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Dec. 1, 1998 - Art Bell
01:20:41
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - TWA Flight 800 Investigation - Cmdr. Bill Donaldson
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Everybody, indeed from the high deserts, stretching in the west from the Tahitian and Hawaiian island chains, eastward to the Caribbean, northward to the North Pole, south all the way into South America and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM.
And let me tell you, referring to my newest affiliate, WABC in New York, I did a interview on their morning show Well, at the end of last week, I think, at the end of the final day of broadcast on WABC, and one of the morning personalities asked me what my view, my opinion of Flight 800 was, and I said, I think it was a missile that exploded adjacent to Flight 800, and I think it was a terrorist.
And, of course, that flies in the face of what we're being told by the FBI, the CIA, And I would imagine the NTSB as well.
To bring you up to date, and to remind you, on July 17th of 1996, TWA Flight 800 bound for Paris blew up off the coast of Long Island shortly after takeoff from Kennedy International Airport, killing all 230 people on board.
Witnesses described a huge fireball in the sky.
July 18th, the FBI takes lead in the investigation.
President Clinton warned the American public against jumping to any conclusions.
Investigators study the bomb, missile, or mechanical malfunction theory as causes.
July 25th, divers recover the plane's so-called black boxes.
Neither one yields any quick answers to the cause.
August 30th.
Traces of RDX, a key ingredient in a plastic explosive, used to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 are found on wreckage.
Investigators later suspect the material got onto the plane during training of bomb-sniffing dogs.
On September 16th of 1996, James Kallstrom headed the probe for the FBI Calls rumors that the plane was felled by a U.S.
missile outrageous.
October 15th, a Boeing engineer says the center fuel tank, the focus of the probe, was designed to leave no chance that an electrical spark could cause an explosion there.
November 2nd, Navy divers completed 15 weeks of terrible work, hard work, Saying they had pulled up all the wreckage they could find.
Fishing trawlers began scraping the ocean floor then for wreckage two days later.
December 4th, CWA stages funeral for unidentified members of Flight 800.
Now, 1997, February 8th, victims' families tore the wreckage at Long Island Hangar Placing roses on the seats where their loved ones sat.
April 29th, crawling for wreckage halted after nearly six months.
June 9th, investigators tell victims' families that the investigation is now in the final phase with no evidence found of a criminal or terrorist act.
A preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board Blames that disaster on a center fuel tank explosion cause unknown but suspected mechanical source.
November 12th.
A victim's father tells the Associated Press he's received a letter from the FBI that says the agency has found absolutely no evidence of a crime and is now suspending its probe into the disaster.
And that is the rough chronology of Flight 800.
I should add, I suppose, one more point.
About a week ago, the CIA released a graphic kind of cartoon image of what they thought occurred with Flight 800.
It was aired by the American media generally for about one day, and then more or less not seen again.
Tonight, I have an aviation expert with us, uh, who is going to talk to us about Flight 800.
He is William, or Bill, Donaldson, and he has a significant history and is well qualified to speak on this subject.
He has been an A-4 long military record, of course, an A-4 attack, uh, pilot line division officer.
He has been an Advanced Jet Flight Instructor, Line Division Officer.
He has been an Assistant Air Operations CCA Officer.
He has been a A-4 US-2 Pilot Maintenance Officer.
He has been an A-6 Attack Pilot Safety Officer.
He has been an Air Operations Officer.
He has been a Safety Officer.
He has been a nuclear plans officer, a chief of staff officer, a military expert who has made a presentation to the Presidential Base Closure Commission.
In other words, he's got nothing but aviation history with him.
We are going to talk to him about the details of what did occur on Flight 800.
We also have two witnesses to what occurred on Long Island that terrible night.
They would be Major Fred Myers, an attorney on Long Island who recently retired from the Air National Guard, who has extensive military pilot history, was active duty Navy helicopter pilot, holds the Distinguished Flying Cross, or pilot rescues under fire in North Vietnam.
That's North Vietnam.
He is a witness to what occurred that night.
We have Richard Goss with us.
