,

I noticed that some of the materials

in the hangar had been disturbed at night.

Miller: One of my investigators, John Desmond,

came to me one day and said, "Some of these tags are being changed."

I said, "What do you mean they're being changed?"

He said, "They're being changed from yellow to white."

Somebody was changing tags on us.

Now, there are only two keys to that hangar.

I had one, the security chief had the other.

Miller: I went over to the FBI and informed them

that we thought somebody was in our hangar after we'd locked down at night.

Hughes: They set up video surveillance in my hangar

and found that three FBI agents from another office

had entered the hangar for purposes unknown

in the wee hours of the morning.

Miller: We were told it was a couple of new FBI agents.

Interviewer: And did they ever tell you who they were?

No.

Hughes: On one occasion an agent from California was brought in.

There was the famous incident where little Ricky Hahn

was out with a piece of fuselage

trying to bend it in the middle of the night.

I found him in the main hangar

with a hammer pounding on some of the wreckage trying to flatten it out.

The guy was hammering on a piece of fuselage.

That defies any common sense.

You don't alter or destroy evidence.

You're altering the shape of a material

which has acquired that shape as a result of some forces.

Hughes: That was brought to the investigator in charge's

attention, Mr. Dickinson. Nothing happened.

Every time there was a problem, it was ignored.

Man: It was about 8:30.

The sun was still up.

Heckman: We interviewed several hundred witnesses

that actually witnessed the event.

Man: I was standing on the bridge looking south.

Woman: It was a very warm night.

Man #2: We were taking a walk that evening.

Man #3: We were taking a nice night flight.

Woman #2: I was walking with a friend of mine.

Man #4: I was standing on the dock

and I was looking out in a southeasterly direction.

I was at the-- I'm very upset,

even still all these years later.

I was at Davis Park with my two young daughters.

I had just put them to bed.

I was standing on the bridge looking south.

All of a sudden, I decided I had to go outside,

get the towels off the front deck, bring them in the house.

I go outside, turn to the left...

Just happened to look up at the sky.

...and I see something that's going across

right in my line of sight.

I actually see something behind a tree line,

much like my thumb, go up in the air.

I saw what appeared to be cheap fireworks.

I noticed a streak of light heading up towards the sky.

I saw this white light shoot up in the sky.

There's something going up in the sky.

This rocket went up in the air.

And I seen this white light.

And I said, "Someone shot off a flare."

And it looked like a flare going up.

And I'm trying to figure out what it is

because it looked completely out of place.

Larger than a standard flare.

And it appeared behind a house to my right.

And it went up and out to sea.

I watched this object go outbound towards the horizon.

It was moving very rapidly.

- It was fast. - Zoop! Just like that.

It was going very quickly. It's very, very shiny.

Kind of like a little smoke plume behind it.

Looked like a missile vapor trail to me.

Then it turned to the left.

- Then it turned. - And it arced over.

And it looked like it curved to the right.

Then it momentarily disappeared.

It disappeared for a second or two.

Then it just sort of disappeared from my vision.

Then I lost it 'cause there was clouds.

Then I saw it again.

It goes up. And there was a plane that was flying along.

And I saw a flash of an aircraft light.

Blink, blink, blink.

It goes up right to the side of the plane,

and I remember thinking to myself--

I was very frightened that it was gonna hit the plane.

And it was-- poof! It didn't actually hit the plane.

It exploded right next to it.

Now,I know nothing about military

or any of that, so I don't know

if its exploding next to it is still significant.

I also noticed on the horizon

a very bright mast light of a ship.

From the mast light, there was another flash

and I saw another object rise out of the ocean.

The next thing, something comes up from underneath the plane.

I saw an explosion.

This big explosion.

And I'm looking at this and I go--

I remember saying out loud to myself,

"Gee, look at that. A plane broken in the sky."

And then the very next day, the FBI came to talk to me.

It was almost abusive in a sense.

They took me into the back room.

They said, "Well, we heard that you saw something.

Tell us what you saw." I told them what I saw

and they looked me straight in the face and said,

"You did not see that. You saw nothing."

Then they decided to jump to a conclusion.

Once that happened, objectivity

went out the window as far as I'm concerned.

Young: That's when the NTSB put on their major push

for a mechanical failure.

Stalcup: And were you in agreement with that push?

We didn't find any part of the airplane

that indicated a mechanical failure.

Speer: They said the airplane exploded

from the center fuel tank.

Cause unknown. Suspect a fuel explosion.

Merritt Birky: Early in the investigation,

some of the first hardware that was brought up

was from that center wing tank.

Some of the parts from that tank

showed evidence of burning, melted aluminum.

So we knew we had a fire in that center wing tank.

Hughes: I think you can see from the forensic evidence,

something did happen in or around the center fuel tank.

The plane sat out in the sun.

It was pretty hot in July,

which increased the temperature of the tank in the aircraft

to vaporize the fuel,

so you'd have enough vapor there to cause an explosion

if you ignite the fuel.

The question remaining is

what sparked the explosion?

Stalcup: What ignited those vapors?

Well, that's-- that's--

that's never been fully proven.

Hughes: The theory was that wiring had failed

and sparked the explosion.

We never found any of that.

We didn't find any evidence in the wiring

on the aircraft that would have indicated that a spark occurred

inside the center wing tank to blow it up.

Interviewer: Did anybody in the investigation find this wiring?

Not to my knowledge, no.

Speer: The only wiring in the center fuel tank

is to the fuel quantity gauge,

and that was the fine wire meant for milliamps.

