Art Bell hosts retired military aviation expert William "Bill" Donaldson, who challenges the official TWA Flight 800 crash narrative, citing eyewitnesses like Fred Myers (FBI-interviewed helicopter pilot) and Richard Goss (Long Island hobbyist) who saw a missile-like object strike the plane on July 17, 1996. Donaldson argues the center fuel tank’s near-empty state (50–100 gallons) and Jet A1’s high ignition threshold (127°F) make spontaneous explosion impossible, while debris patterns suggest external detonation. He suspects a White House cover-up post-election, alleging suppressed Navy whistleblower protections and FBI evidence tampering, including explosive residue on seat fabric. Meanwhile, Dr. Joseph Gold reveals hydrazine sulfate, a $0.10 drug proven in global trials but dismissed by the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) due to its threat to the $200B cancer industry. Both cases expose systemic failures—one in aviation safety, the other in medical suppression—undermining public trust in institutions. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning, wherever you may be.
And wherever you may be, I say you should brace yourself for what is coming this night.
As you all know, Kathy Keaton Guccioni has passed on.
We have interviewed Bob Guccioni now twice, the late Kathy Keaton Guccione once, and throughout, at least 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 that seems like it just can't get legs and walk into people's lives who have received a generally fatal prognosis with stage four 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.
It looks like it's got at least part pit bull in it.
She's a sweetie, just a lover.
And she's, I don't know, four to six months, something like that.
And you guys know me.
I'm Cat Person.
I'm last person to 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.
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, Richard.
Dr. Gold, I, of course, have followed the very sad story of the late Kathy Keaton Guccione.
I had Bob Guccione on first.
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?
unidentified
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.
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?
unidentified
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 going to stop a lot of cancer deaths, and you're going to cause people to live with a high quality of life.
How did you discover this use of hydrazine sulfate?
unidentified
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, the 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.
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 asked our colleagues at other places to test too.
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.
all right arm in what percentage of 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.
unidentified
How many people?
Sure.
Well, 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 in its very advanced stages or stage four 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.
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?
unidentified
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 trials, clinical trials, that have not shown 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, or tranquilizers.
But under an investigation by the General Accounting Office, they were forced to publish a year later that they indeed used tranquilizers in 94% of their patients.
So, In your opinion, rendering their study totally invalid?
unidentified
Oh, totally invalid.
It's been known for 25 years that tranquilizers are incompatible with hydrazine sulfate.
And we, in fact, we 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.
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, week, month, whatever.
unidentified
The institute, the Syracuse Cancer Research Institute, does not sell or distribute hydrazine sulfate, but it could be gotten around the country from other places.
It depends how much you pay.
But you're going to pay very little.
Let's put it this way.
If your physician or a 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 car load for a 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.
All right, so that the audience might understand, Doctor, traditional treatments for cancer, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation.
How would you imagine or do you know hydrazine sulfate in any stage of cancer would compare when we're talking about remissions or whatever stage of helping a cancer patient, how would you compare hydrazine sulfate's use to radiation, chemotherapy, whatever?
unidentified
Well, I would say that hydrazine, there's a two-part answer to that question.
Hydrazine by itself, in about 50% of the patients, induces nothing.
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.
unidentified
Absolutely.
The doctors treating them should explain that to them as part of their informed consent.
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?
unidentified
Okay, first of all, Art, this shouldn't be done by people by themselves.
It's just done under a doctor's or a qualified health professional's care.
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 pizzas.
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.
We're going to take a break here at the bottom of the hour, Doctor.
So relax for a few moments.
When we come back, if what Dr. Gold, who heads the Syracuse Cancer Research Institute, is saying, if what he is saying is true, then there is just 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, getting it, well, actually, it is on the market, I guess, but as a cancer drug, and noticed by doctors and pharmacology labs.
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's cancer researchers and pharmaceutical companies and physicians, why have they not embraced this as a tremendous assist to keeping people alive?
unidentified
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 10 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.
I could say that the drug was developed by a very small institute then on a small budget.
I could say 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.