He owns a fine woodworking business on Long Island, has some private pilot experience, is an avid radio control airplane model flyer, has very sharp eyesight, and very special spatial awareness Which you must have to fly a model.
Richard is a non-drinker.
He was sitting on the West Hampton Yacht Squadron's patio, looking across Mariches Bay to the Barrier Island, and he saw what he thought was a large firework launched from inland, or from the island, climbing straight up, traveling straight out to sea, leveling off, and then making a hard left turn Just before it exploded.
So, we have an aviation expert, we have two witnesses, and tonight you may hear the untold story of Flight 800.
Let us first now go to William or Bill Donaldson.
Welcome to the program.
Hi Art, glad to be on with you this evening.
Happy to have you.
And we've got a lot to talk to you about, Mr. Donaldson.
I skipped over your resume and did not include a very great deal of the detail of some of the jobs you've had, but basically since about 1958, you've been in aviation one way or the other.
Oh, yeah.
In fact, I'm an Air Force brat.
I mean, I grew up with Air Force fighter pilots before I ever even joined the Navy, so probably 58 years of my life has been pretty totally immersed in tactical aviation.
Okay, we're going to have a lot of detail from you about the Flight 800 business, but I think we should leave the show with two people who actually saw what happened.
And I've got them on the line, and I'm going to see if we can bring them up right now.
They are Richard Goss and Major Fred Myers.
Major Myers, are you there?
Hello, Major Myers.
Okay, I can barely hear you for some reason.
Richard Goss, are you there?
Yes, I am.
I'm here.
Okay, we appear to have a problem.
Maybe not.
How's that?
Oh, much better.
Much better.
Is that Major Myers?
Yes, sir.
What happened?
I just had two phones on the same line.
Oh, I see.
No, you can't do that.
All right.
Very good.
What I think I would like to do, Mr. Donaldson, is to let you ask these gentlemen what they saw.
Okay.
That'll work pretty well.
Fred Meyers and I are sort of kindred spirits because we were in Vietnam at about the same time.
Fred, why don't you go ahead and just go through what you were doing and what you saw, and we'll go from there.
Alright, interrupt me if I get too verbose.
I was up on a routine evening training flight, actually just completing a series of mandatory monthly requirements.
Waiting for the sun to go down before we flew a night vision goggle air refueling mission.
Lights out air refueling.
What were you flying?
I was flying an H-60 Black Hawk helicopter.
And I was scanning the area in the front of and to the right of the aircraft because my co-pilot Was flying an instrument approach and he was head 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 at the 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, and color.
But it was moving from my left center to my further left.
It was almost horizontal, but had a gently descending curve.
Commander, you rescued people in North Vietnam.
You've seen missiles.
Yes, sir.
You know what missiles look like?
Yes, sir.
Is that what this looked like?
It could have been, but nothing at the moment in my head said, clicked and said, this is missile, for a couple of reasons.
uh...
certainly i was looking for a medical obviously yes
and number two the metal working fired in in vietnam normally had
erratic flight path they they they don't described or did not describe a smooth arc in the air
that uh...
to but a little bit that's true most of the smaller aircraft missiles are very
erratic in flight and it's a it's something that every combat pilot would
recognize we should realize that there are many muscles and various
inventories that have rock solid uh... trajectories and uh... that may
not have seen one of those flight
Well, you know, I had seen SAM-1s, and they were pretty old.
Yeah.
Logs, telephone pole-type runs.
But there was nothing about this that was unique and said to me, this is a missile.
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 on this Black Hawk when you saw this?
Where were you?
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 3 to 5 seconds, then it stopped for somewhere around a second, and then immediately to my left, At the end of what would have been the trajectory of that same streak of light and at that speed, in other words, so that I made a conclusion that what I saw had come from the streak of light, although the streak of light had stopped, then just about a second later, further to the left and on approximately the same line, I saw an explosion.
High-velocity explosion.
Looked for all the world to me like Ordinance.
Ordinance.
Like a warhead.
In other words, this would not have been the main body explosion of the fuel tank of Flight 800.
This would have been a sharp, ordnance-type explosion.
That's exactly correct.
Alright, you were in a Blackhawk, Major.
