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Nov. 24, 1997 - Art Bell
03:13:45
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Capt. Wm. Donaldson - TWA Flight 800 Investigation. Dr. Joseph Gold - Cancer Treatments
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Time Text
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good
morning wherever you may be.
English.
And wherever you may be, I say you should brace yourself for what is coming this night.
As you all know, Kathy Keaton Guccione has passed on.
We have interviewed Bob Guccione now twice, the late Kathy Keith Guccione once, and throughout, based throughout all of that, references to Dr. Gold every time we talk about hydrazine sulfate.
And so, I thought in the first hour, it might be appropriate to have Dr. Gold on and talk about this inexpensive cancer treatment It seems like it just can't get legs and walk into people's lives who have received, generally, a fatal prognosis with stage 4 cancers and that sort of thing.
And so we're going to talk to Dr. Gold and find out the efficacy and the truth, as much as we can, about hydrazine sulfate.
In the beginning of the second hour, I have not Chimed in, really, on Flight 800, but last week the CIA released a sort of cartoon of what they imagined went on with Flight 800.
The FBI stepped out of the investigation, said it was an accident.
And I am going to bring to you tonight the definitive expert on Flight 800, William Bill Donaldson.
I'll tell you about his background.
It is extensive with aircraft and safety.
Many, many years in the military, as well as two eyewitnesses to what occurred on Long Island that fateful night.
So, I am finally going to do a show on Flight 800, and I suggest you buckle in, because you're going to hear things that you have not heard to date.
All right, just one more item before we go to Dr. Gold, and that is, we have a new member of our family.
You may have heard me speak of it Friday.
And then again, Sunday on Dreamland, and some subhuman being came and dumped this dog near my home.
Just dumped it.
It was starved to death.
Really starved with a bunch of bruises on its legs.
And so it looks like we have a new member of the family.
Now I'm not exactly sure what kind of dog we've got.
Looks like it's got at least part pit bull in it.
She's a sweetie.
Just a lover.
And she's on in four to six months, something like that.
And you guys know me.
I'm Cat Person.
Last person probably have a dog, but I've got a dog.
Anyway, Keith Rowland came out over the weekend, my webmaster, and snapped a couple of digital photographs of our new little girl.
And we're having a Name That Dog contest.
And I would like to add to that, please identify that dog.
What kind of dog is she?
Is anybody able to definitively I think she's a mix of some kind.
Any idea what she is?
There are photographs on the website right now at www.artbell.com and I will tell you more about her as time goes on.
Now, however, we're going to the head of the Syracuse Cancer Research Institute and the nation's leading researcher of the, underline this word, inexpensive drug, hydrazine sulfate.
He is Dr. Joseph Gold.
Doctor, welcome to the program.
Thank you, Eric.
Dr. Gold, I, of course, have followed the very sad story of the late Kathy Keaton Guccione.
I had Bob Guccione on first, and then, as a matter of fact, I had Kathy on the air with me, and she was jubilant about how things were going.
Then, of course, she went in for an operation and she didn't come out.
And before we get into hydrazine sulfate, can you give us a medical idea of what killed Kathy Keaton Guccione?
Well, she had an obstruction in her small intestine and she had a surgical operation for this.
And she never regained consciousness from that operation.
Was it directly related to cancer tumor growth, or was it scar tissue, or what were they doing?
Well, I think it was scar tissue that was indirectly related to the cancer growth.
Okay.
Alright.
But certainly not a cause for her demise.
Yeah, she was convinced that hydrazine sulfate Had already extended her life greatly that the tumors that she had were either Had stopped growing or that she was in some sort of remission and So we've heard a great deal about hydrazine sulfate.
What is hydrazine sulfate?
What does it do and?
Why is it good for treating cancer late stage particularly?
Well, hydrazine sulfate is a simple chemical, the sulfate salt of the base hydrazine.
What it does is stop the wasting of normal energy from the body, and what that does is stop weight loss.
And what that weight loss stops is a condition known as cachexia, the progressive debilitation and weakening of the body.
And that cachexia is important because it accounts for upwards of 70% of all cancer deaths.
And the rationale is quite simple.
You stop cachexia, you're gonna stop a lot of cancer deaths, and you're going to cause people to live
with a high quality of life.
Doctor, Kexia is the wasting away of a person?
That's right.
In other words, they're not eating, caused by what?
Caused by the wasting art of chemical energy.
There's a really complicated scientific rationale behind it.
And what hydrazine sulfate does in the liver, chiefly, is stop the conversion of small molecules to sugar that takes place in the body.
That costs the body a lot of energy, and that energy cost is what we call host energy wasting.
You stop that, you stop weight loss, and you stop cachexia.
How did you discover this use of hydrazine sulfate?
It's a frequently asked question.
I was the first to publish in a medical journal in 1968 the probable stepwise biochemical sequence of cachexia.
Until that time, cachexia was but a descriptive term.
So I indicated at what enzymic system in the liver, if you could stop that enzyme, you'll stop cachexia.
Okay.
And about a year later, it became known that hydrazine sulfate interfered with that enzyme system, and that piece of research had nothing to do with cancer at all.
But when I heard about it, I immediately rushed back to Syracuse to our laboratories and tested it with our tumor-bearing rats and mice and ask our colleagues at other places to test too.
Sure.
And within two to three weeks we all got the same answer that hydrazine sulfate not only inhibited cachexia but caused tumor inhibition as well.
Alright.
Tumor regression.
So at this point it's hallelujah.
It may not be the complete answer certainly to cancer but it's hallelujah.
Well, when you say at this point, what point do you mean?
At the point I just described?
Well, at the point certainly where you saw tumors regressing, there must have been a light bulb and a... Well, we knew we were definitely on the right track, and this was a whole new direction in cancer treatment.
But it took five more years of animal research before the first human being received it.
Oh my goodness.
So yes, there's a lot of work that went into this, and at every point along the way, we published our results in peer-reviewed medical journals.
All right.
In what percentage of... Now, people need to understand, and I want to be very careful this morning, because there are, I don't know, at any given time, How many people do you suppose are dealing with a late stage cancer in America?
Well, first of all, any drug is first tested in late stage, but hydrazine now has been tested quite a while, and it's being used in earlier stages as well.
I understand.
How many people?
Sure.
Well... Just a guess.
Let's put it this way.
There are about 600,000 deaths from cancer each year in the United States alone.
So it's at least double that incidence of people learning that they're getting cancer.
And some people learn they have cancer and it's very advanced stages or stage 4 when they learn about it, such as cancer of the pancreas in Kathy Keaton's case.
She learned about breast cancer when it was already stage four, that is, metastasized all throughout her body.
So a lot of people do learn that they have cancer, not in the earliest stages, unfortunately, but in the latest.
All right.
So there are, at any given time, well over a million people out there, many, many, many of whom are going to be listening to us this morning with cancer.
And I want to be very careful.
Not to give them false hope.
That's very important.
So I will just directly ask you about the efficacy of this drug.
How confident are you when you speak about what it can do, particularly in late stage and then even better early stage?
How confident are you?
I'm very confident by virtue of the published, controlled clinical trials all over the world, with one exception, and I'll get to that.
But every controlled clinical trial that has been published in peer-reviewed medical journals has shown the drug to be both effective and safe.
The only clinical trials that have not showed the drug to be effective are those
done by our own National Cancer Institute which proved to be tainted. That is, they used
tranquilizers with a test drug, with hydrazine sulfate, and they knew that tranquilizers
were incompatible with the drug.
That is, it would render it useless and make the patient sicker. When they first published
their results three years ago, they denied, they concealed the use of hydrazine because
they knew it was incompatible with tranquilizers.
But under an investigation by the General Accounting Office, they were forced to publish a year later that they indeed use tranquilizers in 94% of their patients.
So, in your opinion, rendering their study totally invalid?
Oh, totally invalid.
It's been known for 25 years that tranquilizers are incompatible with hydrazine sulfate.
And we, in fact, we They made sure that they knew it and understood where we were coming from because before their studies commenced, we wrote to every study section head, every person at the NCI at every echelon saying that if they used tranquilizers, they were going to get negative studies.
This was before the studies began.
Backing up just a little bit, if I'm a cancer patient, Doctor, and I'm using hydrazine sulfate, and I'm complying with the necessary regimen that you must do to have this drug work, how much money is it going to cost me per month to treat myself?
Well, uh... Week, month, whatever.
The Institute, the Syracuse Cancer Research Institute, does not sell or distribute hydrazine sulfate that could be gotten around the country
from other places, it depends on how much you pay, but youíre going to pay very little.
Letís put it this way.
If your physician or qualified scientist were to go out and buy a pound jar of high purity
hydrazine sulfate from a fine biochemical house, and there are a lot around, you might
pay $15 or $25 for it, and in that amount there are 100,000 clinical doses.
So the material is virtually dirt cheap, and it's made by the carload for myriad industrial purposes.
The only reason that it's used in cancer is that it has this quality of inhibiting a certain enzyme in the liver.
The name of the enzyme is TEP carboxykinase, but it is used for a myriad of other industrial purposes.
Alright, so that the audience might understand, Doctor, traditional treatments for cancer, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, how would you imagine, or do you know, Well, I would say that hydrazine, there's a two-part answer to that question.
compare into when we're talking about the remissions or Whatever stage of helping a cancer patient
How how would you compare hydrazine sulfates use to?
radiation chemotherapy Whatever well I would say that hydrazine. There's a two-part
answer to that question hydrazine by itself in about 50% of the patient
induces nothing There's no benefit.
In the remaining 50% of the patients, some can have symptomatic relief for two months or longer, some will see their tumors shrink, and some will be cured outright.
When I say cure, I mean more than 10 years without a recurrence.
Hydrazine sulfate, the other part of that question is, hydrazine sulfate is useful therefore in itself, very much so.
However, it can interact favorably with chemotherapy and with radiation therapy is sensational.
With radiation therapy and hydrazine sulfate used together, The two drugs, the two modalities of treatment are what we call synergistic.
That means one plus one equals a hundred.
So in other words, patients are not forced to sit out there and choose between A, B, or C. They can take A and C if they wish, or B and C if they wish, safely, medically.
Absolutely.
The doctors treating them should explain that to them as part of their informed consent.
Uh-huh.
Now, that was something that I did not understand previously about hydrazine sulfate.
Basically, can you tell me, other than tranquilizers, what is the regimen that somebody must adhere to who takes, who tries hydrazine sulfate?
Foods, that sort of thing.
Okay, first of all, Art, this shouldn't be done by people by themselves.
Of course not.
It's done under a qualified health professional's care.
Of course.
But, hydrazine sulfate, and I hate to get technical, but just for a moment, hydrazine sulfate is what we call an MAO inhibitor, monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
And you can't take certain drugs or eat certain foods with it.
The drugs are these.
You can't have sleeping pills or sedatives.
You can't have tranquilizers.
It doesn't matter what the tranquilizer is used for, to tranquilize you or for nausea.
You can't have alcoholic beverages and you can't have antidepressants.
Those four classes of drugs are out.
With foods, now you can't have foods high in a substance called tyramine.
These are cheeses of all kinds except cottage cheese and cream cheese.
That means a person can't eat pizza.
No raisins.
No cured meats.
No fermented foods such as yogurt or fermented tofu.
It's called miso.
No liver, no vitamin B6, and no brewer's yeast tablets.
You can have breads and cakes with yeast, but no brewer's yeast tablets per se.
Those are the main offenders, and if a person stays away from those offenders, they'll have a much better chance for the drug to work.
Alright, we're going to take a break here at the bottom of the hour, Doctor, so relax for a few moments.
If what Dr. Gold, who heads the Syracuse Cancer Research Institute, is saying, if what he is saying is true, then his presentation demands an answer from the National Cancer Institute, from anybody who would have anything to do with getting this drug on the market.
Well, actually it is on the market, I guess, but as a cancer drug and noticed by doctors and pharmacology labs.
We'll talk about that when we come back.
In fact, this is Coast to Coast AM.
All right, once again, Dr. Joseph Gold, who is head of the Syracuse Cancer Research Institute and our nation's leading researcher of the inexpensive drug, hydrazine sulfate, which works well by itself and even better With conventional treatments, or in connection with conventional treatments.
So now the question is, Doctor, why has America, America's cancer researchers and pharmaceutical companies and physicians, why have they not embraced this as a tremendous assist to keeping people alive?
Well, many have, but let me say this, that the way a drug gets used commonly in the United States is for a pharmaceutical company to sponsor it through the FDA.
And no end of pharmaceutical companies have wanted to do so over the last ten years.
Very large ones, and not-so-large ones alike.
The moment, however, they get to the National Cancer Institute, that's the end of their interest.
And we've seen that happen with ever so many pharmaceutical companies.
Now, the National Cancer Institute is our federal government, and they have been the chief adversary of hydrazine sulfate in writing for the last 20 years.
Why?
Why is the key $64,000 question.
I could say that the drug was developed by a very small institute then on a small budget.
I could say that hydrazine sulfate is the first general cancer drug that can be used on all types of cancer and at all stages.
It's not so-called tumor specific.
I could say it's very, very inexpensive.
I could say that it's very free from side effects.
But all those things together don't go for a successful drug.
And it surprised me early on, 20 years ago, and my colleagues kept telling me for years and years, well, the chief reason that the hydrazine is encountering trouble is because it's so inexpensive.
And I'd answer my colleagues, go on, I'd say, there isn't a doctor on this planet Who would withhold an effective cancer drug from his patient just because it's cheap.
But in the last seven, eight years, I'm sure that that's the chief reason.
The drug is too inexpensive.
However, it's not that a pharmaceutical company couldn't make money from it.
It could, because the market is so very, very wide, even though the drug is cheap.
The problem is that the National Cancer Institute and those who have headed it, our National Cancer Leadership, has been against this drug.
They don't want to see it fly.
Alright, the National Cancer Institute conducted tests that you regard as absolutely flawed.
It's my understanding that GAO investigated the National Cancer Institute's testing and found basically that it was okay.
And then, somehow you got somebody to investigate the GAO's investigation, and you got a different answer.
Who did that?
The person who did that was the Chief Counsel to the U.S.
Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, but let's back up a little.
When the GAO investigated this, at first, They caused the National Cancer Institute to publish, a year later, an addendum to their three negative studies, saying that they did indeed use tranquilizers with their hydrazine.
And also, they failed to keep track of concurrent medications.
Something, in their original studies, the NCI said that they did do.
You understand?
Yes.
When the final report of the GAO, the published report came out, it exonerated the NCI.
It said that their studies weren't flawed.
Now that's double talk.
One year they say it is flawed and they cause the NCI to write it in a journal.
The next year they published that the studies weren't flawed.
Well, interestingly then, at that first moment, when they said the studies were flawed, why wasn't there an immediate move to do more studies under properly controlled conditions?