All right, the National Cancer Institute conducted tests that you regard as absolutely flawed.
It's my understanding the 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?
unidentified
The person who did that was the chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittees 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.
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?
unidentified
Well the NCI admitted in the journal when they published that they did use incompatible agents.
They did use tranquilizers in 94% of their patients.
Then they said they don't consider that a flawed study.
And that, you understand?
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.
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 GAS investigation, he is now retired.
I believe he's only in his 40s, which is unheard of.
Let me say something to you that I said to Bob Guccioni, and maybe you can react to it.
Here we have a drug that you clearly state with a 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 much of a believer in, 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.
unidentified
It's very, very hard for me to reconcile to.
I, like you, believe that also.
But here are the real facts.
Take a country like Russia now.
After 17 years of clinical multi-centric testing of this drug in Russia via the joint U.S.-then-USSR 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.
And 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, hydrocene sulfate became an approved drug in Canada by medical prescription.
Now, this so infuriated the National Cancer Institute that, you know, the National Cancer Institute has a journal, it's called the JNCI, that the JNCI published in the spring an article chiding, actually, the Canadian government for allowing this.
And 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 word.
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.
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.
unidentified
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 health care 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.
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.
unidentified
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 now, that a major pharmaceutical company says to heck with this, to heck with the MCI, we're going ahead and sponsor this drug through the FDA anyway.
Indeed, from the high deserts stretching in the west from the Tahitian and Hawaiian Island Shanes 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, a WABC in New York, I did an 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 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 a training of bomb-sniffing dogs.
On September 16th of 1996, James Kellstrom, 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 tour 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 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 A4, long military record of course, an A4 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 A4 US-2 pilot maintenance officer.
He has been an A6 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, had 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.
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.
Fred Myers 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.
unidentified
All right, 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.
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.
Most smaller anti-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.
unidentified
Well, I had seen SAM-1s, and they were pretty old logs, telephone pole-type runs.
But there was nothing about this that was unique and said to be this is a missile.
So I can't make that determination that it absolutely was a missile, because it could have been a number of other things.
All right, Major, where were you specifically in the air in this Blackhawk when you saw this?
Where were you?
unidentified
All right, 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 center line 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.
I was just up in Alaska and was in a Blackhawk, 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?
unidentified
No.
We didn't have the forward-looking infrared radar, which is a 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.
So at this point, we're strictly what we call them, Mark I 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.
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.
But after the event, I talked to several people whom I've known for 15, 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, being civilians, they described it as a Roman 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.
And Art, 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 Myers saw, when you draw the line on the Bering 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 the exactly the same place in the sky, and it was well inland of the track of the aircraft.
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 A.M. All right, 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 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.
unidentified
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 96, I went to the FBI trailer at the East Merchant'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 2.5 by 4 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.
I take it at some point you said, what the hell's going on?
Went back again?
unidentified
Well, actually, there was a meeting approximately two weeks later.
My co-pilot was very dissatisfied with 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.
And during that meeting, I told, 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's 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 TAO lived in Sena 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 Now, from the Kingdom of Nigh, more coast-to-coast a.m. with Art Bell.
Major, since you were flying a National Guard helicopter, would you have been aware of any military exercises, live-fire military exercises, going on in the 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?
unidentified
Might not, because if it were happening in the, if it were a Navy exercise in Whiskey 106, 10 miles south of the beach, and we were only planning to be two miles south of the beach, they probably would not have notified me.
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 ordinance detonation.
How certain are you that's what it was?
unidentified
Look, I just look back on 25 years experience in the air, and I can say that, you know, just give it the duck test.
My old buddy John Simnunu, if it looks like a duck, if it 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.
And 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.
Please lead us through what you know and what you saw.
unidentified
Yeah, that evening, you know, I belong to that West Hampton Yacht Squadron.
And the West Hampton Yacht Squadron faces south, you know, the back porch on it.
And that particular Wednesday evening, we have an informal sunfish race, and that's followed by a porch dinner.
And that dinner, you bring your own food, and you have a little barbecue in the back, and then we gather there on the back porch, and it faces Marich's Bay and the Barrier Beach Dune Road.