The main power on the airplane is 115 volt AC,

and it would have taken 1,200 volts

to arc the fuel quantity probe,

and there's no 1,200 volt electricity on the airplane

outside of the engine igniters

and that's individual to each engine.

So the cause of the ignition of the center fuel tank

had to be something other than airplane electronics.

James Traficant: What I'm going to do is to request

that Mr. Kallstrom

come up to the table at this point.

Mr. James K. Kallstrom, who is assistant director

in charge of the New York office

of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Roy Blunt: Mr. Kallstrom, would you just give us some information

on how many witnesses on the ground

or in other airplanes at the time believe they saw something

coming from the ground headed toward that plane?

Well, I wouldn't want to say that they all saw something coming from the ground.

There are about 200 people

that saw events in the sky that they described.

None of which described a missile.

Blunt: How many of them would you say saw

approximately the same thing?

A good bulk of the people on the shore

report and we triangulate

that they're describing roughly the same event.

So let's say 60-70.

We had witnesses that saw things in the sky.

And we talked about the possibility that a missile,

as horrid as that is,

could have taken down this airplane.

And we thought that needs to be addressed.

Could you play the videotape, please?

Narrator: The following program was produced

by the Central Intelligence Agency.

[ music playing ]

Stalcup: It was November 18, 1997.

I was in the middle of grad school studying physics.

I was sitting on my couch flipping through the channels

with my girlfriend and the FBI came on

and they said it was about this plane crash,

which I had heard things about in the past, and I was interested.

Narrator: Of particular concern to FBI investigators

were reports from dozens of eyewitnesses

who, on the evening of July 17,

recall seeing an object, usually described as a flare

or firework, ascend and culminate in an explosion.

Was it a missile?

Did foreign terrorists destroy the aircraft?

At the request of the FBI,

CIA weapon analysts look into this possibility.

The CIA's conclusion--

the eyewitnesses did not see a missile.

Just after the aircraft exploded,

it pitched up abruptly

and climbed several thousand feet

from 13,800 feet to about 17,000 feet.

Those who said they saw something ascend

and culminate in the explosion probably saw

the burning aircraft ascend and erupt into a fireball,

not a missile.

To date, there is no evidence

that anyone saw a missile shoot down TWA flight 800.

Not a missile.

Never was, never will be.

Stalcup: I felt assaulted.

I felt as if I was being lied to.

It looked more like a big piece of propaganda

than the results

of an air crash investigation.

And I just knew that there was something wrong.

Throughout the animation, they had the underlined words

"not a missile" and the narrator would say, "It was not a missile."

Narrator: Not a missile.

It just seemed odd to me

that they would have to focus so much on telling us

what it wasn't rather than what it was.

[ modem hissing ]

That night, I went on my dial-up connection

and that's when I found out there was an eyewitness

in the air at the time,

an Air National Guard captain who was in a Black Hawk helicopter

who saw an object strike another object

that was coming from the right.

Right then and there I said, "My goodness."

So I thought, "Well, do I believe this article

that I'm reading on the Internet?"

And I thought, "Well, I'll just go right to the source themselves."

There was a website that listed eyewitnesses

that were listed by the media, eyewitness names.

There was a Runyan, there was an Angelides,

there was a Myron.

I think those were the first three people I called.

And I said I'm this interested citizen over here

and they told me what they saw and it was in vivid terms.

And I said, "Thank you very much." And I called the next person.

They all had the same story. And that's when I got hooked.

Because these people

saw something that night.

Stalcup: So the CIA video, what do you think of that?

It's a nice cartoon.

I think the zoom climb is fraud, waste, and abuse.

I don't know how they got the CIA to get involved in this

absolutely ridiculous

animation.

I don't think that there's any engineering justification

that says that the airplane can do what their video said it did.

Every pilot thought, "Baloney. That could never happen."

Trying to claim that the airplane tipped up enough

after the nose came off and climbed...

The nose weighs about 90,000 pounds.

If you disrupt the center of gravity that much

and the airplane tips up, it's gonna either stall

and fall or break apart instantly.

Stalcup: Did you happen to watch the CIA animation about what happened?

- Yes, I did. - And what did you think about that animation?

That animation didn't resemble

anything that I saw in any way whatsoever.

I actually watched it to the point

when they showed that the plane split in two

and one half went up and one half went down.

As soon as I seen that part of their video,

I didn't watch any more after that

because it's just incredibly wrong

and that's not what I seen.

That is not what happened that evening.

Did you ever see anything rise up out of the fireball?

No, absolutely not.

That fireball fell like a stone.

That streak you saw,

could that have been an aircraft?

No, it was far too fast.

I've never seen a plane go that fast up like that.

These people on the shoreline

saw this bright streak originating from near the surface,

not a point two and a half miles in the sky.

How they calculated that zoom climb,

if I could get that information,

I could prove that they jimmied the data.

I filed a Freedom of Information Act request

to the CIA and NTSB

for the data and calculations that they used for that zoom climb.

They refused to give me the information.

Stalcup: But Ray's efforts weren't a total loss.

He actually got some internal memos from the CIA.

And I filed a lawsuit against the CIA separately

and got other documents and, between the two of us,

we had a nice little history of e-mails

from inside that small group in the CIA

that did the animation.

One of the documents specifically discussed

eyewitness Mike Wire.

He's standing on a bridge

and he sees this what he calls a cheap firework

come by a house and kind of arcs up and goes out.

What I saw looked like cheap fireworks

coming out from behind the roofline

of the double chimney house.