Well, the NCI admitted in the journal that they published that they did use Incompatible agents.
They did use tranquilizers in 94% of their patients.
I've got you there.
But then they said they don't consider that a flawed study.
So it was apparent that the deal was with the GAO and the NCI that they would publish this admission and then the GAO would exonerate them.
Only what this Chief Counsel on the subcommittee found, amazingly enough, and he published it in a letter dated just November 5th of this year, just a few weeks ago, was that the person who was in charge of that GAO study apparently was let go from the investigation.
Really?
He wrote what's called a final draft report.
And the final draft report was a scathing criticism of the NCI.
And they had to send a copy to the NCI, and within one week the NCI somehow put pressure on the GAO to Turn this draft report 180 degrees around and say things that were never in it.
So it's a real scandal that has emerged.
And at the same time, the person who originally was head of the G.E.S.
investigation, he is now retired.
I believe he's only in his 40s, which is unheard of.
And we wonder if there is a Let me say something to you that I said to Bob Guccione, and maybe you can react to it.
Here we have a drug that you clearly state, with documentation, extends life, reduces tumors in many cases, is a real serious cancer treatment.
And what we're saying, Doctor, as we track along the story of hydrazine sulfate, is that And I'm as cynical about human nature as you can get, I suppose, but even I have a hard time believing that adult human beings, understanding the gravity and the horrendous nature of cancer, could, for the sake of money, or
Current treatment paradigms, or whatever, but basically money.
Hold back from the American public a treatment that saves lives.
I mean, that's so horrible.
It was very, very hard for me to reconcile, too.
I, like you, believe that also.
But here are the real facts.
Take a country like Russia now.
17 years of clinical multi-centric testing of this drug in Russia via the joint U.S.
then U.S.S.R.
cancer agreement of 1972.
After 17 years of testing, the results were so good that the drug became a first-line cancer drug, has been so for five or six years there.
Any physician in Russia can prescribe that by prescription and it's available.
And take a country like Canada.
Now, as of at least December of last year, hydrosine sulfate became an approved drug in Canada by medical prescription.
Now, this so infuriated the National Cancer Institute The National Cancer Institute has a journal called the JNCI.
The JNCI published in the spring an article chiding, actually, the Canadian government for allowing this.
The Canadian government just thumbed its nose at the NCI and is continuing this work.
But we do have grown-up people, and it's money, and it's ego, and it's power, and it's unwillingness to say, well, gee, I made a mistake 10 years back, or 15 years back, or 5 years back.
But they want to stay in power.
They want to have the money.
They want to have the say-so of what drugs get approved, what drugs get even published in the major journals.
They're all the same people in our cancer leadership, and they all have the same work.
The problem with hydrazine sulfate is that it's a bone in their throat.
Look at all these published studies from everywhere on earth that are positive.
But here's what I don't understand.
If hydrazine sulfate is a positive aspect to conventional treatments.
In other words, if it increases a person's chances greatly when they're taking chemotherapy or radiation, then I truly don't understand.
Because you would imagine the doctors, the clinics, could all continue to make their money from the traditional treatments, enhancing them with hydrazine sulfate.
If it was one or the other, then I can understand the big money guys might put the squash on it.
Well, some people in our cancer leadership feel that if hydrazine were approved, it would economically destabilize the cancer industry.
Now, the cancer industry is cancer treatment, cancer research, cancer care, and cancer administration.
Today, that's about a $200 billion a year business.
And it is a business, especially with new healthcare systems.
A lot of people in our cancer research, cancer leadership are afraid that 30% of that figure would be immediately destabilized by hydrazine sulfate.
I think they're wrong, to tell you the truth.
I think that the use of hydrazine sulfate would Open up new horizons, new scientific horizons, and there would be further treatments that would come along.
All right, Doctor.
We can't do it all tonight.
We can't fight all of City Hall tonight, but what we can do is for those people out there who... Everybody's going to send me faxes and email.
Uncle Joe has cancer.
Please help, Art.
Please help.
Now, I want to be very careful here to tell my audience We're going to give you a way to respond, but I want you to listen to me very carefully.
Don't you call.
Don't you call those of you who are listening right now.
Don't call your buddy Joe who has cancer and tell him to call.
What we want you to do is to have your medical professional, scientist or doctor, get in touch with the Syracuse Cancer Research Institute.
And then, Dr. Gold, I presume you have people who will talk to physicians and tell them exactly how to treat people.
Yes, we would tell them how to go about getting the patient on hydrazine sulfate if, indeed, they do want to get their patient on hydrazine sulfate.
And you've said the right thing, Art.
Please, please, please, audience, don't call the Institute yourselves.
Get your healthcare professionals.
If you call yourselves, all you'll do is jam up our telephones and all our answers will tell you is to have your physicians call.
But there's also, can we give them our website?
Yeah, as a matter of fact, there is a link right now from my website to yours.
So all they've got to do is go to my web page, go down to your name, Dr. Gold, and they can jump right across to your website.
That would be fine.
And everybody knows that.
So what is the phone number for a physician or a scientist to call?
Okay, here's the phone number.
Area code 315.
315-472-6616 or 6618.
Right.
Now, that 18 line is an emergency line for doctors, for cancer doctors only.
So please respect it.
All right.
So again, folks, not you, not the person suffering cancer, but their physician.
And this is going to mean you're going to have to go into your doctor's office and you're going to have to speak to your doctor and give him this number.
And I'm about to repeat the number.
It's area code 315-472-6616 or 6618.
And again, it is for only doctors and scientists.
And since we can't fight City Hall, maybe we can go around City Hall and help people anyway.
And Dr. Gold, I can only imagine the reason that you've done all this is to help people.
Well, the reason we're fighting now is to help as many people as we can.
And we'll consider this a victory when the grassroots movement is so strong, and it's getting very, very strong, that a major pharmaceutical company says, to heck with this, to heck with the NCI, we're going ahead and sponsor this drug through the FDA anyway.
Then we'll consider that a real victory.
All right, Doctor, I would presume that this number would also be one that you would welcome calls from major pharmaceutical companies.
Oh, sure.
Oh, sure.
All right.
Doctor, I thank you for being with us this morning.
It's a brave fight, and it's a big industry you're up against there, my friend.
Well, I think it's coming along very well.
On behalf of all those suffering from cancer, I thank you.
Okay, thanks a lot, R. Take care, Doctor.
Alright, once again, I'm going to, as a public service, I want you to have this number.
Please write it down.
But it is only for your doctor, or your scientist, or any major pharmaceutical company who would like to do the right thing.
Area code 315-472-6616.
Or, area code 315-472-6618.
And I...
have had somebody in my own family touched by cancer.
I guess I ought to say more than touched.
And most of us have, so I felt this hour was a very necessary hour to do.
And I can only hope that it will help you.
All right.
Brace yourself.
Beginning next hour, it's going to get rough.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
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This is Coast to Coast AM from the Kingdom of Nye, with Art Bell.
Well, good morning, everybody.
Indeed, from the high deserts, stretching in the west from the Tahitian and Hawaiian island chains eastward to the Caribbean.
Northward to the North Pole, South all the way into South America and worldwide on the Internet.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
And let me tell you, referring to my newest affiliate, WABC in New York, I did a interview on their morning show, well at the end of last week, I think, at the end of the final day of broadcast on WABC.
And one of the morning personalities asked me, What my view, my opinion of Flight 800 was, and I said, I think it was a missile that exploded adjacent to Flight 800, and I think it was a terrorist.
And of course that flies in the face of what we're being told by the FBI, the CIA, and I would imagine the NTSB as well.
To bring you up to date, and to remind you, on July 17th of 1996, TWA Flight 800 bound for Paris blew up off the coast of Long Island shortly after takeoff from Kennedy International Airport, killing all 230 people on board.
Witnesses described a huge fireball in the sky.
July 18th, the FBI takes lead in the investigation.
President Clinton warned the American public against jumping to any conclusions.
Investigators study the bomb, missile, or mechanical malfunction theory as causes.
July 25th, divers recover the plane's so-called black boxes.
Neither one yields any quick answers to the cause.
August 30th.
Traces of RDX, a key ingredient in a plastic explosive, used to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 are found on wreckage.
Investigators later suspect the material got onto the plane during training of bomb-sniffing dogs.
On September 16th of 1996, James Kallstrom headed the probe for the FBI Calls rumors that the plane was felled by a U.S.
missile outrageous.
October 15th, a Boeing engineer says the center fuel tank, the focus of the probe, was designed to leave no chance that an electrical spark could cause an explosion there.
November 2nd, Navy divers completed 15 weeks of terrible work, hard work, Saying they had pulled up all the wreckage they could find.
Fishing trawlers began scraping the ocean floor then for wreckage two days later.
December 4th, TWA stages funeral for unidentified members of Flight 800.
Now, 1997, February 8th, victims' families tore the wreckage at Long Island Hangar, placing roses, On the seats where their loved ones sat.
April 29th, trawling for wreckage halted after nearly six months.
June 9th, investigators tell victims' families that the investigation is now in the final phase with no evidence found of a criminal or terrorist act.
A preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board Blames that disaster on a center fuel tank explosion cause unknown but suspected mechanical source.
November 12th.
A victim's father tells the Associated Press he's received a letter from the FBI that says the agency has found absolutely no evidence of a crime And is now suspending its probe into the disaster.
And that is the rough chronology of Flight 800.
I should add, I suppose, one more point.
About a week ago, the CIA released a graphic kind of cartoon image of what they thought occurred with Flight 800.
It was aired by the American media, generally, for about one day.
And then, more or less, not seen again.
Tonight, I have an aviation expert with us, uh, who is going to talk to us about Flight 800.
He is William, or Bill, Donaldson, and he has a significant history and is well qualified to speak on this subject.
He has been an A-4 long military record, of course, an A-4 attack Pilot Line Division Officer.
He has been an Advanced Jet Flight Instructor Line Division Officer.
He has been an Assistant Air Operations CCA Officer.
He has been a A-4 US-2 Pilot Maintenance Officer.
He has been an A-6 Attack Pilot Safety Officer.
He has been an Air Operations Officer.
He has been a safety officer, he has been a nuclear plans officer, a Chief of Staff officer, a military expert who has made a presentation to the Presidential Base Closure Commission.
In other words, he's got nothing but aviation history with him.
We are going to talk to him about the details of what did occur on Flight 800.
We also have two witnesses to what occurred on Long Island that terrible night.
They would be Major Fred Myers, an attorney on Long Island who recently retired from the Air National Guard, who has extensive military pilot history, was active duty Navy helicopter pilot, holds the distinguished flying cross, or pilot rescues under fire in North Vietnam.
That's North Vietnam.
He is a witness to what occurred that night.
We have Richard Goss with us.
He owns a fine woodworking business on Long Island, has some private pilot experience, is an avid radio control airplane model flyer, has very sharp eyesight, and very special spatial awareness Which you must have to fly a model.
Richard is a non-drinker.
He was sitting on the West Hampton Yacht Squadron's patio, looking across Mariches Bay to the Barrier Island, and he saw what he thought was a large firework launched from inland, or from the island, climbing straight up, traveling straight out to sea, leveling off, and then making a hard left turn Just before it exploded.
So, we have an aviation expert, we have two witnesses, and tonight you may hear the untold story of Flight 800.
Let us first now go to William or Bill Donaldson.
Welcome to the program.
Hi Art, glad to be on with you this evening.
Happy to have you.
And we've got a lot to talk to you about, Mr. Donaldson.
I skipped over your resume and did not include a very great deal of the detail of some of the jobs you've had, but basically since about 1958, you've been in aviation one way or the other.
Oh, yeah.
In fact, I'm an Air Force brat.
I mean, I grew up with Air Force fighter pilots before I ever even joined the Navy, so probably 58 years of my life has been pretty totally immersed in tactical aviation.
Okay, we're going to have a lot of detail from you about the Flight 800 business, but I think we should lead the show with two people who actually saw what happened.
And I've got them on the line, and I'm going to see if we can bring them up right now.
They are Richard Goss and Major Fred Myers.
Major Myers, are you there?
Hello, Major Myers.
Okay, I can barely hear you for some reason.
Richard Goss, are you there?
Yes, I am.
I'm here.
Okay, we appear to have a problem.
Maybe not.
How's that?
Oh, much better.
Much better.
Is that Major Myers?
Yes, sir.
What happened?
I just had two phones on the same line.
Oh, I see.
No, you can't do that.
All right, very good.
What I think I would like to do, Mr. Donaldson, is to let you ask these gentlemen what they saw.
Okay.
That'll probably work pretty well.
Fred Meyers and I are sort of kindred spirits because we were in Vietnam at about the same time.
Fred, why don't you go ahead and just go through what you were doing and what you saw, and we'll go from there.
Alright, interrupt me if I get too verbose.
I was up on a routine evening training flight, actually just completing a series of mandatory monthly requirements, waiting for the sun to go down before we flew a night vision goggle air refueling mission.
Lights out air refueling.
What were you flying?
I was flying an H-60 Black Hawk helicopter.
And I was scanning the area in the front of and to the right of the aircraft because my co-pilot was flying an instrument approach and he was heads down in the cockpit.
In other words, his concentration, his eyes were on the gauges.
He wasn't looking out for possible traffic that would collide with us.
And we were near the end of the glide slope on this instrument approach when the tower called out giving another aircraft clearance to land on my runway.
So, I immediately looked out in front of me to see where that traffic was.
I couldn't see it, but as I was scanning the horizon looking for this traffic, I saw a streak of light, which I've described many times, and I've described it as being similar in speed and trajectory of a shooting star, except that it was broad daylight, and the streak was red-orange in color.
But it was moving from my left center to my further left.
It was almost horizontal, but had a gently descending curve.
Major, you rescued people in North Vietnam.
You've seen missiles?
Yes, sir.
You know what missiles look like?
Yes, sir.
Is that what this looked like?
It could have been, but nothing at the moment in my head said, clicked and said, this is missile, for a couple of reasons.
Um, certainly I wasn't looking for a missile.
Obviously, yes.
And number two, the missiles I'd seen fired in Vietnam normally had Erratic flight paths.
They don't describe or did not describe a smooth arc in the air.
Fred, to butt in a little bit, that's true.
Most small or any aircraft missiles are very erratic in flight and it's something that every combat pilot would recognize.
But we should realize that there are many missiles in various inventories.
That have rock-solid trajectories, and Fred may not have seen one of those in flight.
Well, you know, I had seen SAM-1s, and they were pretty old.
Yeah.
Logs.
Telephone pole-type runs.
But there was nothing about this that was unique and said to me, this is a missile.
So I didn't make... I can't make that determination that it absolutely was a missile, because it could have been a number of other things.
Alright, Major, where were you specifically in the air in this black hawk when you saw this?