And we had just finished up our Wednesday race.
I raced in that particular race, and we finished stowing our boats and putting our sails away.
And I had just walked up onto the back porch and sat down at the table that some of my friends were at.
And I was looking out over the bay, just relaxing from just this mild race.
We were having a beautiful evening, very clear, light wind, light to moderate wind.
And I just happened to look out over the bay and there was a little conversation.
And then out of the corner of my eye came a, you know, I saw like a flare coming up, you know, toward the Barrier Beach area.
It looked like a flare, and then 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 red, pink, you know, flare.
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, were in fact seeing fuel trailing from the explosion of Flight 800, and that, in fact, it was not going up, it was going down, and it was an optical illusion.
Bill, even if we were to buy into the explanation that it was trailing fuel that was on fire, is there any way you could imagine that the trailing fuel would have taken a sharp left-hand turn?
What Richard describes is the perfect layman's description of a missile engagement.
You know, 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.
And 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 appear 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 a fireworks.
And I've got lots of stuff we can talk to later on.
Would you characterize their investigation as one that initially the agents were very interested in, and then in the both follow-ups you've described, they suddenly had comparatively a great disinterest in what you had to say?
unidentified
A disinterest and yeah, I would say that would be accurate.
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, 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.
All right, I want you to understand who you're about to hear.
William S. Donaldson, Bill Donaldson, we'll call him.
From 1963 2 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 A-4C 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.
74 through 77 was an A4 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 A6 attack pilot and safety officer, qualified air wing alpha strike leader, managed the safety program for deployed A6 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.
80 through 83 was a safety officer, managed aviation safety program for air wings 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 FLANS 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 $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 are discussing, what we've already heard and what we're about to hear, you needed to know who you're listening to.
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, put an article in the Wall Street Journal that basically said that set the predicate for what they're doing now.
He said 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, but I say 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, every one Of these aircraft that the U.S. has ever built, these airliners, all are 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.
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 100-knot headwind at above 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 talk hosts say it was insane to imagine the center fuel tank would have been empty on that long a journey, but that certainly explains it.
And you'd have about a half an inch, 50 gallons of, well, 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 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 him.
You can take the biggest, I actually used two big matches, long matches like you'd use to light a fire in a fireplace.
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.
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.
What I discovered 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.
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.
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 in fuel tanks, and it's absolute nonsense.
And Congress has put them on, you know, 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 center fuel tank configuration?
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.
And I knew that you could get a fuel sample out of that tank in almost no time.
So 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 the head of the National Transportation Safety Board.
All right, 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 by these compressors, I guess, running and to a temperature that finally caused an explosion.
The reason is that when that aircraft was certified 30-some years ago, they go into unbelievable depth into testing, okay, number one.
And 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.
Now, what I found out when I did that little simple two-minute test, it cost me about $15 for a thermos and a thermometer.
Sure.
The NTFD 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?
And they're sticking to this thing like glue to something, and they won't give it up.
But they're in trouble because 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.
Now, you know, I've just spent 10 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.
Under normal flight conditions, even ascending, an airplane underpower ascending, going through 10 to 13,000 feet, there would be no way under those conditions that you would get fuel misting in that center tank.
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, if instead of a 747, we're talking about an F-15, for instance, and it does a lot of aggressive acrobatics, then there is an agitated tank figure that drops the temperature about 50 degrees.
Well, jumping to the bottom line, I think that the highest probability by far is a missile engagement with external warhead detonation well outside the hull of a relatively large missile.
And most people don't have a lot of technical knowledge about this stuff, but it's 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.
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 the extremely high-velocity gas from the detonation and scouring, they call it, where the metal actually looks like it's like an orange peel or something.
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 they'd be in deep trouble.
But there is a through-hole that goes, enters at L2 door, just a little aft of L2 door, on the left side, the second door back on the left.
The six-inch hole, the piece of fragment went through and exited above the R2 door.
And actually, if you look at photographs, you can see that there's a high-velocity penetration coming from the inside going through the structural member right above that door.