It went on a 45 to 50-degree angle out to sea

and it wavered, zigzagged up and down.

Stalcup: The memo shows that the team that created the animation

knew that the ascending light that Mike Wire saw

couldn't have been the aircraft.

But their animation that went on national television

told a completely different story.

Narrator: A fourth eyewitness reported

that he watched a white light, perhaps a firework,

traveling upward at a steep angle.

Stalcup: The video shows the light starting at a point high up in the sky,

not behind the house the way Mike Wire described it.

The CIA animation shows it approximately here in the sky.

And then it proceeds from there

as a streak of light up into the sky,

but that's not what I saw.

What I saw,

something left behind the house

and went up to the plane, the plane blew up.

Stalcup: After watching the animation,

did that cause you to do anything?

Well, that's when I called the FBI,

you know, and I said, "You seem to be a little off

on what you're depicting here.

That's not the way the events unfolded."

And what did they say?

They said, "Do you want to change your story?"

And I said, "No."

I said, "But you really need to send somebody out here

that can understand what I'm explaining."

Okay, and what happened?

Never heard from them.

Interviewer: People who don't know each other

all up and down the coast,

they saw the same thing

and you're saying there was a mass misperception.

Well... [ clears throat ]

not necessarily a misperception.

This has been documented over and over again

in traumatic events.

The human mind tends to change things

or change the sequences just because of the trauma

of what they saw.

They don't remember things in the sequence.

Well, they're all very consistent.

So, if you're saying it's mass misperception,

which you are, really, right?

I guess.

I find that very bizarre.

I can't explain it.

I'm not a psychology expert.

But you did explain it.

Well, I explain it the way it was explained to me.

Young: If you don't mind me being blunt,

if the airplane didn't climb,

then the answer for what the witnesses saw in the sky

might be an unacceptable one.

All of a sudden, this rocket went up in the air.

And then there was this big explosion.

Days later, the FBI came to visit.

And they sat down and they were talking to me

and they're asking me questions and I told them my story.

And he had his little pad.

And then when the interview was over,

they looked at me and said,

"You have your papers in

to become an American citizen, don't you?"

And I said, "Yes. I'm waiting to be called."

They said, "Well, it would be very wise of you

if you want to become an American citizen

to keep very quiet about this and not to talk about it."

Incredible.

And so I didn't because I figured, you know,

I wanted to become an American citizen.

Hughes: David Mayer was a relatively new NTSB employee

who had no training or experience in any aspect

of transportation accident investigation.

Almost a year after the investigation began,

I noticed that he had come to my hangar

and started to change evidence tags.

Never bothered to ask me.

Just started changing them.

The things that he did, technically, were illegal.

There are, I think, 10 or 12 pieces of evidence

where he altered the location from which they were recovered.

Young: In one case, we had a piece

that was originally recovered in the yellow zone

and it was moved to the red zone

because it made things look nicer.

One piece, the aft keel beam under the center tank,

came down in the yellow zone.

Well, it would have fit much better

with the exploding center tank theory

if it had come down in the red zone.

So it was moved to the red zone.

Interviewer: You're basically telling me

that this was an agenda-driven investigation.

I think there's a strong possibility of that.

And the agenda was, "That this is an accident,

make it so."

It's about 22 minutes after the hour and Jim Hall,

who is the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, is in Baltimore.

- Good morning, Mr. Hall. - Morning, Brian.

Brian: Tell us what's gonna go on today.

Hall: Well, Brian, we're gonna have a public hearing

on the TWA 800 accident.

It's the 121st hearing

the Board has held on a major aviation accident.

These hearings are an exercise in public accountability.

Dan Rather: The National Transportation and Safety Board hearings

on the TWA flight 800 crash

focused today on the 747's center fuel tank.

Grose: After they've gotten to a certain stage

of investigation, the NTSB holds a public hearing.

Miller: Prior to the public hearing in Baltimore,

we had what you'd call a prehearing conference.

At its conclusion, I was asked to come to the IIC,

the investigator in charge's office, Al Dickinson.

And in his office he sat me down and told me

that I was not allowed to ask any questions

or speak at the public hearing. And I asked him, I said,

"Al, I've been on this investigation. I don't understand this."

And he said, "If you believe in corporate memory,

you won't ask any questions or speak at the public hearing."

Interviewer: What could you possibly say

that would disrupt the hearing?

Oh, I could get up and say,

"Well, you know, we have great concerns

about the accuracy of your database

and we'd like to have a thorough,

complete audit of your database."

We could have said that.

In fact, our lawyer at TWA

complained to the NTSB about the tag database being inadequate

and too unreliable for any analysis or conclusions.

And that "far-from-settled investigatory information

and analysis" would be presented at the hearing.

Lahr: In all of the accident investigations

I have participated in,

eyewitness testimony was an integral part of it.

Not this time.

Is it true you're not going to have any of the witnesses,

the 200 and some witnesses that just were eyewitnesses?

Well, Brian, that is part of the FBI investigation,

which was a criminal investigation.

The minute the news came out

that the eyewitness portion of that hearing was cancelled,

I started saying, "Oh, my God, what's going on?

This is really big. They don't want these eyewitnesses to talk."

Is there any doubt in your mind

as to whether or not this was a missile?

I have no--

no reason in my mind

to think that this was a bomb or a missile.

And I feel that we've done everything we can

to look at that issue.

Mr. Hank Hughes joined the NTSB in 1985.

He is a senior investigator assigned to the office

of aviation safety.

Hughes: My report, which was

496 pages in length or thereabouts

with photographic supplement

was cut and amended without my knowledge.