I was just up in Alaska and was in a Blackhawk, and I'm aware of particularly the rescue type's equipment.
You have a lot of heat-sensing equipment.
On board as well as radar and so forth.
Were you able to detect anything on instruments?
No.
We didn't have the... We have forward-looking infrared radar, which is a heat-seeking... Right.
...depicting equipment.
We did not have it energized at the time.
It's normal to wait until after sunset to energize that equipment.
Sure.
It has a cool-down period.
We also have night vision goggles, which we have attached to our helmets, but we have them flipped up above the helmet so that they're not impeding our vision.
Understood.
And they were off.
So at this point, we're strictly what we call a Mark 1 eyeball.
We're flying on our normal vision in broad daylight.
On a beautiful evening with practically no clouds in the sky, just a very slight haze, a scud layer that was more visible lower down than it was at 200 feet.
200 feet of visibility was excellent.
Major, the CIA and the FBI have suggested that what people thought they saw And what they thought, you know, they're calling a missile, people like you, Major, who should know what you see, in fact, didn't see that at all.
What they saw was fuel trailing from Flight 800 that appeared to be a streak of light.
Can you address that?
Well, that's pure fabrication.
What these... Really?
What's going on in the FBI, I don't know.
After the event, I talked to several people whom I've known for 10 or 15 years who are early middle age, 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 as 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.
This is Bill here.
The critical point here in an investigation is that when Richard comes on here shortly, what he saw and what Fred Meyer saw, when you draw the line on the bearing line, They cross about three miles offshore and they cross
correlate with other people up and down the beach.
So the first sight of what appears to have been a missile, there are a whole lot of people
that don't know each other at all that point to exactly the same place in the sky and it
was well inland of the track of the aircraft.
Major, were you interviewed by the FBI?
I was on the...
This happened on a Wednesday evening.
Yes.
And on a Friday afternoon, I sought them out at the East Moriches Coast Guard Station.
Oh, you actually went to them.
Major, hold on.
Everybody hold on.
We're at the bottom of the hour, and we'll pick up on that point when we come back tonight.
Flight 800.
as Paul would say the rest of the story this is Coast to Coast AM.
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.
That's correct.
I sought the FBI out on two occasions.
They never came to me.
And on the Friday after the accident, which would have been the 19th of July, 1996.
I went to the FBI trailer at the East Merge's Coast Guard Station, knocked on the door, told them who I was, and asked them if they would like to take a statement from me.
They seemed surprised and sort of caught off guard.
They assigned two agents.
I sat down in a room.
One of the agents pulled out a little two-and-a-half by four-inch spiral notebook out of his back pocket and a pen.
And I spoke to them for approximately four minutes.
They asked no questions.
He took a couple of notes.
And they said, thank you very much, and I left.
And Art, let me tell you something.
He's not the only one that happened to.
There's an inverted process here.
If you didn't see anything, they wanted to talk to you.
If you saw something very specific, they didn't seem to be too interested.
Major Myers, you said you went to them twice, so you did not hear back from them.
I take it at some point you said, what the hell's going on?
Went back in?
Well, actually there was a meeting approximately two weeks later.
My co-pilot was very dissatisfied with the The fact that the FBI had not interviewed anybody in the crew and had not taken any of the actions that he thought were appropriate.
Now, I'm not making any judgment on that, but he asked us to get together one more time and we did.
During that meeting, I think that was also on a Friday, maybe it was just one week later, I told the rest of the crew about a recurring dream I'd had, which concerned one portion of our flight that night when we were approaching the fireball as it was already in the water.
I had told Chris, who was at the controls, to slow the helicopter down to prevent us from flying under some debris that was still falling from the sky.
And I had a picture in my mind's eye of that debris falling, and I I saw that same picture over and over again, and it disturbed my sleep, kept me up for a week.
It 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 uh... they sent two agents to uh... the public affairs offices house uh... the unit p a o was uh... lived in the center bridges right near the coast guard station so they sent two agents up to talk to me uh... i talked to these two agents for about fifteen or twenty minutes uh... they took notes and uh... they said thank you very much of what
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 Nye, more Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Here again is Art.