Right, that 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 the big piece that contains the door.
When that happened, it was the beginning of the nose coming off the aircraft, which happened very, very quickly.
unidentified
The Air Force
From the Kingdom of Nineveh, across the country, around the world, and throughout the universe, this is Coast to Coast A.M. with Art Bell on the CBC Radio Network.
I mean, I can see, I've got color photographs that show the exit hole, and 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.
It cuts, if you look at the photograph, you'll see what looks like a hatchet cut almost going from the inside out through the, just above that door.
Now, I'm going to tell you some stuff that's a lot, that's even worse than that.
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, why, sir, did this not get into the news?
Why did this not become an integral part of the investigation?
Well, I assume it's the same reason that there's probably 20 or 30 other similar proofs, if you will, of the, 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 an engagement of a weapon, they find some way to deny it or talk around it.
And one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen on television was Mr. Calstrom the other morning in one of the morning shows.
He's telling this young lady that he was taking on tour around the hangar there with the wreckage in it.
He said, well, we've done these missile tests and we've proven it's not a missile.
And he showed her 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 graft 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 in that CIA cartoon is a total fabrication.
And 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 crash.
And this is critical because that whole cartoon, the only way that they can get professionals to even swallow this wine 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 that whatever that was was far, far more powerful than anything that a center wing tank could do.
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 true 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 wingtip.
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 is wingtip antenna debris off the left.
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 goes into the water.
So 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 a 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.
Now, and that's why I described this more like a train wreck at altitude than it was a center wingtank 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 wingtank explosion that's in the center of the airplane.
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.
But the nose section that you see sort of tumbling off, falling down, looking like it's intact, 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 it sort of broke off and fell on the water.
All right, for those who didn't see it, what I saw of this CIA cartoon or graphic representation of what occurred was the plane was going along.
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.
What they're telling you, 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 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.
That's what the debris field is 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 the nose, 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 3,000 feet.
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.
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 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 Air Land 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 was a P-3 airborne in the area that shows up on the radar tapes and so on.
But what I'm trying to say is, I mean, remember, I'm a naval officer.
I mean, I'm in retirement as a regular officer.
I could be recalled tomorrow if the commander-in-chief said he wanted to do that.
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.
Goss 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, couldn't do it.
But he was out at Quag, Docker's restaurant, way, way up the beach, and 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 Hilo thought he saw a missile coming from the left.
I mean, I can't imagine that there really is anything else that could have been.
And there's a reason for this.
It fits, 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, 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, and almost to a T, 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.
And they were on the backside 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.
Shortly, we're going to try to get the phone lines open.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
The End
From the Kingdom of God, across the country, around the world, and throughout the universe, this is Coast to Coast A.M. with Art Bell on the CBC Radio Network.
Now, the key to that is, and where it became very misleading when Mr. Hall presented that to Congress as an answer, that 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.
Some of those packs were just about intact when they found them.
And I have a very strong suspicion that if the NTSB could even pin, could find anything that would support that idea, that it would be made known immediately.
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 push-up.
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.
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 with every passenger, family members of passengers, and none of that has surfaced, that there was a...
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.
Well, here's the if you put the event in the time sequence in history and 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.
So then 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.
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.
I honestly think 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.
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 had been a prediction made by one of these groups of fundamentalists in, 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.
It's 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.
Let's say we have a group that says, okay, if you don't cave in to Arafat or whatever demand is made, the 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.
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 minutiae, 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?
I don't know 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, and what's the end result?
I mean, all I see is really a PR operation directed at the American people by the authorities, political authorities, and various departments in the government.
And my personal belief is I've dealt, I mean, 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, 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 communicated, well, he actually 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 Wheelis Air Force Base.
We left that place in a total rubble.
You know, 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.
And that's that's a I think we all need to learn that lesson every once in a while.
We need strong presidents that will make, you know, you prevent these things by being strong and ready.
And of course we have the even most recent Afrakas 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.
All right, 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.
Believe it or not, this is Coast to Coast A.M. Back now to Bill Donaldson.