When I did find out about it,

I complained. Nothing was done.

We were required to provide a factual report,

but ordered not to write an analysis.

Interviewer: What? Could you say that again?

We were directed to write a factual report,

but not an analysis.

All we issued was factual reports.

Wetli: I was basically requested to supply autopsy reports

and photographs and so forth. But there was no analysis.

In all of the other investigations that I've done

and every other NTSB investigator I've worked with,

the group chairman writes a factual report...

and then based on that factual report,

writes an analysis of the significance

of the facts and circumstances

of that aspect of the accident.

Shanahan: To determine really what happened,

you've got to put everybody's findings together

and analyze it,

which we've done that in every investigation

I've been involved in except this one.

Interviewer: What would your analysis have been?

That the primary--

the primary conclusion was...

the explosive forces came from outside the airplane,

not the center fuel tank.

Stalcup: Would that statement have been in your analysis?

If I got to write one.

Let me tell you, this is an honest investigation

and it is being conducted in an honest and open fashion.

Traficant: I'd just like the panel

to answer my questions yes or no.

If you can't, I want you to say you can't answer it.

First question, Mr. Hall.

To this point, is there any physical evidence,

conclusive forensic physical evidence,

to prove that it was a mechanical failure

that caused the explosion of the center fuel tank?

Yes or no?

No, but-- no, but we're looking at that.

I want a one question answer.

- I know this is tough. At this point-- - No.

Mr. Kallstrom,

were there in fact traces of PETN and RDX

found in that plane wreckage?

There were explosive chemicals found.

Now, the FAA did a historical record search

on the aircraft involved

and found out that actually before the crash

it was at St. Louis Airport overnight.

We were told that in St. Louis

a bomb-sniffing canine training session occurred

where they left some residue

by mistake of the explosives that the FBI had found.

You know for sure that the dog was on that plane?

Kallstrom: We know for sure. Well, we have the report

that document the training.

Very specifically document the training.

Both Congressman Traficant and I

would like sent to our offices immediately

the documentation that shows the plane number.

Stalcup: These are the documents the FBI supplied to Congress.

The officer who conducted the exercise

did not know the plane number,

but testified he was on an empty plane.

The plane that would later become flight 800

left the gate fully boarded with more than 400 passengers

at 12:35.

The officer finished the exercise at 12:00 noon.

TWA regulations require the cabin crew

to be on the plane an hour before departure.

They would have been on this plane

before the dog training exercise even began.

So the exercise could not have happened on the plane

that would become flight 800.

Was it conclusive that a dog

- was on this plane that blew up? - Kallstrom: Yes.

Stalcup: Flight 800 is just...

a "fuck you" to the world.

I mean, it's just-- it's just amazing.

I think flight 800 is, you know,

it's a watershed moment for this country.

It was, "Wow.

Look what we can really get away with."

Even in the information age.

Narrator: The CIA's conclusion--

the eyewitnesses did not see a missile.

Interviewer: How do you feel about all this?

Oh, it's terrible.

First time I ever really distrusted my government.

I...

World War II, I couldn't wait to serve my country.

And I stayed in the Navy Reserve.

I believe in this country.

And for that kind of cover-up

to be tolerated, it makes me fighting mad.

Wire: I always believed in the FBI,

that they do a good job.

Sometimes they have to bend some corners,

but this is--

there's too much bending going on with this.

I was very upset for a long time about this.

Then I just kind of sat back and resigned to the fact

that I could stand on my soapbox all day--

nobody's gonna listen to me, so...

If somebody's interested in hearing what I have to say, I'll tell 'em.

Hughes: I've been an investigator over 40 years

and it was a one-of-a-kind experience

that I wouldn't recommend anybody go through.

As an American, I'm ashamed.

Stalcup: The reason for me standing here today

is to inform the news media and the public

of an inexplicably flawed official investigation

into our nation's worst air disaster.

Stalcup: After the Baltimore hearing,

I began researching the crash deeper and deeper.

I called investigators involved directly,

filed Freedom of Information Act requests,

actually sued the CIA and the NTSB,

I sued the FBI, and I analyzed thousands of pages of documents,

reports, witness statements, radar data,

and other documents pertaining to TWA 800.

Two weeks before I graduated,

I took out two student loans

to fund a vacation.

Interviewer: Where'd you go?

Stalcup: I went back to Cape Cod.

Interviewer: That's a vacation? That's home.

I did not want to go--

vacation meaning not going directly to work anywhere.

I was getting my doctorate in physics

while at the same time being a citizen researcher.

I was so burned out. I needed to just...

not do anything.

Interviewer: And how long did you not do anything?

Stalcup: Well, not doing anything means

I did flight 800 100% of the time.

Eventually I really got frustrated by the media's inaccurate reporting

and by reporters ignoring the facts of the case.

I decided to get in touch with Hank Hughes,

Bob Young, Jim Speer,

and other insiders who had the courage

to come out and speak publically about their experience.

And to make this documentary

to present our evidence and to show how the government

handled the investigation.

Interviewer: Why should the audience

believe you?

I mean, who are you to be doing this?

Why should the audience believe me?

Don't believe me. I don't want the audience to believe me.

I want them to look at the evidence

and see what it says.

I think the most telling piece of evidence

is the splatter that we found on top of the center wing tank.

Stalcup: There was a splatter pattern.

A pattern of material that was deposited

in the top of the center wing fuel tank.

When the center wing fuel tank broke apart,

they pieced it back together again when they brought it back from the ocean.