Where were you?
Alright, I was 200 feet in the air on the northeast end of a runway that faces southwest.
So I was looking right straight down the runway and over the extended centerline of the runway right at this streak of light.
It was right in front of me.
It was at a good distance, somewhere between 10 and 15 miles.
And probably I had estimated at the time somewhere around 10,000 feet, although it's very difficult to estimate altitude at that distance.
The streak of light lasted for three to five seconds, then it stopped for somewhere around a second, and then immediately to my left At the end of what would have been the trajectory of that same streak of light and at that speed, in other words, so that I made a conclusion that what I saw had come from the streak of light, although the streak of light had stopped, then just about a second later, further to the left and on approximately the same line, I saw an explosion.
High-velocity explosion.
Look for all the world to be like ordnance.
Ordnance?
Like a warhead?
In other words, this would not have been the main body explosion of the fuel tank of Flight 800.
This would have been a sharp, ordnance-type explosion.
That's exactly correct.
Alright, you were in a Black Hawk, Major.
I was just up in Alaska and was in a Black Hawk.
And I'm aware of particularly the rescue types equipment.
You have a lot of heat-sensing equipment on board, as well as radar and so forth.
Were you able to detect anything on instruments?
No.
We didn't have the... We have forward-looking infrared radar, which is the heat-seeking, depicting equipment.
We did not have it energized at the time.
It's normal to wait until after sunset to energize that equipment.
Sure.
And it has a cool down period.
We also have night vision goggles, which we have attached to our helmets, but we have them flipped up above the helmet so that they're not impeding our vision.
Understood.
And they were off.
So at this point, we're strictly what we call a Mark 1 eyeball.
We're flying on our normal vision.
In broad daylight, on a beautiful evening with practically no clouds in the sky, just a very slight haze or scud layer that was more visible lower down than it was at 200 feet.
At 200 feet, the visibility was excellent.
Major, the CIA and the FBI have suggested That what people thought they saw, and what they thought, you know, they're calling a missile, people like you, Major, who should know what you see, in fact, didn't see that at all.
What they saw was fuel trailing from Flight 800 that appeared to be a streak of light.
Can you address that?
Well, that's pure fabrication.
Really?
What's going on in the FBI, I don't know.
After the event, I talked to several people whom I've known for 10 or 15 years who are early middle-aged, 40s and 50s, good eyesight, highly reputable people, professional people, who told me that they had, by accident, seen something And they had seen what they described in civilians.
They described it as a rolling candle or a rocket going up from the horizon.
And there's no doubt in their mind that it was going up and not coming down.
This is Bill here.
The critical point here in an investigation is that when Richard comes on here shortly, what he saw and what Fred Meyer saw, when you draw the line on the bearing line, They cross about three miles offshore and they cross
correlate with other people up and down the beach.
So the first sight of what appears to have been a missile, there are a whole lot of people
that don't know each other at all that point to exactly the same place in the sky and it
was well inland of the track of the aircraft.
Major, were you interviewed by the FBI?
I was. Um.
I'm...
This happened on a Wednesday evening.
Yes.
And on a Friday afternoon, I sought them out at the East Moriches Coast Guard Station.
Oh, you actually went to them?
Major, hold on.
Everybody hold on.
We're at the bottom of the hour, and we'll pick up on that point when we come back tonight.
Flight 800.
as Paul would say the rest of the story this is Coast to Coast AM.
Alright we're talking about flight 800 and we have with us right now Major Fred Myers
Major Myers was in a Black Hawk helicopter at about 200 feet when he saw a streak of light and then what he describes as an ordnance explosion at an estimated 10,000 feet altitude.
Now again an ordnance explosion That means a weapon exploding, not a center fuel tank exploding.
Everybody's back on the air again.
Major, I asked you, did the FBI interview you?
And you said you went to them.
That's correct.
I sought the FBI out on two occasions.
They never came to me.
And on the Friday after the accident, which would have been the 19th of July, 1996, I went to the FBI trailer at the East Merge's Coast Guard Station, knocked on the door, told them who I was, and asked them if they would like to take a statement from me.
They seemed surprised, sort of caught off guard.
They assigned two agents.
I sat down in a room.
One of the agents pulled out a little two-and-a-half by four-inch spiral notebook out of his back pocket and a pen.
And I spoke to them for approximately four minutes.
They asked no questions.
He took a couple of notes.
And they said, thank you very much, and I left.
And, Art, let me tell you something.
He's not the only one that happened to.
There's an inverted process here.
If you didn't see anything, they wanted to talk to you.
If you saw something very specific, they didn't seem to be too interested.
Major Myers, you said you went to them twice, so you did not hear back from them.
I take it at some point you said, what the hell's going on?
Went back again?
Well, actually there was a meeting approximately two weeks later.
My co-pilot was very dissatisfied with the The fact that the FBI had not interviewed anybody in the crew, and had not taken any of the actions that he thought were appropriate.
Now, I'm not making any judgment on that, but he asked us to get together one more time, and we did.
During that meeting, I think that was also on a Friday, maybe it was just one week later, I told the rest of the crew about a recurring dream I'd had, which concerned one portion of our flight that night when we were approaching the fireball as it was already in the water.
I had told Chris, who was at the controls, to slow the helicopter down to prevent us from flying under some debris that was still falling from the sky.
And I had a picture in my mind, the eye of that debris falling, and I Saw that same picture over and over again, and it disturbed my sleep, kept me up for a week.
Took about a week, and the dream worked its way out, and I could recognize what I was looking at in the dream.
And I don't want to go into that, but at any rate, at that point, we called the FBI again, and I told them I had additional information that I thought would be Helpful to them, and they sent two agents to the Public Affairs Office's house.
The unit PAO lived in Santa Mariches, right near the Coast Guard Station.
So they sent two agents up to talk to me.
I talked to these two agents for about 15 or 20 minutes.
They took notes, and they said, thank you very much, and left.
That was the last interview I had one-on-one with anybody in the FBI.
Sometime later, probably just about two weeks later, I gave a briefing to members of my own unit, the commanders of my own unit.
There was an FBI agent present at that briefing.
He asked no questions that I recall.
Six months later, I had my first and only interview with the NTSB, and there was an FBI agent present at that meeting that lasted approximately 15 minutes, and he asked no questions then.
And that's my total experience with the FBI.
Here again is Art.
Uh, Major, uh, since you were flying a National Guard helicopter, would you have been aware of any military exercises, live fire military exercises, uh, going on in the area?
Not necessarily.
All right.
Um, the, um, although it, It's a gray area.
Now, we were scheduled to fly on an air refueling route.
What this is, is a direct course and speed and altitude.
They're all predetermined.
They're filed with the local air route traffic control of the Federal Aviation.
They know that we're going to be flying approximately two miles south of the beach on a course parallel to the beach at an altitude.
A preset altitude.
So in other words, had there been something going on, if they had not viewed it as a possible conflict to your flight plan, you might not have been notified?
Might not, because if it were happening in the, if it were a Navy exercise in Whiskey 106, ten miles south of the beach, and we're only planning to be two miles south of the beach, they probably would not have noticed.
All right.
Major, I think that we've got as much from you as we can have, except I just want to ask one more question.
The most explosive, no pun intended, part of your testimony is that you saw a high explosive ordnance, a detonation.
how certain are you that's what it was look i just uh... report back on the
twenty five years experience in the air
that that's i can say that uh...
and I'm going to go ahead and close out the webinar.
You know, just give it the duck test.
My old buddy Johnson Nuno, if it looks like a duck and flies like a duck, it's probably a duck.
And what I saw looked to me, for all the world, like an ordnance explosion.
I don't know what else looks like that.
I might also comment that about a second and a half to two seconds after that ordnance explosion, there was a second high-velocity explosion.
of brilliant white light like nothing I had recall having seen before or since and then about two seconds or three seconds after that there came the petrochemical explosion which was the fuel burning.
And that would have been a probably bright orange.
Bright orange, mottled color, a lot of black, a lot of mottled color and grew to this huge fireball.
The point being, there were two high-velocity explosions before the fuel explosion.
Very clear.
Major, I want to thank you.
Bill, do you have anything else that we've missed that we should ask?
No, there's one point about that bright white light.
Fred is not the only one that saw that, and that is a characteristic of high-velocity fragment penetration of aluminum.
A brilliant white flash, almost like a flashbulb.
It's one of the collateral things that can happen with a warhead detonation.
Warhead.
All right.
Major, I want to thank you for being with us this evening, and I wish you luck, my friend.
Thank you.
Take care.
All right.
That is Major Fred Myers.
We'll now turn our attention to Richard Goss.
Richard Goss, again, owns a business on Long Island.
He is a witness to this event as well.
Are you there, Richard?
Yes, sir.
Please lead us through what you know and what you saw.
That evening, I belonged to that West Hampton Yacht Squadron.
The West Hampton Yacht Squadron faces south, the back porch on it.
That particular Wednesday evening, we have an informal sunfish race, and that's followed by a porch dinner.
At that dinner, you bring your own food, and you have a little barbecue in the back.
We gather there on the back porch, and it faces Morich's Bay and the Barrier Beach, Dune Road.
We had just finished up our Wednesday race.
I raced in that particular race.
We finished stowing our boats and putting our sails away.
I just walked up onto the back porch and sat down at the table that some of my friends were at.
I was looking out over the bay, just relaxing.
Just this mild, very clear, beautiful evening, very clear, light wind, light to moderate
wind.
I just happened to look out over the bay and there was a little conversation.
Then out of the corner of my eye came a flare coming up toward the barrier beach area.
Is there any doubt at all about whether what you saw was going up or down?
Oh, it was definitely going up.
It was definitely going up.
Definitely going up.
And it looked like a flare going up.
It looked like a flare, and then, you know, it drew attention to a couple other people, and they said, you know, someone even mentioned, hey, look at the firework, and we all thought it was a firework, at least I did.
Now I'm just pleasantly watching this bright, you know, red, pink, you know uh...
all right could you could you see uh... richard anything beyond the light
itself in other words could you make out uh...
any substance anything at all beyond the light
now i would hope right you know and it was the typical look of uh... of a firework
Sure.
We all know what they look like.
And you know that light travels quite high up before it reaches its peak, and that's exactly what I saw.
And then, as it reached its peak, it sort of leveled out.
And then the strangest part was, it took a sharp veer left.
And it was horizontal.
You know, it moved horizontal at that point.
And it was only a second or two later that I saw the massive explosion in the sky.
All right, again, Richard, the CIA and others have said that witnesses like yourself, who saw things like you're describing to us right now, We're in fact seeing fuel trailing from the explosion of the Flight 800, and that in fact it was not going up, it was going down, and it was an optical illusion.
What do you say?
What do you say?
One hell of an optical illusion.
I can't see that possible at all.
Alright, let me try this out.
You saw this thing rising, this light, which you thought was a flare, and it rose to a great altitude and then you said took a turn.
Now, a flare might go up and then in a trajectory might begin down again.
That's not what you're talking about.
You're talking about a horizontal turn that you saw.
Is that correct?
And Richard, give them a feeling of how fast this thing was moving.
Moving up quickly, or did it appear to be going away from you?
Oh yeah, it was very fast.
Faster than a firework climbing.
And then I could see that when it reached its peak, it was definitely traveling away.
The flare was getting smaller and then it took the sharp left and you could see the smoke trail, sharp left.
Then you could see a smoke trail?
And then there wasn't the explosion.
Then an explosion.
Did you see, you heard the Major describe what he firmly concludes is a high ordnance explosion, not the kind of explosion that uh... followed with the uh... center fuel tank or the fuel
tanks exploding the fuel and flight eight hundred exploding which is like a
fireball when you say you saw an explosion
what did you see precisely i thought that i thought the large fireball at that point
and then uh... about a second after that there was a second
explosion off to the side off to the left side as that
fireball started to come down the the original fireball there was a
second second explosion bill even if we were to uh... by into the
explanation that it was trailing fuel that was on fire
is there any way you could imagine that uh... the trailing fuel
would have taken a sharp left-hand turn Oh, no.
What Richard described is the perfect layman's description of a missile engagement.
When I talked to him out there, we went out to the Yacht Club and I took bearing lines, precise bearing lines from his position.
I even photographed that site later.
When I crossed it to these other people up and down 11 miles of beach, they all saw essentially the same thing.
They saw something going vertically rapidly and then appeared to level, go outbound.
And Richard's probably the closest one of the witnesses I've talked to to the actual launch, because it looks like, even though he thought it went from the barrier island as a fireworks, it probably was a missile about another three nautical miles offshore.
And a much bigger vehicle than a flare or fireworks.
And I've got lots of stuff we can talk to later.
Of course, yes, of course.
Richard, did you go to the FBI?
They came to me.
They came to you?
Yes.
And what was the nature of the interrogation or the investigation?
What did they ask you?
What did you perceive of their attitude?
Their attitude when they... There were two agents that interviewed me.
Their attitude was... They were very surprised at the viewpoint that I had.
And they were very excited about what I had seen.
Initially, and this is the first time I've heard Mr. Myers, and he was describing the notepad, the small notepad, out of the back pocket.
That's exactly what they used, and all they used was that same type of notepad and pen.
They jotted down a few things, and the interview was four or five minutes.
Four or five minutes.
And one peeled off and he was speaking on a cellular phone in the background.
And that was about it.
Was that the only interview the FBI held with you or did they come back?
They came back a second time.
And then?
Very little excitement.
This time it was just sort of a follow-up.
It was like something had changed?
It was definitely like something had changed.
I just couldn't believe it.
That was it.
It was no excitement, no anything after that.
Then a third time they had called me on my cell phone in my truck and given me an over-the-phone interview.
And that was it.
Would you characterize their investigation as one that initially the agents were very interested in, and then in both follow-ups you've described, they suddenly had, comparatively, a great disinterest in what you had to say?
A disinterest, and yes, I would say that would be accurate.
Um, you're not a drinker?
No, sir.
You don't take drugs?
No, sir.
You're sure of what you saw?
Absolutely.
When you saw the CIA's description of what occurred and you heard the conclusion of mechanical failure on Flight 800, how did that hit you?
You know, best described, I looked down at the ground and shook my head.
You know, I couldn't believe it.
You know the cartoon?
The CIA cartoon?
Yeah, the CIA cartoon.
That best describes it as a cartoon.
It was a joke.
That isn't what happened?
No.
Richard, I want to thank you for joining us this evening.
We are going to proceed.
As a matter of fact, I think I just spent a longer period of time with you by several times than the FBI apparently spent with you.
Absolutely.
So I want to thank you, and we will continue with Bill Donaldson after the break.
Richard, again, thank you for being here.
Thank you.
Good night.
All right, that's Richard Goss, and when we come back, we will get into the technical details Of what Bill Donaldson thinks occurred on Flight 800.