Uh, Major, uh, since you were flying a National Guard helicopter, would you have been aware of any military exercises, live-fire military exercises, uh, going on in the area?
Not necessarily.
All right.
Um, the, um... Although it...
It's a gray area.
Now, we were scheduled to fly on an air refueling route.
What this is, is a direct course and speed and altitude.
They're all predetermined.
They're filed with the local air route traffic control of the Federal Aviation.
They know that we're going to be flying approximately two miles south of the beach on a course parallel to the beach at an altitude.
A preset altitude.
So in other words, had there been something going on, if they had not viewed it as a possible conflict to your flight plan, you might not have been notified?
Might not, because if it were happening in the, if it were a Navy exercise in Whiskey 106, ten miles south of the beach, and we're only planning to be two miles south of the beach, they probably would not have noticed.
All right.
Major, I think that we've got as much from you as we can have, except I just want to ask one more question.
The most explosive, no pun intended, part of your testimony is that you saw a high explosive ordnance, a detonation.
how certain are you that's what it was look i just uh... report back on the
twenty five years experience in the air
that that's i can play that uh...
And I'm going to end it there.
You know, just give it the duck test.
My old buddy Johnson Nuno, if it looks like a duck and flies like a duck, it's probably a duck.
And what I saw looked to me, for all the world, like an ordnance explosion.
I don't know what else looks like that.
I might also comment that about a second and a half to two seconds after that ordnance explosion, there was a second high-velocity explosion.
of brilliant white light like nothing I had recall having seen before or since and then about two seconds or three seconds after that there came the petrochemical explosion which was the fuel burning.
And that would have been a probably bright orange.
Bright orange, mottled color, a lot of black, a lot of mottled color and grew to this huge fireball.
The point being, there were two high-velocity explosions before the fuel explosion.
Very clear.
Major, I want to thank you.
Bill, do you have anything else that we've missed that we should ask?
No, there's one point about that bright white light.
Fred is not the only one that saw that, and that is a characteristic of high-velocity fragment penetration of aluminum.
A brilliant white flash, almost like a flashbulb.
It's one of the collateral things that can happen with a warhead detonation.
Warhead.
All right.
Major, I want to thank you for being with us this evening, and I wish you luck, my friend.
Thank you.
Take care.
All right.
That is Major Fred Myers.
We'll now turn our attention to Richard Goss.
Richard Goss, again, owns a business on Long Island.
He is a witness to this event as well.
Are you there, Richard?
Yes, sir.
Please lead us through what you know and what you saw.
That evening, I belonged to that West Hampton Yacht Squadron.
The West Hampton Yacht Squadron faces south, the back porch on it.
That particular Wednesday evening, we have an informal sunfish race, and that's followed by a porch dinner.
At that dinner, you bring your own food, and you have a little barbecue in the back.
We gather there on the back porch, and it faces Morich's Bay and the Barrier Beach Dune Road.
We had just finished up our Wednesday race.
I raced in that particular race.
We finished stowing our boats and putting our sails away.
I just walked up onto the back porch and sat down at the table that some of my friends were at.
I was looking out over the bay, just relaxing.
Just this mild, very clear, beautiful evening, very clear, light wind, light to moderate
wind.
I just happened to look out over the bay and there was a little conversation.
Then out of the corner of my eye I saw a flare coming up toward the Barrier Beach area.
Is there any doubt at all about whether what you saw was going up or down?
Oh, it was definitely going up.
It was definitely going up.
Definitely going up.
And it looked like a flare going up.
It looked like a flare, and then, you know, it drew attention to a couple other people, and they said, you know, someone even mentioned, hey, look at the firework, and we all thought it was a firework, at least I did.
Now I'm just pleasantly watching this bright, you know, red, pink, You know, uh, flare.
there alright could you could you see a richard
anything beyond the light itself in other words could you make out uh...
any substance anything at all beyond the light
now i would hope right you know and it was the typical look of uh... of a firework
Sure.
We all know what they look like.
And you know that light travels quite high up before it reaches its peak, and that's exactly what I saw.
And then, as it reached its peak, it sort of leveled out.
And then the strangest part was, it took a sharp veer left.