Yeah, the problem is that we probably wouldn't get the evidence because 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 to the seeker head on the missile that doesn't have to be taken off.
But with about 500 pounds of hardware and the missile rail, you could bolt it to a superstructure of a small boat, and you have a deadly, I mean a really deadly anti-aircraft weapon.
unidentified
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 PIA did?
Oh, I forgot to talk about nitrogen andering, too.
I'll get right back to that.
But the members of Congress, the one in particular that I talked to was Mr. Trafficant 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 Trafficant the duty to further investigate this mishap.
So 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 andering, 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 JP-4 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.
One single tracer through a partially empty JP-4 tank, you do have volatile fumes in there, particularly when the fuel is cold and the airplane's descending.
There's a window there where the Golden BB could get you a whole big airplane.
And they decided to engineer around that with their C-5, and there may be some combat aircraft, too, that have nitrogen.
or 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 you know it really really rattles the airplane and when I landed back aboard the Intrepidant I didn't have a single hole in the airplane but I believe me I was it
made me a believer in anti-aircraft ordinance so again so we're clear with all of your expertise and all of your knowledge and all you all the work you've done on this 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 there's a reason for that the reason they did this
um they based that they have a tremendous problem with all these eyewitnesses number one what they saw and they found a way to 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 the airplane would be like 42 to 44 seconds of sound travel time
from the airplane uh...
you know explosion point and then they jumped on that they said okay that's these people couldn't have possibly seen anything except after the fact because of this this distance there here's the the fatal flaw is that the people i've talked to didn't 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 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 what see and that's the problem that the CIA tape they didn't talk to those people that were very explicit about this and really do a good sound analysis I'm curious Mr. Donaldson
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, you know, a postcard or something like that.
If people are really interested in the Flight 800 thing, the best thing that could happen is if they convene a congressional inquiry or at least hearings on this thing.
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.
But 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.
I've been inside the center fuel tanks, as he described.
They're about six feet tall.
I'm 5'10.
I can walk through there.
And I know people think, well, you work for the company.
You're going to say good things.
But I know for a fact about the product, but I know for a fact that 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.
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,
would have such a negative impact on the aircraft industry, on tourism, on our own national morale, that they might be indeed inclined to continue a lie.
Well, we're in a supposition here, but my personal answer would be I just can't imagine, knowing the command structure, that 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 the justice they've got to be involved because the f_b_i_ is uh...
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 is telling me that that's extremely rare on a piece of slick aluminum to get a false positive.
What happened was Janet Reno had a meeting and allegedly Mr. Hall, this is 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. Calstrom said, hey, this is evidence.
This is physical evidence of a, quote, criminal act.
Allegedly, they turned this around and said we have to cooperate 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 counter checks 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.
unidentified
Okay, second question.
Can you paint us a picture of how easy it would be for a terrorist or some entity to come in, set up a rocket launch and escape?
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.
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, go into a committee hearing.
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.
Now, 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.
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.
And he was in the, in fact, I think he was in Tel Aviv the day before, and he was in Egypt the day after.
But it's not unusually for Israeli government officials to travel El Al 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.
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.
And 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 there was four or six terrorists that were rolling hand grenades into the crowd, literally.
But it wasn't.
It was LL 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, you know, they're just a small country with about 4 million people and they're the constant target of these people.
And 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.
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.
But I see in this debris field, this thing just totally was disintegrated right from the very beginning.
And it is a wide fanned area of everything.
I mean, seats, all kinds of parts from outside the airplane and inside the airplane.
In fact, the first 10 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.
So 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.
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 got really shaky and was really shaken up badly.
And he was kind of panicky from what I heard.
But anyway, there were not, there was two TWA airliners on the path, one right in front of the other one.
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, was headed for Tel Aviv, and it was full of a lot of high-ranking Israeli dignitaries and political powers.
And I don't know if that's kicking a dead horse that you've already talked about, but it's pointing.
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.
And 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 was true.
Bill, how hard would it be for you, you've got a big military background, to get hold of a missile that could do what had to be done to bring down Flight 800?