So I suggest you stay with me if you want to hear the other side of the story of that tragedy.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Thank you for watching.
To talk with Art Bell, from west of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, dial 1-800-618-8255.
That's 1-800-618-8255.
Now again, here's Art.
To talk with Art Bell, from west of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and
New Mexico, dial 1-800-618-8255.
That's 1-800-618-8255.
Now again, here's Art.
Once again, good morning.
We're dealing tonight with the Flight 800 disaster, or criminal act.
You determine that for yourself.
In this last hour, we heard from Major Fred Myers, who personally witnessed what he describes as a high explosive ordnance detonation.
A streak of light, and then a high ordnance detonation.
He viewed this from a Black Hawk helicopter about 200 feet in the air, So he is a witness to what occurred.
Now, that doesn't sound like an overheated fuel tank exploding to me.
It sounds like a witness, a well-experienced, who has seen missiles, rescued pilots in North Vietnam, and saw all this from his Blackhawk.
Then we heard from Richard Goss, a Long Island resident, well-trained, Who also saw something rise from the ground without question to a high altitude, take a sharp left-hand turn, then he too saw an explosion.
Two eyewitnesses to what occurred with respect to Flight 800, not at all consistent with the CIA cartoon representation or graphic illustration of what they have concluded occurred with Flight 800 in a minute.
William S. Bill, if you will, Donaldson, and I'll tell you, I'll give you an idea once again of who you're about to hear from so you understand the significance of what he's about to say.
When 230 people died suddenly near Long Island, New York, Flight 800 bound for Paris.
An accident?
You decide for yourself as the evening progresses.
Alright, I want you to understand who you're about to hear.
William S. Donaldson.
Bill Donaldson, we'll call him.
From 1962 through 5 was a naval aviation cadet at the University of Maryland.
65 through 7 was designated naval aviator and commissioned.
1968 through 70 was an A-4 attack pilot and a line division officer who flew 89 combat missions in Southeast Asia, both North and South Vietnam, as well as Laos, where of course we never flew, ran a line division of 40 men, 16 A4C aircraft on the flight deck, and qualified as combat section and division flight leader.
70 through 72, was advanced jet flight instructor slash line division officer, directed line division of 190 men, three officers, and 70 TA-4 and F-9 aircraft.
He was then 72 through 74 assistant air operations CCA officer, though most junior of six officers then assigned to air operations, one of two fully qualified day-night in air ops hot seat directed a division of 27 air controllers best in the fleet.
Division achieved perfect score and competitive exercise resulting in the USS Forrestal winning the battle E for operations.
The 74 through 77 was an A-4 US-2 pilot maintenance officer directed the aircraft maintenance department there named the best of 11 in the air wing.
1978 through 80 Was an A-6 attack pilot and safety officer.
Qualified Air Wing Alpha Strike Leader.
Managed the safety program for deployed A-6 squadron.
Ran quality assurance program.
1980.
The year 1980, actually.
An air operations officer.
Planned and executed air operations for Joint Exercise Operation Solid Shield 80.
Supervised a staff of eight officers and controlled the Air War 350 combat air sorties from Joint Command Post Key West.
83 was a safety officer.
Managed aviation safety program for Air Wing's three squadrons, 120 aircraft, 300 pilots.
Exercised oversight of all mishap investigations, kind of like what the NTSB does.
Discovered a cause of a series of out-of-control mishaps.
84 through 87 was a nuclear plans officer.
Formulated contingency war plans for use of nuclear weapons in NATO and represented the 6th Fleet to NATO Headquarters in Belgium.
Exercised and certified each carrier battle group in conventional and nuclear operations.
87 through 91 was a chief staff officer, supervised 90 member staff, oversaw a $75 million budget, four subordinate commands, and five major contractors, was reporting custodian for 122 jet aircraft, responsible for all operational, administrative, safety, personal, legal, and aircraft maintenance matters.
A 91 through 92 was a military expert on a council which executed a 45-minute presentation to three members of the Presidential Commission on Base Closures, you'll recall that, cited by the Chairman as the best he had seen.
I think it's important that you understand who you are hearing.
So that was a little lengthy, but I think because of the gravity of what we're discussing, what we've already heard and what we're about to hear, This whole thing is kind of like eating an elephant.
It's a pretty big program, but the only way you can do it is sort of one bite at a time.
I've got some things that when I tell your audience, it's going to be tough for them to believe it, but I want to say up front I'm doing this as a matter of honor.
I don't want to make a nickel out of this, and I don't plan to.
You haven't written a book?
You're not doing a movie?
No.
That's not the program.
Let me explain what started this.
I knew we were in trouble, we as a country, on this thing when the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, a fellow by the name of Jim Hall, back in April, He put an article in the Wall Street Journal that basically set the predicate for what they're doing now.
The title of the article was, it wasn't a missile, and his justification was that the centerline tank had spontaneously exploded.
Now, if your listeners don't pick up anything at all when I say this, this is a key and it should open their eyes here.
In the entire history of United States civil jet aviation, Dating back over 30 years.
Yes, sir.
Every one of these aircraft that the U.S.
has ever built, these airliners, all basically have the same fuel design that the 747 Flight 800 had.
And they all use empty or near-empty center wing tanks at one point or another, depending on what routes they fly.
Maybe you can help me out right now.
This was an aircraft headed from New York to Paris.
That's a 3,000 mile, roughly, journey, I think, across the Atlantic.
Would it be a normal thing on such a flight to have that center fuel tank empty or nearly empty?
Yes.
And the reason the answer is yes is because in the northern hemisphere, when you're flying east to west, you're fighting a headwind.
In other words, from Paris to New York, for instance, you might have a A hundred knot headwind at about 30,000 feet.
So, when they're coming from Paris to New York, for instance, they need every bit of fuel they've got.
But when they turn around and go the other way, from New York back to Paris, you've got this tremendous tailwind that's operating the whole time you're in flight.
So, in effect, if you filled that center tank up when you left Kennedy, you'd be hauling 80,000 pounds or more of dead weight.
And that's really not safe.
You don't want to land with that extra weight, especially when it's fuel in an airplane.
I appreciate that answer, because I've heard many tacos say it was insane to imagine the center fuel tank would have been empty on that long a journey, but that certainly explains it.
Would there have been some fuel in that tank?
Right.
There was approximately, they're saying now 50 to 100 gallons.
You're talking about It's a measurement that's 20 feet by 20 feet by 6 feet tall,
roughly.
And you'd have about a half an inch, 50 gallons, 100 gallons would be about a half inch, a
little over a half inch of fuel in the bottom.
Now here's what I wanted to finish saying here, that in the whole history of airliners
built in the United States, their entire history of flight, there has never been in history
a spontaneous fuel tank explosion in any tank, not just the center wing tank.
That adds up conservatively to 150,000 years plus of flight time.
And now, here we had, back in April, we had the chairman of the NTSB saying up front, well we solved the problem, we just had a spontaneous explosion in a tank.
Okay, to me, that got my attention.
That's what got me involved in this.
I knew it was probably absolute BS.
So I went ahead and I ordered the fuels manual, and I studied it, and I found out right off the get-go what I really already knew from my military experience.
The fuel that was in the airplane is called Jet A1, and it's universally used around the world now.
It was created by American fuels technology.
That fuel is extremely safe.
And Art, I want to tell you something.
I mean, I've done this.
I've even made a videotape and took it up to Congress and showed it to them.
You can take the biggest, you know, I actually used two big matches, like long matches, like you'd use to light a fire in a fireplace.
Right.
And you can light the matches and you can just slowly immerse the lit match into the surface of that fuel and it'll go out.
And it'll go out all the way, and you can heat the fuel all the way up to 127 degrees.
Actually, 126 degrees, and it'll still go out.
At 127 degrees, you'll get a slow fire that will propagate across the surface of the fuel.
A slow fire?
Yeah.
In other words, and this is really what the aviation fuels manual tells you when you get into the technical side, and I don't want to go too far afield there, but the bottom line is this.
Is that at the temperatures, the normal operating temperatures of that fuel in that aircraft, and remember at the altitude that it was at, the temperature was 21 degrees Fahrenheit.
Understood.
Okay, now, you couldn't even, you could hold a barbecue in the fuel tank and dump your hot coals into that fuel and they'd go out.
Alright?
So here we have the lead safety agency in the United States The political head of that agency telling the whole world that we have dangerous fumes and fuel tanks, and it's absolute nonsense.
And Congress has put the pressure on, they've farmed out all kinds of testing to Caltech and some other people, and they wouldn't answer the question, what was the temperature in the centerline tank?
If the conclusion was the center tank spontaneously blew up, Then why has there not been great directives from the NTSB regarding changes in the central center fuel tank configuration?
Well, initially, and that, I've got several letters, I think you've got them, that I've sent back and forth, we've sent back and forth between Mr. Hall and myself.
Yes sir.
That was my very point, that if you have, the NTSB, if they really thought that there was a severe hazard to flight safety, Then they have a fiduciary duty to the flying public to immediately put in a safety fix, if you will.
Now, I knew from my experience as maintenance officer and safety officer that every aircraft, for engineering and just regular maintenance purposes, all of these tanks have low-point drains.
I knew that you could get a fuel sample out of that tank in almost no time.
After we sent the questions to Mr. Hall, they absolutely wouldn't answer the temperature question.
I went up to New York.
Mr. Hall is?
Is the head of the National Transportation Safety Board.
All right.
So you went to New York?
Went to New York, got an airline.
I can't name which one because it'll get them in trouble with the NTSB.
But I had one of their 747s that was turning around, going back to Europe, exactly like Flight 800 was.
I went ahead and had them pull a sample out of that tank.
It took all of two minutes.
All you do is pop a little access door in the bottom of the wing.
You stick about a four-foot hollow tube up there and press on a spring-loaded valve on the bottom of the tank.
The fuel goes into the tube, into the container at the bottom of the tube.
Then I had them pour it into a thermos that I had rigged to take the temperature out of.
I took the temperature, and the fuel Was exactly one degree warmer than the ambient air.
It was 69 degrees and it was 68 in the ambient air at the time.
Alright, now, I've heard claims that the air conditioning units on Flight 800, or all 747s, are located below this fuel tank, and that these 747, Flight 800, had been sitting on the ground, and the theory was that the center fuel tank had been heated Uh, by these compressors, I guess, running.
Right.
And to a temperature that could finally cause an explosion.
Is there any way that could have happened?
No.
No?
And the reason is that when that aircraft was certified 30-some years ago, they go into unbelievable depth into testing.
Okay, number one.
When they do that, they create documents that go to maintenance people and they create documents that go to pilots.
And the document that goes to pilots specifically says, due to the testing that was done 30 some years ago, that extended, meaning long periods of time of air conditioning unit operation on the ground may raise the temperature 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the center wing tank.
From the ambient.
Right.
Okay.
Now, what I found out when I did that little simple two minute test, it cost me about 15 bucks for a thermos and a thermometer.
Sure.
The NTSB has spent millions on instrumenting airplanes and flying them around and they still won't answer the question.
What's the temperature in the tank?
Okay?
And they're sticking to this thing like You know, like glue to something, and they won't give it up.
But they're in trouble because, you know, I just can't imagine that there's any way to fabricate an answer here.
But here's the bottom line.
What the fuels manual tells you is there's something there that tells you, that gives you the answer to what happened to Flight 800.
And that is this.
The tank did explode.
There's no question that the center line tank exploded.
There was an overpressure event that was a fuel air event in the tank.
I've just spent ten minutes saying that can't happen.
Well, there is a way that it can happen.
Anytime the tank is subjected to a severe amount of energy, for instance, if the aircraft is involved in a mid-air collision with another airplane or it crashes on the ground or even hits the water, What happens to the fuel in the tank is it's slammed against the walls, especially an empty tank like that, and the fuel is misted into the atmosphere.
Misted fuel can explode.
All you need is the spark.
And it can explode, even the safe fuel, at very low temperatures compared to a stable tank.
But again, let us be clear.
Under normal, slight conditions, even ascending, an airplane under power ascending, going through 10,000 to 13,000 feet, There would be no way under those conditions that you would get fuel misting in that center tank?
No.
There's no, unless the, what the graphs show you in the fuels manual is basically, they show you what you could do, for instance, instead of a 747, we're talking about an F-15 for instance, and it does a lot of aggressive acrobatics, then there is a An agitated tank figure that drops the temperature about 50 degrees.
But that would not be the case with a 747.
I've never been on a 747 while they're pulling loops and rolls.
All right, Bill.
Hold tight.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
Take a break and we'll be right back.
Listen carefully, folks.
Listen very carefully tonight as you decide what really happened to Flight 800.
I'm Art Bell, and from the high desert, this is Coast to Coast AM.
Once again, William Donaldson, Bill Donaldson.
you once again uh... william donaldson bill donaldson
uh... mister donaldson in your considerable expert opinion what did
bring down flight eight hundred well uh...
jump into the bottom line i think that uh...
the highest probability by far is a uh...
a missile engagement with uh... external warhead detonation well outside the hall
a relatively large missile In other words, a proximity detonation.
Right, and most people don't have a lot of technical knowledge about this stuff, but Modern anti-aircraft weapons, missiles, are designed and are actually far more deadly if they use a proximity fuse and do detonate away from the hull of the aircraft.
Why?
In other words, the NTSB and everybody else kept looking for a giant hole in the plane where a missile would have penetrated.
Well, not only that, but they were looking for, when you have a detonation and the fireball actually touches the metal, You get deep metal pitting from an extremely high velocity gas from the detonation, and scouring, they call it, where the metal actually looks like an orange peel or something.
They did not find that?
No.
See, what they're doing is they're saying, well, we didn't find that, so therefore a missile or a bomb didn't happen here.
And there is a gross, gross fallacy with that.
I don't know what a good metaphor would be, but for instance, some of the larger missiles that are in various inventories are designed to go off as far as 40 to 60 feet away or more away from the hull.
And if that happens, what you'll get is penetration of the hull with extremely high velocity metal fragments.
And depending on the orientation of the missile when it's approaching the aircraft, And I think, by the way, after going through, Richard Goss gave me a good lead and I went, two investigators that are inside this thing, I can't tell you who they are because it would be in deep trouble, but there is a through hole that goes, enters at L2 door, just a little after the L2 door, on the left side, the second door back on the left, the six inch hole,
piece of fragment went through and exited above the R2 door and uh... actually if you look at photographs you can see
that there's a high velocity penetration coming from the inside going through the
structural number right above that door. My god, now wait a minute.
You're telling me uh... if I'm listening carefully and hearing this that
there was a large hole
in a door of both both and entry hole and exit hole
Right.
It actually didn't go through the door, but it was in close proximity.
In other words, we had an entry on the left side of the aircraft, just adjacent to and right next to a window, actually, of the L2 door on the left side.