They matched it up just like a jigsaw puzzle

and found this splatter pattern.

It was continuous across the fracture line

of the center wing tank,

but it was not found on the fracture's surface.

And this shows that it was deposited

prior to the center wing tank exploding.

Birky: We really never could identify

what that splatter pattern was from.

Stalcup: Really? It wasn't from anything that melted on the aircraft?

Well, it could have been something that was melted on the aircraft

because it went through a fiery-- a fireball.

Stalcup: But this material was deposited before the fireball.

Well...

there's some evidence that that might be the case.

Stalcup: Who is responsible for deciding

what potential evidence would be examined?

I was.

Were you aware of something called a splatter pattern

on top of the center wing tank?

No.

This splatter crossed the fracture boundaries.

Okay, but what is a splatter pattern?

It's a melted material.

The NTSB didn't share this with you?

I've never-- no.

I've never seen that. Never heard of that.

One person that should have known about this that didn't was me.

If I had heard at the time,

I would try and get some of the samples

of the residue and have it analyzed.

Stalcup: You sent a sample

from the top surface of the tank of that splatter pattern

down to NASA for testing.

Why would he send it down to NASA?

There was an instrument right there.

He already had the capability on the scene.

There was no reason, if you were looking for military explosives,

to send it down to NASA.

Stalcup: One of the persons that did the analysis

of the residue was a guy named Charlie Bassett down at NASA.

And that was another three- or four-hour,

maybe six-hour drive from where I was at.

So I drove down there to talk to him about that.

And he ended up saying, "Did you hear about my nitrates report?"

And I said, "What do you mean? You found nitrates in the wreckage?"

He said, "Sure, I did."

So he gave me a copy of the report.

NASA sent back a report giving them information

that there was nitrates in that splatter.

That's very interesting.

- You didn't know that? - No.

Stalcup: And the report that came back from Charlie Bassett--

in the splatter pattern, he detected nitrates.

I can't remember that at this point.

You don't remember that nitrates were detected?

No, I don't remember that.

I'll have to go back and look at the reports

if I have them anymore. I don't know.

Stalcup: Actually, I had the report with me

and I gave it to Dr. Birky to review.

So, these tests

did not identify uniquely

whether it was-- what the source was.

It only tells you that there's nitrates there.

Stalcup: They have this evidence that something melted

on the center wing fuel tank before it broke to pieces.

It basically by itself proves that their theory is wrong.

But they stopped requesting further examination of that piece.

Nitrates could come from a number of different sources.

I mean, nitrates by themselves don't mean anything.

You see, I didn't consider

the nitrates sufficient to identify

an explosive device.

You needed further testing to do that?

- Pardon? - It would have required further testing?

It would have required significant further testing.

That's correct.

And that testing was never done?

Well, I don't-- no, it was never done.

A nitrate doesn't-- in my estimation,

my judgment, doesn't prove an explosive device.

I mean, you can get nitrates from many things.

But you just said you didn't order the follow-up testing.

- No, I didn't. - Why?

I don't have a recollection of why

other than to say that...

we didn't do it.

People watching might think that that's suspicious.

Well, I'm sure they could say that.

They would have felt that.

My argument is

the follow-up testing that needed to be done wasn't.

I can only answer by saying

that you're right, it was not done.

Um...

should more analytical work been done?

Well, that's--

that would be appropriate.

Hall: We do everything we can.

It's our responsibility to do this in a professional,

thorough, and methodical way.

Stalcup: In their own animation,

the NTSB amended the CIA's version

by showing the plane turning to the left

before the climb.

But the NTSB's theory for what caused the crash

has no explanation for that left turn.

Stalcup: What about the left wing?

Do you remember any damage to the left wing

that was interesting?

The left wing? No. That was different than the right wing?

Stalcup: The upper surface of the left wing

was shattered, but the right wing's upper surface wasn't.

It looks like-- I mean, you've got

decimation of the upper skin of the left wing,

but essentially nothing on the right.

Stalcup: The wings were carrying all of the plane's fuel

for its trip to Paris.

The NTSB says that when the left wing

impacted the ocean, the fuel in side the wing

was pressurized, causing it to burst.

Stalcup: But in their own animations,

the government shows the left wing breaking off on the air.

Narrator: Its left wing separated from the fuselage,

releasing unburned fuel.

Stalcup: With the wing broken off and no longer sealed,

with much of the fuel gone

and no longer evenly distributed throughout the wing,

on impact with the ocean, you're not gonna get

the hydraulic forces you need

to shatter the wing the way it did.

But at level flight with the wings full of fuel,

if you introduced high energy into that liquid,

you can get the hydraulic forces you need

to shatter that wing.

There would be a reduction of lift on that left wing.

The right wing, undamaged, would have its full lift.

And that is what would explain the left turn.

Witness: It seemed like the aircraft turned.

I could see the flash of the wing

'cause the sun was behind me setting out here.

Stalcup: There were eyewitnesses who saw the plane banking.

One eyewitness was in a boat and they thought it was gonna hit them.

Now, if the left wing did shatter first,

you would expect to find left wing debris

in the red zone,

the earliest debris field closest to JFK Airport.

There was left wing debris

in the earliest debris field closest to JFK Airport.

Parallel to the horizon

was a cigar-shaped cloud. A long cigar-shaped cloud.

Stalcup: If powerful energy were introduced to the left wing

before it broke off,

fuel would spray out and immediately vaporize,

creating a cloud of white vapor behind the plane.

Stalcup: What color was the cigar-shaped cloud?