If you had money and set out to do it, could you get it?
With the Soviet Union breaking up and with 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 and maybe from the Mideast and 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 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 couldn't put a 900-pound missile on your shoulder and launch it.
But you could disguise something like that 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 heat seeker because it's at the very, 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, that the pilot would turn around and go back and land, and probably everybody would have been fine.
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.
On June 1997, I received a newsletter from James Bogue Wright that he said, drawing upon his 30 years plus experience in the military, he said that the U.S. Navy and Army were conducting final acceptance tests of an AGCC 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 T.R.A. Sellinger?
Yeah, 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.
And like I said earlier in the show, I personally knew the chief of staff down at Airland.
That's the Navy command that owns all the aircraft carriers on the East Coast.
pierre selinger made such a big splash when he uh...
made his announcement and then of course later was very much discredited right didn't didn't all that make it an awful lot easier for the c_i_a_ and f_b_i_ to come along later i think the current scenario to be more believable for for sure
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'd apparently 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 him 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.
unidentified
Thank you.
You're listening to a rebroadcast of one of Art Bell's most popular programs.
When you hear phone numbers, please do not call.
Now, please enjoy this on-core presentation of Art Bell.
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.
And I can tell you that, 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 mean, I don't know how to say it any other way than that, but it's a persistent thought.
I mean, 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 when I was in the service with.
I mean, 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'm making an excuse if you believe the military is involved.
unidentified
No, I don't believe it.
That's fine.
But 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 a meteorite would always be from high elevation to low elevation.
I have never heard of they always have a they could have a somewhat a horizontal trajectory at first if it's off coming in at a tangent to the earth, but then eventually it will cascade downward.
I'm not sure if he's 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 when 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.
And even if it was a perfectly normal airplane.
And so Myers' statement fits where the object was compared To where everybody else saw it, and the relative speed is a key, and that points to a missile.
That could be any one of three or four different rogue nations.
unidentified
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 reelection, it would be an attack from a rogue nation.
It would be a terrorist attack.
There would be no political motivation to cover that.
I think that indeed seeing something like that, particularly when there could be no response because they had no idea who did it, there could be no attack, would assure a defeat.
And the reason is that it wouldn't matter who the president was at that timing or even what his politics are, if 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 people, the American people thought that we'd come under a 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 there was a terrorist attack and it became known, then that would have been extreme jeopardy for the Clinton administration.
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.
And I'm sure, and 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 Ven CN's equipment would have identified him as a friendly airliner.
I have a couple questions, and I actually want to let you know a little research that I've 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.
I think that, well, he and I haven't talked to him in a long time, but he and Pierre Selinger I know met several times, even went over to Paris, I think.
unidentified
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, and I contacted the French embassy or consulate here in Los Angeles.
And I asked, were there any real critical French passengers on that aircraft?
And the one name that I received when they stacked me over a manifest was a name of a guy named Rodolphe Moreau, made the late 20s, son of the president of Moreau Pharmaceuticals, the largest pharmaceutical company in France.
And he was returning from a multiple months work in Africa working with a tribe that had contracted AIDS that 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 in his research?
You're going out 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, and how it wasn't, and what didn't happen.
And again, your conclusion is that there is no way this could have been a simple mechanical failure.
And 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 salvage, civilian salvage teams to go down and look at whatever they can recover.
It was immediate, and I think it was ordered right out of the White House or somebody in the direct chain of command.
And 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 the media or looked like something went up and hit the airplane.
The reaction, I think, was to find out what happened.
And then I think they ended up containing what they found.
And again, I would ask that the audience contact Chairman of the Aviation Subcommittee, James Duncan, and request a congressional investigation be continued.
Well, I hate to leave the show on a negative note.
I know this is a very hard for a lot of people to think about this, but 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.
Bill Donaldson, I appreciate you all listening to this, and I thought it was long overdue in view of the report last week.
In fact, it demands attention.
Tomorrow night, Major Ed Dames is going to be my guest, and if you've been wondering as I have what this discontinuity is, the mystery ends tomorrow night.