This large piece, it had to be at least six inches in diameter, went through the cabin and exited Going through just above the R2 door.
Now, that's critical because in the breakup sequence of the aircraft, one of the first major structures that came off the aircraft was the R2 door.
And actually, it's a big piece that contains the door.
and when that happened it was the beginning of the nose coming
off the aircraft which happened
very very quickly from the kingdom of nine
across the country around the world and throughout the universe
this is coast to coast AM with Art Bell on the CBC radio network
Mr. Donaldson, how could such a glaring piece of evidence, forensic evidence, not be reported?
How could we not know about that until just now?
Listen, I'm not the guy that discovered it.
The investigators told me, okay?
I can see I've got color photographs that show the exit hole.
It's clear as a bell to me because that fragment hit one of the longitudinal stringers in the fuselage above that door with such force that it forced the stringer through the skin of the aircraft from the inside.
If you look at the photograph, you'll see what looks like a hatchet cut almost going Uh, from the inside out through the, uh, just above that door.
Now, I'm going to tell you some stuff that's a lot, uh, it's even worse than that.
But, but before you do, again, I've got to ask you, these investigators that you spoke to, who told you this, who supplied you with the photograph or whatever.
Right.
Uh, why, sir, did this not get into the news?
Why did this not become an integral part of the investigation?
Why was it not reported?
Or if it was, why was it ignored?
Well, I assume it's the same reason that there's probably 20 or 30 other similar proofs, if you will, to use their vernacular, a criminal act.
It's probably more like an act of war if it was terrorists or proxies for some other outfit.
But the point is that in every one of these incidents that I see clearly, with my experience, that it's proof of Of an engagement of a weapon, they find some way to, you know, deny it or talk around it.
And, you know, one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen on television was Mr. Kallstrom the other morning at one of the morning shows.
You know, he's telling this young lady that he was taking on tour around the hangar there with the wreckage.
And he said, well, we've done these missile tests and we've proven it's not a missile.
What I'll call hit plates.
When you do a test firing of a warhead at various ranges, you use aluminum sheets and so on and see what the damage is.
Well, what he showed, I mean, I could have done that much damage with my 12-gauge shotgun from 15 yards away.
And what they tested, obviously, were very small, like shoulder-fired weapons.
At a distance from the hip plates, and you know you've got relatively small holes, less than the size of your fist.
What I'm talking about, and what I know happened to that airplane, that airplane was in a train wreck at 13,700 feet.
There's no other way to explain it.
The last two days I've been meticulously grafting the debris field on graph paper.
I have the internal documents that were generated by the NTSB that shows precisely where every piece of metal went into the water.
And I'm going to tell you that what they showed you on that CIA cartoon is a total fabrication.
When you study a debris field and do the ballistic geometry on that debris field, and I'm looking at something that's only 7,000 feet long, I'm looking at, it's not broken into three distinct debris fields like they've been telling the public.
They're saying that, you know, there's debris from the first explosion and then the nose came off in one big piece and landed in a hole and then further on the rest of the airplane crashed.
I saw the cartoon.
Okay, that didn't happen, okay?
There are two distinct debris fields, not three, and this is critical because That whole cartoon, the only way that they can get professionals to even swallow this line is if there was some kind of an explosion in the center wing tank would not be really very powerful.
And it's hard for people to believe in the business that it would take the nose off a 747 to begin with.
But what I'm going to tell you next indicates Whatever that was was far, far more powerful than anything that a center wing tank could do.
Go right ahead.
Okay.
When you look at the debris field, what you do is you determine where the course of the aircraft, it was flying on a heading of 071 crew at 13,700 feet when this event occurred.
at 13,700 feet when this event occurred.
When the event happened, and what I'm going to say happened, was a missile approaching
from the left low front of the aircraft did a hard left turn.
It was approaching almost perpendicular, slightly below the left wing.
Turned hard left and detonated in front of and below the left wing tip.
The reason I say that is that there's debris in the first part of that debris field that should never be there if it was only a center wing tank explosion.
That debris Wingtip antenna debris off the left.
There's a HF antenna on each wing.
Yes, sir.
Wingtip.
And there's a piece of that.
It's in the very first beginning of the debris field.
And then a little further on, you have the upper and lower outboard skin from the left wing.
You know, how did that happen?
And then, of course, the rest of the wing and the main part of the airplane goes another 6,000 feet before it, you know, goes into the water.
That's one indicator.
Here's another indicator.
When the event occurred, the aircraft didn't break up at the center wing tank first.
The first big pieces that hit the water, there was one piece of the spar that came out of the center wing tank.
I think that was the result of the secondary fuel explosion caused by the weapon going off.
But the left Forward cargo compartment, 16 feet in front of the center wing tank.
A big piece of that came off first.
And then a little further aft in that left compartment, lower left compartment, actually was blown from the left side of the aircraft over 2,000 feet to the right of the aircraft track, way, way out there.
Wow.
And that's why I described it more like a train wreck at altitude than it was a center wing tank explosion.
You can't get a piece of the left side of the fuselage of the airplane displaced 2,000 feet to the right of track with a center wing tank explosion that's You know, that's in the center of the airplane.
Have you raised this issue with the NTSB?
No.
You're hearing it for the first time, and this is a product of a detailed study in the last two days that I've been doing on this graph material.
I was shocked when I saw this, because what it means is that within the first month, when they started putting this stuff together, that debris field is a perfect fingerprint For a massive explosion in the sky.
It was not a center wing tank explosion only.
That was a collateral result.
Now here's the other thing.
I mean, slow me down if I get too pumped up on this.
Go right ahead.
But the nose section that you see sort of, you know, tumbling off, falling down, looking like it's intact.
Yes.
That's a total fabrication.
That nose section was blown to kingdom come.
It came down, not in one big piece, but it came down in groups of five.
There were five sections of multiple pieces that hit the water.
One of those pieces, groups of pieces, like six or eight pieces of fuselage, landed way, way off to the right, like 2,000, again, 2,000 feet to the right of the track of the aircraft.
Now, you know, they're telling you that this nose just kind of tumbled off and, you know, it sort of broke off and fell in the water.
All right.
For those who didn't see it, what I saw of the CIA cartoon or graphic representation of what occurred was the plane was going along, that it showed a large explosion.
The front portion of the aircraft fell forward intact.
While the airplane itself actually rose in altitude in this cartoon, and then of course came down in the fireball, that could not have happened?
No.
Well, let me address the on-the-nose thing.
What they're telling me, the reason they're saying that I think that it was intact and it just kind of fell on a hole there, is there's no way you can with the application of physics and science explain how the that whole big giant piece of nose was shattered into five major subcomponents and that some of them were blown so far off the course of the aircraft.
It takes a tremendous amount of energy to do that.
That's why I keep going back to it's like a train wreck.
It's like a freight train hit this thing from the left side.
Okay, that's what the debris field saying.
Now the cartoon The most absurd thing that I've ever seen in my life, dealing with aviation, was what the CIA put together there.
That aircraft, with all that gross tonnage of the nose coming off, will pitch up all right.
It'll pitch up instantly to a 90 degree pitch up, and the airplane will immediately, the flat bottom of the wing will hit the wind, and the rest of the airplane starts to break up, and it's over.
It's not going to climb 200 feet, much less Remember, when the nose comes off, the throttle controls go
with it.
All the hydraulic lines are severed.
The electrical lines are severed.
Everything that the pilot has going back to the engines is cut.
Mr. Donaldson, Pierre Selinger, as you well know, stuck his neck way out and claimed he
had evidence of a friendly fire missile accident.
Right.
All of a sudden, Pierre Salinger just sort of went away.
People said he was duped, and he just sort of went away, and you don't hear any more about it.
Did Pierre Salinger have it wrong?
The short answer is yes, because what he did was he jumped to the conclusion that if it was a missile that shot it down, it had to have been a friendly fire incident.
And the problem with that, and the problem with the book that was published along the same lines, stating the same thing, is that once the main media jumped on that and started trying to fact check it, and there are no facts that support any military activity of any significance that you could put your finger on.
Now, there were some submarines that were operating within Within that area, but basically our submarines don't have those kind of weapons on board.
And I mean, I know from my own experience, I mean, I never seriously considered this once I talked to the Chief of Staff down at Airlant in Norfolk.
I mean, I know the guy socially, and he said, hey, we had a cruiser about 130 miles out.
They were coming home, and they were out of range.
We just didn't have any assets in the area.
There's a P-3 airborne in the area that shows up on the radar tapes and so on.
What I'm trying to say is, remember, I'm a naval officer.
I'm in retirement as a regular officer.
I could be recalled tomorrow if the Commander-in-Chief said he wanted to do that.
And after this show, you may be.
I don't know.
I've been thinking about it.
But the point that I'm making is, The fact that it wasn't the Navy that did it doesn't mean that there wasn't a missile fired.
I understand.
The physical facts tell me, almost without a shadow of a doubt, that, and I'm not even talking about all these eyewitnesses that I've interviewed here yet, but without a shadow of a doubt, there was a major event that was caused by a missile on that aircraft, and there may have been two.
There are eyewitnesses that saw two launches And I think that one was launched vertically.
That's, you know, Goff saw that one and so did Major Myers.
But when you go further to the east, I had an eyewitness that wanted to get on with you, but he's working early in the morning.
He couldn't do it.
But he was out at Quake, Docker's Restaurant, way, way up the beach.
He saw a missile going out at about a 45 degree angle, which we haven't talked about it yet, but the other pilot with Myers in that helo thought he saw a missile coming from the left.
Myers saw one coming from the right.
That would have been his co-pilot?
Right.
I haven't talked to him.
He works, I guess, for One of the government agencies, and they basically told him to stay out of this.
Mr. Donaldson, you believe it was a terrorist missile or missiles that took this plane down?
Through logic, yes.
I mean, I can't imagine that there really is anything else that could have been.
And there's a reason for this.
In a way, it fits a fingerprint there because of the tactics that were used.
What I'm getting as a firing position is about four nautical miles straight out from where Richard Goss was sitting there at the West Hampton Yacht Club.
That puts it about three nautical miles offshore, and the reason I could find that is, unlike their testimony of the way the FBI did the investigation, I went up there with GPS satellite equipment and ran these people down with Went out to the site that they were at, took bearing line information to where they first saw a flare or missile on the surface.
Took that bearing and put it on charts.
I've got Suffolk County Police reports from all up and down the coast.
Almost to a tee, all these people saw something very close to the beach being launched.
In fact, I've got witnesses that are 60 years old that thought that the stuff came right off the beach itself.
They were on the back side of the barrier beach and they go running, huffing and puffing over the sand dune to look down and see where the heck this damn thing came from.
At what altitude was that plane when the described high detonation explosion occurred?
Well, I'm saying it was at 13,700 feet.
I've watched the radar tape and that's when the transponder went dead.
It was indicating exactly 380 knots.
13.5, 13.5.
What kind of missile could do that?
In my last letter to Mr. Hall, I pointed out a scenario where I picked one, and that's really all it is.
I don't have physical evidence of the missile.
That's fine.
What did you pick?
Okay, I picked the Iranian AIM-54A Phoenix.
That missile weighs 985 pounds.
It's got its own on-board terminal radar guidance system.
In other words, once the missile's fired, it's totally all by itself.
Capable of reaching what altitude, Mr. Donaldson?
That missile could reach 100,000 feet.
100,000 feet.
All right, Mr. Donaldson, stand by.
We're at the top of the hour when we come back.
Shortly, we're going to try to get the phone lines open.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
From the Kingdom of Narnia, I'm out.
Bill, welcome back.
Here's a facts, Bill.
Your guest, Mr. Donaldson, has not mentioned the numerous military aircraft that have exploded due to defects in their fuel tanks.
Radio Network.
Back now to Bill Donaldson.
Bill, welcome back.
Here's a facts, Bill.
Your guest, Mr. Donaldson, has not mentioned the numerous military aircraft that have exploded
due to defects in their fuel tanks.
In other words, KC-135s, B-52s, some have exploded due to faulty fuel pumps.
Is your guest positive that the air conditioning compressor on the 747 was not in any way defective?
Defective air conditioners can run very hot.
Okay, let me, there's two answers to that question.
All right.
There are, there's on record, there are three KC-135 explosions that were dating back 15 years or more.
But you have to realize that the KC-135 is a Boeing 707 that is all fuel tank.
It is loaded from nose to tail with high-pressure pumps, and its mission is to transfer fuel to B-52s and other big aircraft in the Air Force.
Refueling, yes.
Right, air-to-air refueling.
Now, the key to that is, and where it became very misleading when Mr. Hall presented that to Congress as an answer, Yes, there has been explosions.
The difference is that all of those explosions, it took me five minutes to find this out when I called the Air Force Safety Center.
Every one of those airplanes that blew up were fueled with JP-4.
JP-4 was the old fuel that is just as volatile as the gasoline, regular gasoline you put in your car.
Not like the JP-1?
No, the difference is like dynamite and fuel oil.
I mean, there's a tremendous difference.
All right, end of that story.
Second point was, are you sure the air compressor or the air conditioning compressor was not faulty and particularly hot?
Well, I guess the straight answer to that is no.
I don't think anybody could say that.
Some of those packs were just about intact when they found them, and I have a very strong suspicion that if the NTSB Uh, could even, uh, pin, you know, could find anything that would support that idea that it would be made known immediately.
You bet.
Uh, the following from a pilot, uh, the CIA tape shows the 747's nose breaking loose, yet the fuselage falls nose downward.
As a pilot for 35 years, it seems more likely it would have been instantly tail heavy due to a major shift in the aircraft, um, center of gravity, center of gravity, it's what he says here, uh, another C.I.A., F.B.I.
lie.
That's true.
Would you concur?
I just did.
Let me tell you something here.
For those that don't know a lot about aerodynamics, there is a basic concept of an aircraft in flight, a regular conventionally designed airplane like the 747.
When it's in flight, it's being held up by the lift that's generated on the wing, obviously.
That's called the center of lift.
And if you think of the airplane as a seesaw balancing across the center of lift, which is the wing, the tailplane is always pushing down to the aircraft is designed to be always a little bit nose heavy across the center of lift to give positive stability.
Now, what the pilot's referring to, and he's 100% correct here, When you suddenly lose all of that gross tonnage in the front of the wing, virtually everything forward of the wing, that wing is lifting over 750,000 pounds right after takeoff like that.
So now you've cut the seesaw in half, and the fulcrum of the seesaw is pushing up with three-quarters of a million pounds of pushup.
The tail is pushing down, trying to balance what used to be the nose that's no longer there.
So you instantly get a snap on the airframe where it pitches right into the wind, and I can tell you from talking to the medical examiner, I don't want to get too graphic here, but almost everybody died instantly in the airplane from the violent, I guess the best way to call it is whiplash when that happened.