- White. - It was this white poof.

Like a crystally white poof.

A huge white ball.

A white phosphorus explosion.

Stalcup: I wanted to see for myself

if high explosives could have caused

that left wing shatter pattern.

So I sealed a piece of 747 wing

over a container 75% filled with liquid

just like the left wing was.

Then I put a quarter pound of TNT into the container

and blew it up.

Misted liquid blew out of the container

just like the misted fuel blew out of the left wing.

Let's go look for some pieces.

Man: I know I saw two more go over the trees.

- In there someplace. - Really? That far?

- Yeah. - It's right here.

Rivets sheared off.

Almost every rivet on the upper surface

of the left wing was sheared away.

We have the same fractures that we have pictures of from the wreckage.

This fracture right here is just like

the fracture that we see on the wreckage.

This fracture right here

is almost identical to fractures

that are found on the accident aircraft.

We have pictures of the wreckage that look just like this.

Yeah, it appears we replicated the damage from the accident aircraft.

Stalcup: And one more thing about that left turn

caused by the shattered left wing--

you can clearly see it on radar.

Thanks to Captain Ray Lahr, who sued the CIA,

we now have the NTSB's own simulation software.

You see these blue triangles and green squares?

That's where the plane was according to two separate radar sites.

And as you can see here, the NTSB simulations

aren't going through those triangles and squares.

So they're wrong.

If it doesn't fit the radar data, it's not what happened.

This is showing the climb.

And this is exactly when they're not matching radar data.

So this climb is itself invalid.

What really happened to the aircraft is this.

When you fit it to the radar data,

there is no climb.

[ radio chatter ]

Hughes: Typically, you'll see a damage pattern

which will correlate with the injuries.

The center fuel tank blowing up

or an explosive device inside of the airplane

would have caused a burn pattern

that would have emanated from one area

and progressed in a direction away from where

the explosion originated.

In the instance of TWA flight 800,

there's no such correlation.

From front to back and right to left,

the injury patterns were completely atypical.

One person might have been severely burned,

the person sitting next to them didn't have a mark on their body,

and the person sitting next to them may have

been completely destroyed.

How do you account for absolutely no patterns?

We saw nothing where, for example,

those in the vicinity of the center fuel tank

would have more damage than those seated elsewhere on the airplane.

Shanahan: Many of the passengers were ejected from their seats

at some point during the crash.

You could look at seats that had fire damage

and see if the individuals who were supposedly sitting there

also had fire damage.

And in many cases we found out that they did not.

That tells me that the passenger

had left that seat prior to the time that the fire

had spread into the cabin.

To give you an idea of the crash, this is sometime in mid-August.

I walked down to the water and I see a piece of the plane laying there

and I said, "What's going on? Plane parts are supposed to go to Calverton, not here."

And when you look a little bit closer, you can see

a bone which has been shot like an arrow right through the fuselage of that plane.

This, I think, is something that wasn't appreciated by a lot of people,

the tremendous forces involved here.

Hughes: The damage to the seats

and the injuries to the passengers was random,

which in my mind indicates

a high ordnance detonation,

not a low-speed explosion

like a center fuel tank blowing up.

- A high-speed explosion. - Stalcup: Where?

Well, given the fact that we found no point

from which it emanated, I think it was external to the aircraft.

Young: April of 2000,

the NTSB decided that they would go down

to Eglin Air Force Base

and shoot Stingers, flares, and fireworks.

And they would put witnesses on the ground

in different locations

at various distances from the launch point.

And basically, the theory was

that when they do this,

the witnesses would be so at odds

at what the eyewitnesses claimed,

it would prove conclusively

that the eyewitnesses didn't know what they were talking about

and therefore it could be brought up

to refute the eyewitnesses at the final hearing.

Guess what?

They had a missile visibility test

and it was on the nightly news

and I happened to see it that night.

The missile launch was very similar

to what I saw out here.

It matched pretty identical to it.

Stalcup: Here's an example of how the US media

covered the missile visibility tests.

Government investigators have confirmed tonight

that the Army recently conducted

some dramatic tests

to disprove once and for all

whether or not a missile attack was responsible

for the explosion of TWA flight 800.

Stalcup: Actually, according to the official report,

the test was done to determine how far away

a witness could be and still see a missile.

Here's NBC's Robert Hager.

Stalcup: The report starts off with a visual cue

to remind viewers to connect missiles with conspiracy theories.

Hager: Three times Army contractors fire Stinger missiles

similar to this as NTSB investigators watch below.

Investigators did not stage the test

because they seriously believe a missile caused the TWA crash.

In fact, they're certain it was not a missile.

Stalcup: Now pay close attention to what he says next.

But they do feel it's important for the record

to match what they were able to see in the test

with what some eyewitnesses believe they saw off Long Island.

Stalcup: If they're so certain that a missile didn't cause the crash,

why would they have to match what the flight 800 witnesses

believe they saw with the missiles

the eyewitnesses actually saw during the test in Florida?

Hager: Eyewitnesses like Vietnam vet Fred Meyer

who was in a helicopter that night.

I followed the streak of light

red/orange in color,

moving from my left center to my further left.

Hager: Meyer says then he saw explosions similar to this.

Stalcup: Actually, this, the plane descending in a fireball,

is not what he saw next. What he saw next was...

I saw an explosion.

And the explosion was on the trajectory

of the streak of light I had been following.

Stalcup: The descending fireball

was the last thing Major Meyer saw.

Hager: Why are investigators sure it wasn't a missile?

It's this reconstruction.