And it was horizontal.
You know, it moved horizontal at that point.
And it was only a second or two later that I saw the massive explosion in the sky.
All right, again, Richard, the CIA and others have said that witnesses like yourself, who saw things like you're describing to us right now, Uh, we're in fact seeing, uh, fuel trailing from the explosion, uh, of the, uh, of Flight 800.
Uh, and that, uh, in fact, it was not going up.
It was going down, and it was an optical illusion.
What do you say?
What do you say?
One hell of an optical illusion.
I can't see that possible at all.
Alright, let me try this out.
You saw this thing rising, this light, which you thought was a flare, and it rose to a great altitude and then you said took a turn.
Now, a flare might go up and then in a trajectory might begin down again.
That's not what you're talking about.
You're talking about a horizontal turn that you saw.
Is that correct?
And Richard, give them a feeling of how fast this thing was moving.
Moving up quickly, or did it appear to be going away from you?
Oh yeah, it was very fast.
Faster than a firework climbing.
And then I could see that when it reached its peak, it was definitely traveling away.
The flare was getting smaller and then it took the sharp left and you could see the smoke trail, sharp left.
And you could see a smoke trail?
And then there wasn't the explosion.
Then an explosion.
Did you see, you heard the Major describe what he firmly concludes is a high ordnance explosion, not the kind of explosion that uh... followed with the uh... center fuel tank or the fuel
tanks exploding the fuel and flight eight hundred exploding which is like a
fireball when you say you saw an explosion
what did you see precisely i thought that i thought the large fireball at that point
and then uh... about a second after that there was a second
explosion off to the side off to the left side as that
fireball started to come down the the original fireball that was the
second second explosion
bill even if we were to uh... by into the explanation that it was trailing fuel
that was on fire is there any way you could imagine that uh... the trailing
fuel would have taken a sharp left-hand turn
on our what richard is described as the
the perfect layman's description of a little engagement uh... you know
he when one uh...
when i talk to him after we went out to the art club but i took uh...
very blind precise very quiet disposition
I even photographed that site later.
When I crossed it to these other people up and down 11 miles of beach, they all saw essentially the same thing.
They saw something going vertically rapidly and then appeared to level, go outbound.
And Richard's probably the closest one of the witnesses I've talked to to the actual launch, because it looks like, even though he thought it went from the barrier island as a fireworks, it probably was a missile about another three nautical miles offshore.
And a much bigger vehicle than a flare or fireworks.
And I've got lots of stuff we can talk to later.
Of course, yes, of course.
Richard, did you go to the FBI?
They came to me.
They came to you?
Yes.
And what was the nature of the interrogation or the investigation?
What did they ask you?
What did you perceive of their attitude?
Their attitude when they... There were two agents that interviewed me.
Their attitude was... They were very surprised at the viewpoint that I had.
And they were very excited about what I had seen.
Initially, and this is the first time I've heard Mr. Myers, and he was describing the notepad, the small notepad, out of the back pocket.
That's exactly what they used, and all they used was that same type of notepad and pen.
They jotted down a few things, and the interview was four or five minutes.
Four or five minutes.
And one peeled off and he was speaking on a cellular phone in the background.
And that was about it.
Was that the only interview the FBI held with you or did they come back?
They came back a second time.
And then?
Very little excitement.
This time it was just sort of a follow up.
It was like something had changed?
It was definitely like something had changed.
I just couldn't believe it.
That was it.
It was no excitement, no anything after that.
A third time they had called me on my cell phone in my truck and given me an over the phone interview.
And that was it.
Would you characterize their investigation as one that initially the agents were very interested in, and then in both follow-ups you've described, they suddenly had, comparatively, a great disinterest in what you had to say?
A disinterest in... yeah, I would say that would be accurate.
Um, you're not a drinker?
No, sir.
You don't take drugs?
No, sir.
You're sure of what you saw?
Absolutely.
When you saw the CIA's description of what occurred and you heard the conclusion of mechanical failure on Flight 800, how did that hit you?
You know, best described, I looked down at the ground and shook my head.
You know, I couldn't believe it.
You know the cartoon?