All right.
I would like to take some calls if we might.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Bill Donaldson.
Hello.
Hello, my own heart.
Yes, sir.
Where are you?
My name is Denny.
I'm from the Philadelphia area.
Okay.
I drive a truck all night, Art.
I think I have an interesting piece of information here.
When this crash happened, the local radio station down here was receiving a lot of call-ins from people out of the New York area.
One in particular that stuck in my mind was a gentleman had just come in.
He was very excited.
They were out on a party boat fishing.
And he claimed that while they were out there fishing that there was this particular trawler that had been zig-zagging in and out of the party boats.
And what was noticeable about it was it had no flag, no markings or lights on it.
And it headed off Into the distance after a little while and they packed up and they were heading in and he said that he saw a two-soy missile coming up from the general direction of where this boat was.
And that's all I have to say.
All right.
I had it always stuck in my mind.
Bill, are you familiar with that report at all?
No.
And the problem is that the only people who really have access to all of that are the police agencies up there and the FBI.
And if it's like some of these other witnesses that I have interviewed, it seems like they sit on that stuff.
I did interview Roland Penny, who was at sea when this thing happened, and he went right out to the crash site.
What he told me was he almost got run over by a tug pulling a barge with its lights off.
So there was a lot of suspicious boat activity.
In the immediate area.
And you have to understand, that's a major shipping lane.
Just like it's an air corridor to Europe, it's a shipping corridor all up and down the East Coast and also offshore.
So the amount of surface traffic is just horrendous.
I appreciate that input there.
Was it Denny?
Yes.
That's a good tip.
You know, I wish I could track all these individuals down and get them on audio tape and put it all together, but it's kind of tough with one guy doing this.
Yes, it is.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Bill Donaldson.
Hello.
Yeah, hello.
Where are you, sir?
My name's Dave.
I'm calling from Los Angeles.
All right.
With all the talk about it possibly having been a missile that took down a plane, who was on the plane?
Could there have been someone on there that was... I think... We had a congressman on there or something, right?
Wasn't there someone from the government that was on the plane?
I think there were reports of that at first, but I don't think it panned out.
The FBI, I know, did detailed... at least they claim that they've done detailed interviews of every passenger, family member, you know, family members of passengers.
None of that has surfaced that there was a... And I really think this is too horrendous an event to blame on one passenger as a target, unless you were talking about somebody like a head of state or something.
Alright, I realize that this is going to call for conjecture, but we are imagining tonight that the FBI, the CIA, the NTSB, And all of this investigation has been, in effect, muzzled.
Covered up.
It's a lie.
That's what you said a little while ago.
To what end, Mr. Adelson?
To what end?
Well, here's... If you put the event in the time sequence in history of when it happened, I can put a little conjecture on the table here.
If you remember, first of all, look back at this administration's history dealing with terrorism.
We have the event in Saudi Arabia.
There was a bombing where four or five service members died, and then the Khobar Towers where it was 19 or 20 or whatever it was.
We did not respond.
All we did was retreat from the Khobar Tower things.
I'm talking about we as a country, as a military response.
We moved those guys into the desert.
Then, you know, you've got the Democratic Convention going down.
All of a sudden, bang, Flight 800 goes in.
There's hundreds, literally, of witnesses telling the police that they saw ascending flares.
You've heard it all.
Sure.
Okay.
Immediately, now here's what I think as a military officer should have happened.
What should have happened is that the Department of Defense should have been put on alert and should have been the lead until they could determine That there was not a missile involved.
But instead, the White House put one of the closest friends of Al Gore, probably that he's got, Jim Hall, in the NTSB, the political leadership of the NTSB, in charge in almost apparent competition with the FBI.
And that's where it went down.
That there was a directive, probably from the White House, that told them, no matter what you find, cool it until after the election, or at least until the election's in the bag.
And I know that's a dreadful thing for somebody to say, but everything appears that way.
And I say that because there's evidence of it.
One of the strangest things I've ever seen was the President of the United States signed a directive from the White House About the time Pierre Salinger went public with his allegation that withdrew Whistleblower Protection Act status for all the Navy personnel involved in the recovery process.
Why the hell would he do that?
And they even put it on the internet, on the White House page, until somebody said, hey, what's that?
And they jerked it.
I mean, I got a copy of it from, I'll just say from lawyers.
The key here is, it was a ridiculous thing to do unless you don't understand the way the military works.
I mean, on active duty, you're under the UCMJ, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and as long as the order that you're being given is a legal order, I mean, they can order those sailors not to talk to anybody, but as soon as one of them figured out it was a cover-up, Under the UCMJ, you could actually violate the order and say, hey, this is wrong.
It's morally wrong, and it's an illegal order, and I'm going to talk about it.
All right.
Here's something else somebody would ask, and so I will ask.
If it had been a terrorist act, terrorism is not much good unless you know that it's terrorism.
Right.
Most acts are followed by some claim of responsibility, usually accompanied with proof.
Right.
Some sort of proof.
Here we have, that I'm aware of, nothing of the sort.
So what good the terrorism, unless you have terrified people, unless they have the knowledge that an act of terrorism has occurred?
Why nobody taking claim?
Okay, let me, there's a relatively I think a good answer to that.
Number one, I'm not sure that there weren't claims.
In fact, there was a hubbub of activity right after the event, within a day or two, that there'd been a prediction made by one of these groups of fundamentalists.
They'd sent a communique to a newspaper, I think, in Egypt.
And the White House immediately denied it had anything to do with Flight 800, which I thought was a little strange at the time.
But let's say that they didn't take public credit.
What you really got here is intimidation of the United States government.
Governments very often do not tell the public what's going on in back channel communications.
In other words, all the stuff that happens between us and Israel and the Palestinian situation, about 99% of it is State Department.
Basically sealed from public view, the communications.
There's no way for you and I to know that whoever did this did not make it explicitly clear to the government of the United States why it was done.
And here's the terrifying thing to me, and one of the reasons I'm in this.
The NTSB has created a scenario here where they've already warned the country, in fact the world, That there's a possibility that these center wing tanks can explode unexpectedly.
Yes.
Let's say we have a group that says, okay, if you don't cave in to Arafat or whatever, whatever demand is made, a demand du jour from that part of the world, we'll do it again.
And, you know, that's the biggest nightmare I can think of for a President of the United States.
Well, of course, and would it be made public?
The answer is clearly no.
Right.
Clearly no.
I took exactly one week after Flight 800 went down, I flew out of Kennedy on a TWA 747 to Europe, and it was, believe me, white knuckle all the way until we were way up at cruising altitude.
And at that point, there was tremendously increased security on the ground.
I mean, they went through every little minutia.
They looked at everything.
And that has all sort of now gone away.
Yes, there's a little increased security, but basically we're almost back to where we were before all this occurred.
So what has been the sum total of our action with regard to this aircraft going down?
Well, I don't see any, and I see $70 million that they were real proud of.
I don't know if they were proud of it, but they were asked a question in that joint press
conference when they announced the FBI was dropping out.
But $70 million, what's the end result?
All I see is really a PR operation directed at the American people by the authorities,
political authorities in various departments in the government.
By our own government.
And my personal belief is, I've personally been involved in some of these things in the
Mediterranean dealing with these folks with military operations.
And the one thing that I really believe in my heart, and that is that a strong forward presence and an immediate accountability.
If, for instance, harken back to the Reagan situation with Gaddafi.
President Reagan delivered one of the biggest air raids in history in a short one day period on Libya based on the death of one American soldier in a cafe in Germany.
He had intelligence that Libya was involved in a cafe bombing where one of our soldiers died and he unleashed, I know because I was in 6th fleet at the time, We had two carriers on full alpha strikes into what used to be Wheeles Air Force Base.
We left that place in a total rubble.
A lot of the effectiveness of what we did on that one raid was never reported because the access for the media in there was very limited.
But it was, believe me, from the point of view of a terrorist or a rogue state, when Ronald Reagan said something, they listened.
I think we all need to learn that lesson every once in a while.
We need strong presidents that will make, you know, that you prevent these things by being strong and ready.
And of course we have the even most recent fracas with Iraq with regard to inspections.
Our inspectors were not allowed to inspect for the longest period of time while they were no doubt moving around whatever they wanted.
Then, we began to move a lot of military hardware, and Iraq said, okay, we give in.
We give in completely.
Come on back.
They came back, and now they're not allowed to inspect, and we look like a great big paper tiger.
Right.
So, you're well to point out the difference in administrations and the way they react to threat.
Alright, we're going to continue with Bill Donaldson as we discuss Flight 800.
And we're going to try and discern when we come back where we should go, what we should do, or is it case closed?
Here's the cartoon of Believe It or Not.
this is close to close to him but now to bill donaldson
Thanks for hanging in with us, Bill.
Oh, I've enjoyed it.
All right, a lot of calls here, a lot of people want to talk to you, so let's go to them.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Bill Donaldson.
Hello.
Hi, this is Ralph from Escondido.
I'm an engineer and I have a couple technical questions.
This is a great presentation.
First, doesn't the Air Force use GN-2, gaseous nitrogen, to passivate its empty fuel tanks to prevent sparks?
Yeah.
Second, you mentioned that you thought the missile was an Iranian AIM-XXX.
No, no, no.
He said he used that as an example of one that would have worked.
Right.
It is a real possibility of a threat.
In other words, when the Shah of Iran was still in power, he bought many F-14s from production, and we sold them the missile.
That missile is an air-to-air missile, but it can be relatively easily converted to a surface-to-air The problem is that we probably wouldn't get the evidence because it's relatively simple.
back in seventy to do that as a point-defense weapon
but it would have to be modified because as you said it's an over the horizon
air-to-air missile is there any evidence that they have converted a phoenix to
ground-to-air the problem is that we probably wouldn't get the evidence
because it's it's relatively simple what you have to do is take the
launching rail off the aircraft and there's a cooling system that goes uh...
to the seeker head on the missile that has to be taken off but
about five hundred pounds of hardware and the missile rail you could bolt it
to uh...
superstructure of a small boat and and you have a deadly i mean a really deadly
anti-aircraft weapon now have you thought of taking this whole scenario to one of
these forensic animators and making your own animation and flooding the country with
it just the way the P.I.A. did well yeah but uh... there are a few bucks
involved and i'm just a retired zero five
yeah yeah
From the kingdom of...
All right, you've gone to some members of Congress?
Yes, and I'm glad you brought that up.
Oh, I forgot to talk about nitrogen and nerding, too.
I'll get right back to that.
But the members of Congress, the one in particular that I talked to was Mr. Traficant from the 17th District of Ohio.
He's a Democrat.
But very keenly aware of this situation, and long story short, he interceded with the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Aviation, Mr. James Duncan from Tennessee.
And Congressman Duncan essentially assigned Congressman Traficant the duty to further investigate this mishap.
What I'm doing is whatever I'm able to come up with, I'm in almost daily communication with his chief of staff and we're working the problem.
Now back to nitrogen and nerding, the Air Force question.
That's a very good question because it's one of the things that Mr. Hall surfaced as a solution to this.
The problem is that the Air Force was forced, not forced, but they went to the nitrogen and nerding back when The military was using JP4 in the Vietnam era.
In those days, if you were going to land in, say, Hanoi, not Hanoi, but South Vietnam there, Da Nang, and any one of the Viet Cong happened to have a rifle loaded with tracers.
The magic bullet.
Exactly.
One single tracer through a partially empty JP4 tank, you do have volatile fumes in there particularly when the airplane is with a few
cold and the airplanes descending
there's a there's a window there were the golden baby could get you a whole bigger point him
and they decided to engineer around that with their c five and and there may be
some combat aircraft to the uh...
but again uh... with jp one which is what the two w a flight eight hundred
yet jerry one Jet A-1 is a military... I'm sorry, A-1, alright.
There is no way.
Short of, you said, an extreme trauma, as in shrapnel, for example, passing through the tank.
Or a shockwave from the bursting weapon.
When a high explosive goes off close to an aircraft, and I know from personal experience in North Vietnam, I had an 85mm round go off probably 80 or 90 feet away from the aircraft, and I almost lost the filling out of my teeth.
It really, really rattled the airplane.
And when I landed back aboard the Intrepid, I didn't have a single hole in the airplane.
But believe me, I was It made me a believer in anti-aircraft ordnance.
So, again, so we're clear, with all of your expertise and all of your knowledge and all the work you've done thus far, you flat out declare the CIA depiction of what occurred and the conclusions that they have given to the American people to be flat out lies.
Right.
And there's a reason for that.
The reason they did this They have a tremendous problem with all these eyewitnesses, number one, what they saw.
They found a way to, if you pay close attention to that tape, they tried to use the fact that people heard sounds before they looked and saw something.
and when you do speed of sound analysis from the actual crash point
the closest point of land would be like forty two to forty four seconds of sound
travel time from the airplane explosion point
they jumped on that they said okay that's these people could not possibly seen anything except after
the fact because of this
distance there here's the
the fatal flaw is that the people i've talked to
when you hear the explosion out at sea they heard missile launch noises which are
you get a bang thundering noise sure and then a crackling sound as the as the
missile goes uh... supersonic and and goes outbound and and
One eyewitness we didn't get in here would tell you that he heard a boom, crackle, and then about five seconds later, a boom, crackle, and then he sees one missile going outbound at a 45 degree angle, disappearing, exploding.
Then he sees the parts falling on fire, coming through a thin undercast, and then he hears two more explosions.
And that's the problem.
The CIA, they didn't talk to those people that were very explicit about this, and didn't really do a good sound analysis.
I'm curious, Mr. Donaldson, why would the CIA, just out of curiosity, be the one charged with coming up with an animation Uh, for an investigation that was conducted by the FBI.
Because it's an impressive name.
This whole thing is a public relations stunt that cost the American taxpayer 70 million bucks.
That's the bottom line.
And when you can draw in, you know, I mean, what more prestige?
Let me tell you, I hate to be in a position to be running down employees of any of these agencies.
99% of them are great Americans, and I honestly believe and feel that.
I mean, I'm a federal guy myself, okay?
But what's happened is that the political leadership has got a priority mission, and that mission is to take Flight 800 and snap the book shut on history on that baby and put it on the shelf.
That's what's happened.
How do we keep the book from closing?
Well, the best way to do that is to follow the Constitution.
I mean, I hate to be, I don't know if it's melodramatic or not, but our congressmen are us.
They're our last chance to seek justice in this thing, if you will, or to rectify the record, and I think the best way to get interest in the aviation subcommittee is to you know postcard
or something like that if if people are really
interested in the flight eight hundred point the best thing that could happen is if they convene uh...
a uh...
uh... congressional uh... inquiry or uh... at least hearings on uh... on this
thing are there any particular representatives that
you would think uh... would be uh... the easiest the best to remember would be determined
of the aviation subcommittee in the in the house because they've already
taken some action And that's Mr. James Duncan of Tennessee.