No residue of any missile explosives. None.

Stalcup: This is false.

Government investigators did report

finding explosive residues on the plane.

Hager: Instead, a pattern of twisted metal

that shows the explosion that did bring the plane down

originated here in the center fuel tank.

Stalcup: And this is also false.

There is no evidence confirming that the explosion

that brought down the plane originated in the center fuel tank.

Hager: And no continuous holes in a straight line

through the wreckage, which would have had to have been left

if a missile penetrated.

Stalcup: Not if it were a proximity fuse missile

that does not penetrate, but explodes nearby.

This and many other media reports

persistently focused on missiles that could penetrate the plane.

Hager: So investigators believe what eyewitnesses saw

was the trail of fire left in the sky

by the falling plane itself.

Stalcup: Well before seeing this descending fireball,

many witnesses reported seeing an object rise up

off the surface.

Hager: What investigators really believe

is that the fuel tank exploded

because of an electrical short

or some other mechanical problem.

Stalcup: What investigators?

No ignition source was ever confirmed.

And what other mechanical problems?

The reporter provides no details.

Hager: And nothing they observed in the new missile tests

has changed their minds.

Stalcup: But he never reports the results of the tests.

The results that showed that all observers

easily saw the missile.

Hager: Robert Hager, "NBC News," Washington.

Frank Hilldrup: What about detonation at some distance?

Perhaps a self-destruct scenario?

It's possible that several types of missiles

could have been in the vicinity of TWA flight 800

at the time of the mishap.

But the possibility that that occurred

is hard to imagine.

Stalcup: Did you ever look at my analysis

of the radar information

that actually showed some evidence

of a high-energy explosion on radar?

Yes.

Stalcup: Since it happened so close to shore

and miles off of Long Island

in a very busy air corridor,

there are several FAA radar sites

that recorded the crash.

Man: The field to the left is consistent with the explosion.

Stalcup: At the Baltimore hearing,

they showed this radar image which shows 20 minutes of debris

drifting with the wind after the plane explodes.

But what they didn't talk about in their presentation

is this--

the first few seconds after the plane lost electrical power.

The radar shows debris flying away from the plane

at a speed of at least Mach 4,

which is four times the speed of sound.

No detonation velocity lower than Mach 4 fit the data very well.

So, yeah.

That explosion of the center wing fuel tank

they determined was a low-velocity explosion,

meaning that it went slower than the speed of sound.

So any wreckage that is shown going faster than the speed of sound

could not have come from that explosion.

And so any high-speed debris that came out,

which we calculated at Mach 4,

definitely was not from the center wing tank explosion.

It couldn't have been. And that's what disproves this case.

I mean, that is the smoking gun.

Missiles are rounded-- have rounded surfaces

and, like stealth fighters,

do not give a very good signature.

However, once a missile explodes,

it's a bright light.

You throw up confetti at night and you shine a flashlight, you're gonna see it.

And that's what this was, a bunch of confetti moving at Mach 4.

Shanahan: You're looking at 3,000 miles an hour as the initial velocity.

- Somewhere in that range? - Probably greater than that.

- But, yeah. At least, yeah. - Okay.

Huh.

That's pretty high explosive.

It certainly smells like a missile

when you look at those findings.

When you see this kind of information,

you have to say, "It's a missile

and let's prove that it wasn't."

And I don't see any evidence that anybody attempted

to rule out that this was a missile.

Not in any honest scientific way at least.

[ radio chatter ]

Stalcup: After climbing out of JFK Airport,

flight 800 leveled off at 13,000 feet.

Moments later, a fast-moving object

was seen racing horizontally out to sea

from Long Island's south shore

heading east-southeast.

One of the dozens of eyewitnesses

who saw object one was Lisa Perry.

And I see something that's going across the sky.

It's going very quickly. It looked kind of like that Superman bullet.

Stalcup: A few miles offshore, it turned upward

and began climbing while heading south.

- And it wavered and zigzagged as it flew. - Then it turned.

Stalcup: At this time, a second object

rose off the ocean miles away and further to the east.

Both objects began converging on flight 800.

Object two approached the jetliner head on.

And then it started climbing, passing my altitude.

Pilot Vassilis Bakounis, flying at 2,000 feet,

saw the object rising from below his altitude.

Meanwhile, object one headed behind

and to the right of flight 800.

It suddenly turned left toward the jetliner

and exploded near flight 800's left wing.

The detonation of object one near the airplane

caused the upper surface of the left wing to shatter.

As the plane banked to the left,

misted fuel coming out of the top of the left wing

made a thick white plume of vapor behind the jetliner.

Then object two exploded

with two nearly simultaneous explosions.

Two ordnance explosions.

The timing difference between the two explosions

was a fraction of seconds.

Stalcup: A third object

came racing out of the ocean and climbed sharply.

It appeared to come from a ship.

Witness: At night in the evening, ships turn on their lights.

Sometimes they'll have a bright mast light.

This particular vessel had a very bright mast light.

From the mast light,

there was another flash

and I saw another object rise out of the ocean.

Stalcup: Object three exploded

underneath the aircraft's nose

causing it to fall off.

As the aircraft fell to the ocean,

its wings broke off,

creating two huge fireballs in the sky.

[ gavel banging ]

Good morning and welcome to this meeting

of the National Transportation Safety Board.

The cause of the in-flight breakup

of TWA flight 800

was a fuel/air explosion in the center wing tank.

After four years of working on this,

I assume that you would have liked to have been able

to come here today in front of the family members

and tell them what the ignition source was.

Sir, I would just love to be able to walk in here

with a molten piece of wire and say here it is,

but, no, sir, I cannot walk up and say this is the piece.

[ speaking French ]

Stalcup: No eyewitnesses testified at the hearing.

Instead, the NTSB's Dr. David Mayer,

the same guy who changed evidence tags in Hank's hangar,

gave an hour-long presentation

explaining why eyewitnesses are unreliable.

Psychologist Ira Hyman has written that people

combine knowledge from various sources

with their own personal experience to create memories.

It's been well documented that people's memories change over time.

Even memories that we're sure of can contain errors.

Witness accounts can change over time.

Witnesses' memories do change over time.

People's memories change over time.

Hughes: David Mayer is Mr. Fixit.

You know, he fixed the tags.

He fixed the witness statements.

A group put a four-page ad in the "Washington Times,"

including six witness accounts.

What do you think about those accounts?

Well, I actually have the ad with me.

The final witness in the advertisement

is identified as witness 649.

Stalcup: Witness 649 is Joseph Delgado.

Witness 649 described events that certainly do

sound like a missile attacking the airplane.

Witness 649 said that everything he saw

occurred between two flagpoles.

The yellow line shows his line of sight

between those two flagpoles.

They said everything he saw

occurred between these two flagpoles.

And it looks like a single line.

It isn't a single line. It's two lines,

but they're two degrees apart.

It happened somewhere in here.

So we're looking at a 20, 30-degree angle separation.

- Or better. - He had a baseball field in front of him.

He wasn't constricted by his viewpoint.

- It wasn't just two degrees? - No.

- It wasn't just a very narrow angle? - No way.

- No way? - [ laughs ] No.

Mayer: So it doesn't appears that this witness was looking

in the right location to see flight 800 at the spot

where it would have been struck by a hypothetical missile.

Stalcup: Next, Dr. Mayer talks about eyewitness Fred Meyer,

a war veteran who flew rescue helicopters in Vietnam.

He observed a streak in flight

for about one or two seconds

and then he saw the enormous fireball develop.

Mr. Mayer here did not tell the whole truth.

He mentioned something that occurred

at the very end of my statement.

I saw a streak of light crossing the sky

in a nearly horizontal direction.

And then I saw an explosion

which was, in my estimation,

a high-velocity explosion of military ordnance.

Something I'd seen many times before.

And then after having made that statement,

I made statements regarding watching

the fireball descend into the ocean.

The witness observations of a streak of light

were not related to a missile.

The TWA flight 800 in-flight breakup

was initiated by a fuel/air explosion

in the center wing tank.

The source of ignition energy for the explosion

could not be determined with certainty.

This then completes the four-year investigation

into the tragedy of TWA 800.

And I adjourn this board meeting.

Stalcup: I lived in Mashpee,

it's a little town on Cape Cod.

We made our own ice cream, made our own root beer.

We had four kids. It was a wonderful childhood.

My father was an oceanographer,

my mother was a stay-at-home mom.

It was like a dream.

Life was a dream and the birds were beautiful,

nature, go on canoe trips, camping.

When I was seven years old, my mother died.

When something like that happens, it changes you.

You start to see the value of life.

You know?

You, you know-- you have a--

you know...

You have a, you know, beautiful mother that loves you

and you're very young and you're very dependent on that woman.

And they're gone.

It's probably the most painful thing you can ever go through.

And life goes on.

I was surprised that the cars just didn't stop.

And you see the importance of life, really.

You know, you value life a lot more

and you stand up for what's right.

Mr. Chairman, members of the committee,

my name is Joe Lychner from Houston, Texas.

And one year ago today on July 10,

I was the luckiest man in the world.

I had a great home, a loving family

including my beautiful wife Pam who was 37,

my daughter Shannon who was 10,

my daughter Katie who was eight.

We had it all.

I had recently started a new position with my company

and that's why I was not with my family

when they boarded TWA flight 800

for a short stay in Paris.

My name is Hank Hughes.

I'm a retired NTSB investigator.

I was one of the principal investigators of TWA flight 800.

And, of course, I worked with Bob Young,

who was the chief investigator for TWA.

I am here because of some concerns I've had

for well over 15 years.

The witnesses had the courage to come forward after this happened,

but they were ignored, some of them were berated.

No witness was ever allowed to testify.

Once it got to this point, you can see these little pieces right here,

well, this is the wind direction.

Hughes: The way to reopen the investigation legally

is to file what they call a petition for reconsideration.

This petition goes to the NTSB.

We're gonna write our name on the line.

If you would like to participate,

we welcome you to sign it, too.

Stalcup: We're gonna read our findings

and we're gonna all sign them here in front of you.

Number one: The explosion that caused the crash

was external to the aircraft.

Number two: FAA radar sites recorded fast-moving debris

that travelled perpendicular to the flight path.

No mechanism or event in the official theory

can account for this radar evidence.

A significant number of credible eyewitness accounts

are consistent with an external event.

The CIA produced an inaccurate crash animation.

Both the CIA and NTSB crash simulations are inaccurate.

There remains significant anomalies

in the way this investigation was conducted.

There were numerous violations of customary

and normal investigative protocol.

The NTSB's probable cause determination for this crash

of flight 800 is not supported

by the physical evidence, the eyewitness statements,

and other facts.

An object travelled a great distance

at great speed and converged with it.

I mean, it's...

You know, you try to--

it's a very difficult thing. You have to try to forget and move on.

And I think that's important for a lot of people,

but to not have this explored

to the depth that it should be

is wrong.