If you address something to him, all you'd have to do is say, Congressman Duncan, House of Representatives, Chairman, Aviation Subcommittee.
And it'll get to the committee and it'll get to the staffers that realize that there's somebody awake out here.
And still concerned about this issue.
Mr. Donaldson, do you want to be subpoenaed?
Oh, I don't care.
You mean by them?
Yeah.
Yes.
Oh, sure.
I mean, I'm not sure.
I was wondering who you meant was going to subpoena me, but sure.
In fact, I would expect that I would be in a committee hearing.
All right.
Would it be reasonable that listeners reacting to what they have heard tonight, the expert testimony, Would write to the Chairman of the Aviation Subcommittee, James Duncan, and request that hearings be held and that you specifically be subpoenaed?
Well, yeah, I don't know that you'd have to worry about me, because I'm already into this thing up to my eyebrows, and I would imagine that I would be on one of the panels just already.
I'm not looking for personal recognition in this thing, and I hate to... I just don't want to leave anybody with that impression.
This is about constitutional abuse, I think, and it's time that some of the folks that get to this elite feeling where they think they can get away with this, they just need to be... Speed brakes need to be put out on them.
That's all.
All right.
First time caller on the line.
You're on the air with Bill Donaldson and Art Bell.
Hello.
Hello.
Where are you?
I'm calling from Washington State.
All right.
I work for the Boeing Company in Everett.
I'm a tool maker.
I work out in production sometimes.
I've been inside the center fuel tanks, as you described.
They're about six feet tall.
I'm 5'10".
I can walk through there.
I know people think, well, you work for the company, you're going to say good things, I know about the product, but I know for a fact that safety is built into those airplanes with redundancy.
I mean, you've got four or five backup systems to take care of things.
They're a well-built airplane, and I just think that what's going on is they've just been trying to cover it up, and I think what the government needs to do is come forward and Tell the people that, hey, we're not immune to worldwide terrorism, that they can hit here, too, and I think that's what's happened.
Well, I think that to imagine or to even suggest publicly that it might have been terrorism, or to conclude that it might have been terrorism, without specifically being able to point a finger and know who did it and who to go after, would be such a negative I would have such a negative impact on the aircraft industry, on tourism, on our own national morale, that they might indeed be inclined to continue a lie.
Is that out of line, Mr. Donaldson?
Well, I don't think so.
The gentleman that just called, he's exactly right.
That aircraft is one of the safest It probably is the safest way a human being can move across the face of the earth, statistically.
And really, that's the crutch of the government's problem, trying to pin it on the airplane, because it is so safe.
For instance, there's no wiring in that centerline tank that can provide the spark, number one.
And things like the pumps that pump fuel out of the tank are mounted outside the tank.
It's only the impeller that's on the inside.
There are some who have speculated that the impeller somehow broke loose and penetrated the tank.
I've seen them speculate on everything from UFOs to meteor impacts.
When the chief safety guy in aviation for the United States surfaces, maybe it got hit by a meteor, we're all in trouble.
That's not professional, and it's ludicrous.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Bill Donaldson.
Hello.
This is Gabriel in L.A.
Yes, sir.
Okay.
I applaud you, Bill, on the research you've done.
It's great service.
It's an amazing story.
Three questions, real quick.
If the CIA and the FBI know this was an attack, does that automatically mean Janet Reno or the President know or are informed of this?
We're in supposition here, but my personal answer would be, I just can't imagine knowing the command structure.
I know the way it works in the military.
If we get attacked in the military anywhere in the world, we have a duty to inform the White House via flash precedence message within five minutes.
And also the Justice Department?
They've got to be involved because the FBI is... I can tell you all kinds of things.
The Aegis equipment, for instance, that the Bureau of Alcohol and Tobacco was using to sniff chemicals when that material was brought up from the seafloor, is the best technology for that in the world.
They had at least 12 positive hits for high explosive residue on this aluminum.
The manufacturer's telling me that that's extremely rare on a piece of slick aluminum to get a false positive.
Okay.
What happened was Janet Reno had a meeting and allegedly Mr. Hall, this was all in a published article that I read, but to get to the quick bottom line is they got these 12 hits and allegedly Mr. Kallstrom said, hey, this is evidence.
This is physical evidence of a quote, criminal act.
Allegedly, they turned us around and said we have to corroborate it with further backup analysis.
Now, the problem with doing that is the trace levels were so low because this stuff goes into solution and salt water real fast to begin with, and it was washed in fresh water before they sniffed it.
They did get the hits, but now it's so nebulous that unless you use the same equipment, you probably won't get the hit again.
And the way they do those counterchecks is they use a different method.
And the other method was less sensitive than the tactical equipment that was used there when they brought the stuff ashore.
So bottom line is, they only got two positives when they rechecked with inferior equipment at the FBI lab.
And based on that, they said those two positives were from inside the cabin and They tied it to a dog training test that was done in St.
Louis, which again is stretching the imagination pretty far.
If you're asking my, tactically it would be extremely easy.
picture of how easy it would be for a terrorist, this is a surface terrorist situation, how
easy it would be for a terrorist or some entity to come in, set up a rocket launch and escape?
If you're asking my, tactically it would be extremely easy.
If you ask me, could I do it if I had access to the right weapon, yeah.
And the way to do it would be to use a ship that's probably 70 or 80 feet long, a small boat or a small ship.
And the timing of this thing is perfect for a terrorist act because the sun was literally going down when the missile was fired.
It was fired, I believe, from the data I've got, from inland to sea, so if you miss, uh... the weapon goes way out to see
you know and if but if you hit uh... that the chaos
created practically would would allow anybody to escape
uh... because the everybody's attention immediately goes to a rescue effort
situation the fire is just so awesome you can see it from a hundred fifty miles away at that uh...
i'll look at Caller, if you have another question, I'm going to have to hold you over.
You want to hold?
Yes.
All right.
Mr. Donaldson, we have yet one hour to go.
Is there a way people can press or people can contact you?
Probably the best way to do that would be through accuracy in media in Washington, D.C.
Instead of coming directly to me, I hate to give out my personal number.
Oh, I don't do that.
Can you give their number?
Yeah, boy.
I may be putting them with the size of your audience.
I may overwhelm them here.
I don't have it right handy.
I can get it, though, shortly.
All right.
Very good.
People can find the accuracy and media number in Washington, D.C., anyway.
And short of that, folks, Mr. Donaldson suggests you jot off a postcard or a letter to the Chairman of the Aviation Subcommittee, James Duncan, and urge a congressional investigation.
Correct, sir?
Right.
There is already a low-level investigation going on, but what they need to do is to complete that, and after the NTSB comes in with their findings, have a Go into a committee hearing.
Good enough.
Hold on.
We'll be right back to you.
This is Coast to Coast AFL.
From the Kingdom of Nine, Coast to Coast AM continues with Art Bell.
All right, back now to Bill Donaldson.
And Bill, I'm glad you've stayed with us.
A few facts, questions, and then back to the phones.
From David in Anchorage, Alaska.
Normally, when an aircraft such as the B747 has a major accident, the first thing the FAA does is ground them all Until they figure out what's wrong in this case, not only did it not happen, but very little at all has been heard from Boeing.
That's true.
And let me explain something about the average person doesn't realize the effect the NTSB has or the authority that they have by law to do these investigations.
The worst thing that can happen to Boeing or to TWA is to make a public statement that is divisive or not totally supportive of the NTSB.
Because if they do that, the NTSB has the authority to sever them from the investigation.
And that means that their investigators, the corporate investigators, are no longer privy to the inside information.
That's assuming that they really are to begin with, but it leaves them very vulnerable.
So you're not going to hear anything that's negative come from either Boeing or TWA until there's a final resolution on this.
And then they have to worry about the next accident and whether there's any paybacks.
So I hate to be so brutally blunt about this, but it's a typical question.
Why doesn't Boeing stand up to them?
Why doesn't TWA?
Well, they really can't, because they have a fiduciary duty to their stockholders, and the government's got the ultimate big hammer.
All right, in this, Art, as I recall, Flight 800 took the place of another 747 that was delayed, and I often wondered who or what the other passenger list, the other plane, was.
Do you know anything about that?
Well, I think there's some truth to the fact that LL That was reported pretty quickly that they were in the same block time and they slid for maintenance reasons or some other reason for at least 30 minutes.
And then there was immediate supposition that maybe Netanyahu or one of the Israeli officials was on board.
In fact, I thought that was a possibility for quite a while until I finally was able to track down where Netanyahu was.
In fact, I think he was in Tel Aviv the day before and he was in Egypt the day after.
But it's not unusual for Israeli government officials to travel without announcing their travel plans.
That would have been, obviously, sort of a double hit if you're looking at it from the terrorist point of view.
Sure, I believe that the only major airlines never to experience a terrorist incident would be El Al, isn't that correct?
As far as I know, because in fact I can tell you from being stationed in Italy that if you remember that one incident where I think it was an American nine-year-old girl killed, there was a terrorist attack directly on the airport waiting area there in Rome.
In fact, there was a simultaneous attack I think in another European city.
In any case, what I'm getting at here is the reporting that came out of that incident Probably led people to believe that it was the Italian security people that gunned down these, I think it was four or six terrorists that were rolling hand grenades into the crowd, literally.
But it wasn't.
It was El Al undercover security people that were working as ticket agents and things like that.
They pulled Uzi submachine guns out of somewhere and they did those people in right there in front of the world.
And it's that kind of security That their security is extremely good.
I mean, we just don't have anything that touches it.
And they have to have that or they're just a small country with about four million people and they're the constant target of these people.
I was in Jerusalem about two months ago and it seemed like about every other person carried a gun.
Right.
You know, in the irony here, and it's the old American West idea in a way, if everybody's armed, you end up with a real polite society.
That's right.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Bill Donaldson.
Good morning.
Hello, Mr. Donaldson.
Yes, sir.
Your information is very compelling tonight, especially the debris field.
Briefly, I have two points that I'd like you to comment on.
Where are you, caller?
Calling from Ohio.
All right.
I have a close relative who's a pilot for TWA.
A couple of months ago, he lent me a copy of the book, Downing of TWA Flight 800, which I think everybody should read.
First, the book describes some coordinated military exercises in the area, and second, it also reports about FBI seizure and cover-up of evidence of an orange missile fuel residue found on seat fabric in the suspected missile path through the cabin.
Can you shed any light on these points?
As to the first part, that book had a large leap in logic on that military exercise.
There just isn't any real evidence that that occurred, that there was a big military exercise out there.
Now, the residue on the seats, I'm a little bit... I don't know how to really answer that without having access to the alleged test on the stuff.
But the seats in that area were in a very high-impact zone, and there is a hole.
The one I described goes right through that area.
I just give that one a toss-up because I really don't know.
I hate to say that it was rocket fuel or any one particular thing, but the FBI is saying it was nothing but gum residue or adhesive residue.
That's possible, too.
I can't answer that one with any kind of certainty.
The book had put forth an explanation of a missile with an inactive warhead passing through the cabin.
I see way too much vantage for that.
I don't know.
First of all, the hole is only about six inches in diameter.
So you don't believe that kinetic energy was involved?
It's technically possible, because a missile can be traveling three times the speed of sound, and if it hits main structural parts of the aircraft, it could deliver what would ultimately be a serious or fatal blow.
I see in this debris field, this thing just totally was disintegrated right from the very beginning, and it is a wide fan area of everything.
I mean, seats, all kinds of parts from outside the airplane and inside the airplane.
In fact, the first ten pieces of debris, there's only one piece of external debris in the first ten.
In other words, you get stuff from inside the cabin.
The integrity of the cabin was immediately lost.
And really, the best way to describe this when you look at it is it was like a freight train.
I don't know that an inert missile... I think the airplane would fly further and would shed parts for a lot longer time if that's what hit the airplane.
All right.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Bill Donaldson.
Hello.
Where are you, please?
My name's Gabriel in L.A.
Yes, Gabriel.
I just wanted to follow up on what we were talking about before, but I just... Gabriel, you're only allowed to call once.
I appreciate the effort, but that's a hard, fast rule here.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Bill Donaldson.
Hi, it's Ron in Houston.
Yes, Ron.
I want to go back to this thing about... He mentioned an El Al airplane.
I have a friend whose wife is pretty far up in...
I think British.
I don't know how far up, but connected enough that this is the rumor I heard through him that was going around the airline industry right after that happened.
As a matter of fact, Art, it kind of tied in with I was listening to you the night before that it happened.
A lady called in and said the moment that our esteemed president was informed of this, he paled and, you know, got really shaky and was really shaken up badly.
And he was kind of panicky from what I heard.
But anyway, there was two TWA airliners on the path, one right in front of the other one.
Right.
Now, one of them went up to take off, and it started to take off, experienced some kind of minor difficulty.
And since there was a TWA flight right behind it, it could drop off, let that TWA flight take off, And then correct it, if it could correct its problem, then it could go on and enter the flight pattern behind that airplane and leave.
And there would be no record of it.
And that is, in fact, what happened.
And 800 came up second.
But the first one, supposedly, was full of, uh, was headed for Tel Aviv and it was full of a lot of high-ranking Israeli dignitaries and political powers.
And I've, you know, I don't know if that's That's an interesting point.
In fact, when you look at the radar, Flight 900 was only, I think, about 10 miles behind Flight 800 when it went down.
TWA Flight 900.
Now that you've mentioned that, I think I need to check and see where the destination of Flight 900 was, and if that happened, as you described, because that's an interesting Very interesting scenario that would lead to motive a little better, if that's true.
Oh, West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Bill Donaldson.
Good morning.
Good morning, Art.
Hi, where are you?
I'm calling, I'm Tim calling from Spokane, Washington.
Yes, Tim.
I spent a number of years over in Germany with the U.S.
Army, and I was a red-eye missile team chief.
These are the shoulder-fired, they're like a bazooka.
The predecessor to the Stinger.
Right, right.
The Stinger replaced it.
But the Red Eye, a lot of them used to be stored at the Miesel Army Depot right around the border of Germany and France.
And during our tour of duty over there, one of our responsibilities was to go over there and guard that place.
And in our indoctrination, one of the first things they told us was how people would just walk into that place like a supermarket.
And they had a lot of security measures, but it seemed that Red-Eye Missiles, the Stingers, Tow Missiles, Law Missiles, would just walk out of the place.
And so it would be very easy for somebody to get a hold of something like that on the black market, I'm sure.
Alright, that's a pretty good question.
Bill, how hard would it be for you, you've got a big military background, to get a hold of a missile that could do what had to be done to bring down Flight 800?
Could you do it?
If you had money and set out to do it, could you get it?
With the Soviet Union breaking up and all the subordinate countries it broke down into with their various missile and military inventories, the answer is probably yes.
If you're a multi-millionaire, maybe from the Mideast, you might be able to pull off a buy of some kind and maybe even finance something.
You know, a ship at sea or whatever, but, you know, all that's pretty much speculation.
The one thing that I do want to address about the Red Eye and the Stinger is that I don't think either one of those missiles could have possibly been the culprit here, because they have tiny warheads.
They're very small.
They're obviously designed to be shoulder-fired, so, you know, you couldn't put a 900-pound missile on your shoulder and launch it, but you could.
The sky is something I've got very easily in a boat, or on a boat, under a lifeboat or life raft, and just unmask it and fire it when you're in range.
So I just wanted to say that it's not likely that it's a shoulder-fired heatseeker, because it would have to be the golden BB to even get to the altitude, number one.
And when it got there, about the best it would do is maybe cripple one engine and the pilot would turn around and go back and land and probably everybody would have been fine.
So it would take a lot more explosive power?
Oh yeah.
What I'm looking at in this debris field is far more than what you're going to get out of a kerosene pop in a tank or a shoulder fired small little missile like that.
Alright.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Bill Donaldson.
Hi.
Yes, hi.
My name is Joe, calling from Fairbanks, Alaska.
Yes, sir.
On June 1997, I received a newsletter from James Bogue Wright.
He said, drawing upon his 30 years plus experience in the military, he said that the U.S.
Navy and Army were conducting a final acceptance test of an AGC-C system in that area, and they did launch an inert Navy anti-missile missile, which brought down that aircraft.
Yeah, that's basically the storyline that And I think in that time, a lot of people jumped on it because it seemed logical, but really, believe me, the media, if the one thing a lot of the liberal media likes to do is sort of step on the military when they get a chance, it seems, and I think they really did dig into this pretty quick, and they just couldn't come up with anything.
Like I said earlier in the show, I personally knew the Chief of Staff down at Air Lant.
That's the Navy command that owns all the aircraft carriers on the East Coast.
And, excuse me, they were baffled about this.
I mean, the ships just weren't there.
That's the bottom line.
The fact that Pierre Selinger made such a big splash when he made his announcement, and then, of course, later was Very much discredited.
Right.
Didn't all that make it an awful lot easier for the CIA and FBI to come along later?
Right.
For the current scenario to be more believable for sure.
And that's a shame because, you know, if they'd have stopped it in the book where it got to the point that, you know, here's the evidence for the missile attack, it would have been far better.
And if Pierre Salinger had just said, It appears that a missile shot the airplane down.
And I met him when he was in Washington here.
Basically, what he told me and the audience he was talking to... Bill, hold tight.
We'll pick up on that after the break.
this is close close to him all right back down to build all of them who's up very late
because he's back I think you're in Maryland, aren't you, Bill?
That's correct, Art.
So the sun is not far from coming up back there.
Yeah, I'm facing west, but yeah, I think you're right.
All right, we don't have long to go.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Bill Donaldson.
Hello.
Hello there.
No, I guess not.
Oh, I didn't push the right button.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Bill Donaldson.
Hello.
He says.
Hello there!
No, East of the Rockies.
Let's try that.
You're on the air.
Okay, for some reason we're not getting audio from these folks.
And I don't have any idea what that reason could be.
Very strange.
I'm not used to this happening.
Let me try one more time.
A wild card line.
You're on the air.
Hello?
I can barely hear the person in the background.
Bill, very unusual.
I wonder what possibly could be causing this.
I can't hear him either.
While you're working on that, I could finish that comment about Pierre Salinger.
Oh, absolutely.
You met with him, you said.
Right.
And the gist of what he really told some press people at a meeting there in D.C., and I was sitting there with him, is that the French had gone through a similar situation where they had apparently I've been doing some missile testing in the Mediterranean, and they accidentally shot down an aircraft.
I don't know how long ago this was, maybe over 20 years ago, and it took them 10 years to admit to the fact.
So he was very much swayed by what the French had done, and immediately jumped to the conclusion that the Americans had done the same thing.
But, you know, like a lot of times when you make an assumption, You often get in trouble and I think that's the case here.
When you hear phone numbers, please do not call.
Now, please enjoy this encore presentation of Art Bell.
East of the Rockies, you're on air with Bill Donaldson.
Good morning.
Yes, good morning.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Where are you, sir?
I'm in New York.
All right.
So you're actually not on the air here.
I heard you earlier.
Right.
First of all, could I ask you what rank Mr. Donaldson was?
Well, I was a Navy Commander.
It's the same as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force.
Okay.
Well, Commander, I commend you for exonerating the Navy.
I think you did that.
I always found that kind of preposterous.
Is that correct?
You're doing that?
Well, I wouldn't just say the Navy.
I've worked with a lot of command and control systems at sea, and the scenario that was in the book was totally unrealistic, because the one cardinal rule that you always do, safety-wise, is you never fire a missile in any proximity of a large population or shipping lanes or air lanes.
I can tell you, and this would apply to the Army and to all the services, that the general officers and the admirals that approve these exercises would probably fire a junior officer that came to them with such a screwy plan.
I don't have to say it any other way than that, but it's a persistent thought.
There are people on Long Island that very firmly believe that the Navy was involved And that maybe even the Army was in it, and a whole bunch of other folks.
But I can't find the evidence, and I trust the people that I was in the service with.
I personally know the Chief of Naval Operations.
I haven't talked to him about this, but that's all I can tell you.
I know I'm an ex-naval officer, and it sounds like I'll make an excuse if you believe the military is involved.
No, I don't believe it.
That's fine.
What I want to go over is three hours of programming.
Just very quickly, going back to Colonel Major Myers at the beginning of the show, at the very beginning of his interview, I think he said that it looked like a shooting star, the trajectory.
Did he hold to that?
Because a shooting star or meteorite would always be from high elevation to low elevation.
I have never heard of Well, I think what happened in his case is that he didn't see the vertical portion of whatever was involved there.
if it's off, coming in at a tangent to the earth, but then eventually it will, you know,
cascade downward.
I'm not sure if he stuck to that or not.
That certainly can't be a missile from the surface, obviously.
Well, I think what happened in his case is that he didn't see the vertical portion of
whatever was involved there.
I think what he looked up, he was seeing the thing moving horizontally with a slight down
trajectory from his perspective.
Now, you have to remember he was only at 200 feet and he was looking up at something that was at 13,700 feet where the aircraft was.
And depending on the aspect here, a missile that was going outbound and crossing from his left to his right may give a trajectory to him that would look like that.
The key to me is that It was fast.
It was really moving fast.
And that totally destroys the CIA tape, the idea that the airplane... First of all, they're attributed to doing something that's impossible to do, and that's climb 3,000 feet.
TWA has made a statement on the record that the airplane can't climb that fast to make that tape valid.
Even if it was a perfectly normal airplane, okay?
And so, Myers' statement fits where the object was compared to where everybody else saw it, and the relative speed is a key that points to a missile.
All right.
Well, that's fine.
But where I began to have a problem with some of your testimony tonight was when you obviously start bringing in political considerations.
You see, I've been thinking of what would be a motivation for a cover-up all along.
All right, well that was clearly, though, stated as speculation, and I asked him to speculate on that.
All right, but you see, when you talk about motivation, Art, and Mr. Donaldson, you know, your scenario is terrorism.
That would be, from the Iranians, no less, as one possible consideration.
Yeah, I could be any one of three or four different What I call rogue nations.
Well, you see, a very simple political analysis that anybody could figure out is that at the time, in the summer of 96, if anything would assure President Clinton of re-election, it would be an attack from a rogue nation.
It would be a terrorist attack.
There would be no political motivation to cover that up.
Oh, I disagree 180%.
i would not be a great by disagreeing a hundred and eighty percent of the
water uh... my i think that uh... indeed
uh... seeing uh... something like that particularly when there could be no
response because they'd had no idea who did it
uh... there could be no attack uh... would assure a defeat
I I would agree with that.
And the reason is that it wouldn't matter who the President was at that timing, or even what his politics are, He's presented with a problem that he's had basically an act of war committed on our own territory, and he can't figure out who to strike.
That would be a dilemma for anyone.
That's an apolitical statement on that, but when you look at who was running and When November came along, and if the American people thought that we'd come under terrorist attack and there was no response, you've got a guy like Mr. Dole, who was a World War II hero, and you have Mr. Clinton to pick from.
I personally think that if it was a terrorist attack and it became known, then that would have been extreme jeopardy for the Clinton administration.
Oh, I think so.
I think politically people would have run to Dole at that point.
Despite their apparent boredom with his campaign, certainly they would have run toward him.
That's a pretty simple political conclusion.
Bill, do you think it's possible or likely that what was done was in retaliation for our downing of an Iranian commercial aircraft?
That's an interesting speculation because I keep looking to that.
The Pan Am 103 disaster, which Preceded this by some years under the Bush administration, was never really answered either.
We picked on Gaddafi and blamed him in the scenario that came out of that investigation, but there are also tentacles that point into other rogue nations on that deal.
This is all speculation here because I'm not on the inside of the government, but it could be that That this is the hot ticket item for those folks in that part of the world to, you know, to lever the American administration, whoever it might be.
Well, it's horrible to imagine that we would accept such a quid pro quo, but if you look at Pan Am 103 or you look at the downing of the Iranian airliner, Airbus, could we sort of simply Except the downing of Flight 800 quietly and call it even at the international level and hope that nothing else would happen and would that be a reason and a motivation for concluding the investigation as they're apparently trying to do now?
Well, I guess you could go through that rationale, but I personally would, from experience, The one lesson we should learn in our short history as a nation is that when we've been strong and when we've answered threats with direct confrontation, we fare far better than sticking our head in the sand.
It goes without question, Bill, but that was then.
This is now.
That Airbus incident, a lot of people don't realize it, but the captain of the Vinciennes was actually under surface attack when that happened.
I don't know whether you remember that, but the Iranians were firing on him from gunboats.
Gunboats, I recall that, yes.
Yeah, he was entering with five-inch shells fired from a forward mount, and then all of a sudden they get this contact without a transponder taken off out of Tehran.
The Board of Inquiry found the American captain totally within his rights of protecting his ship.
Sure, I'm not looking at it as we might, but rather as they might.
Right, and I'm sure it really wouldn't have mattered, but the real culprit in that incident, from a safety standpoint, was that Iran was committing basically an attack against an American military vessel in international waters, and at the same time allowed one of their commercial airliners to take off right over top Without turning his transponder on.
All that captain would have had to have done is to make sure the transponder switch was in the on position and the MCN's equipment would have identified him as a friendly airliner.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Bill Donaldson.
Hi.
Good morning, Mark.
Good morning, Bill.
Where are you, sir?
I'm calling from KABC in Los Angeles.
All right.
I have a couple questions.
I actually want to let you know a little research that I had done on this regarding this.
Ray Bream, former late-night talk show host from here in Los Angeles, has a close personal friend of many years named Captain Richard Russell out of Florida.
He's a retired 747 pilot.
Are you familiar with him?
Oh, yeah.
I've been down and I've looked at his tape.
Okay.
Well, then you've heard about his phone call he received right after the downing.
I haven't talked to him in a long time, but he and Pierre Selinger I know met several
times and even went over to Paris.
Right, but originally within about an hour to two hours after the plane was down, Richard Russell received a phone call from somebody within the Department of Defense stating that we had taken it down.
And that was the first thing that he got out of the blue.
And beyond that, looking for a possible motive, I did some research right after the plane went down.
Contacted the French Embassy or Consulate here in Los Angeles.
And I asked, was there any real critical French passengers on that aircraft?
And the one name that I received when they faxed me over a manifest was a name of a guy named Rodolphe Moreau, mid to late 20s, son of the president of Moreau Pharmaceuticals, the largest pharmaceutical company in France.
And he was returning from a multiple month work In Africa, working with a tribe that had contracted AIDS, but did not get the AIDS symptoms, and he'd been working on a vaccination or an anti-something or other, I'm not familiar with all the pharmaceutical terms, but had made a trip back to the United States on his way back to France, and he was on that aircraft with much of the research that he had worked on in Africa.
And that's never been brought out in anything I've ever heard of here in the United States.
I had to get that directly from the French.
Are you familiar with him at all, or his research?
No, I hadn't really, and I hadn't concentrated on the passengers.
I sort of left that... I figured that was really the FBI's bailiwick.
I mean, they're pretty good at tracking that stuff down normally.
You're going at this more like a forensic expert might go after a murder scene.
In other words, you're into the hard evidence, the debris field, the impact, what it would have taken, how it could have been done.
Right.
And how it wasn't, and what didn't happen.
Right.
And again, your conclusion is that there is no way this could have been a simple mechanical failure.
No.
And that it just, none of the physical evidence really supports what is being said, and the unprecedented way that it's been done with this gigantic public relations pitch.
I can tell you normally a commercial airliner goes down, it's happened before, The military never even gets involved.
The government stays out of it.
Normally, they call in the insurance underwriters, and they get civilian salvage teams to go down and look at whatever they can recover.
The military involvement in this was immediate, wasn't it?
It was immediate, and I think it was ordered right out of the White House or somebody in the direct chain of command.
It makes sense on one way that the Navy does have some very good equipment.
But it isn't normal procedure.
Let's put it that way.
And I mean, if it was, the whole thing is, there were so many eyewitnesses that said that it was a missile on media or looked like something went up and hit the airplane.
The reaction, I think, was to contain the, to find out what happened.
And then I think they ended up containing what they found.
Well, Bill, we're about the end of the show here, and again, I would ask that the audience contact Chairman of the Aviation Subcommittee, James Duncan, and request a congressional investigation be continued.
These are sad days in America, Bill.
Well, I hate to leave the show on a negative note.
I know this is hard for a lot of people to think about this.
I always kind of lean back on something that I hold very precious, and that's the Constitution.
There isn't really any administration that can hurt this country, no matter how bad it is.
The way the Constitution is constructed, if we all just remember what it says and stick to the rules, time will get us past through any of this.
Well, I hope that time level brings the truth, and time doesn't bring the ability As we do too frequently to revise history.
Right.
And the last memory of Flight 800 is not the CIA cartoon, but rather a comprehensive investigation that is way overdue at the congressional level.
So Bill, I want to thank you for being here, and I hope what we have done tonight will bear fruit.
Art, I sure appreciate the opportunity to speak to your listeners, and you have a good day now.
You too.
Take care, Bill.
That's it, folks.
Bill Donaldson.
I appreciate you all listening to this, and I felt it was long overdue in view of the report last week.
In fact, it demands attention.
Tomorrow night, Major Ed Daines is going to be my guest, and if you've been wondering as I have what this discontinuity is, the mystery ends tomorrow night.
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