The CIA cartoon?
Yeah, the CIA cartoon.
That best describes it as a cartoon.
It was a joke.
That isn't what happened?
No.
Richard, I want to thank you for joining us this evening.
We are going to proceed your, as a matter of fact, I think I just spent a longer period of time with you by several times than the FBI apparently spent with you.
Absolutely.
So I want to thank you, and we will continue with Bill Donaldson after the break.
Richard, again, thank you for being here.
Thank you.
Good night.
Alright, that's Richard Goss, and when we come back, we will get into the technical details Of what Bill Donaldson thinks occurred on Flight 800.
So I suggest you stay with me if you want to hear the other side of the story of that tragedy.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AF.
Thank you for watching.
Please subscribe to our YouTube channel.
To talk with Art Bell, from west of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, dial 1-800-618-8255.
That's 1-800-618-8255.
Now again, here's Art.
Once again, good morning.
Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, dial 1-800-618-8255.
That's 1-800-618-8255.
Now again, here's our...
Once again, good morning.
We're dealing tonight with the Flight 800 disaster, or criminal act.
You determine that for yourself.
In this last hour we heard from Major Fred Myers, who personally witnessed what he describes as a high explosive ordnance detonation.
A streak of light and then a high ordnance detonation.
He viewed this from a Black Hawk helicopter about 200 feet in the air.
So he is a witness to what occurred.
Now, That doesn't sound like an overheated fuel tank exploding to me.
It sounds like a witness, a well-experienced, who has seen missiles, rescued pilots in North Vietnam, and saw all this from his Blackhawk.
Then we heard from Richard Goss, a Long Island resident, well-trained, who also saw something rise from the ground without question to a high altitude, take a sharp left-hand turn, Then, uh, he too saw an explosion.
Two eyewitnesses to what occurred, uh, 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 1962 through 5 was a naval aviation cadet at the University of Maryland.
65...
65 through 7 was designated naval aviator and commissioned.
1968 through 70 was an A-4 attack pilot and a line division officer who flew 89 combat missions in Southeast Asia, both North and South Vietnam, as well as Laos, where of course we never flew.
Ran a line division of 40 men 16 A4C aircraft on the flight deck and qualified as combat section and division flight leader.
70 through 72 was advanced jet flight instructor slash line division officer
directed line division of 190 men, three officers, and 70 TA-4 and F-9 aircraft.
He was then 72 through 74 assistant air operations CCA officer.
Thank you.
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.
1974-77 was an A-4 US-2 Pilot Maintenance Officer.
Directed the Aircraft Maintenance Department there.
Named the best of 11 in the Air Wing.
1978-80 was an A-6 Attack Pilot and Safety Officer.
Qualified Air Wing Alpha Strike Leader.
Managed the Safety Program for deployed A-6 Squadron.
Ran Quality Assurance Program.
1980, the year 1980 actually, an air operations officer planned and executed air operations for Joint Exercise Operation Solid Shield 80, supervised a staff of eight officers and controlled the air war, 350 combat air sorties from Joint Command Post Key West.
83 was a safety officer Managed aviation safety program for Air Wing's three squadrons, 120 aircraft, 300 pilots.
Exercised oversight of all mishap investigations, kind of like what the NTSB does.
Discovered a cause of a series of out-of-control mishaps.
84 through 87 was a nuclear 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 a $75 million budget, four subordinate commands, and five major contractors, was reporting custodian for 122 jet aircraft, responsible for all operational, administrative, safety, personal, legal, and aircraft maintenance matters.
A 91 through 92 was a military expert on A council which executed a 45-minute presentation to three members of the Presidential Commission on Base Closures, you'll recall that, cited by the Chairman as the best he had seen.
I think it's important that you understand who you are hearing.
So that was a little lengthy, but I think because of the gravity of what we're discussing, what we've already heard and what we're about to hear, you needed to know who you're listening to.
Bill, welcome back.
Well, thanks, Art.
You know, this whole thing is kind of like eating an elephant.
It's a pretty big program, but the only way you can do it is sort of one bite at a time.
I've got some things that when I tell your audience, it's going to be tough for them to believe it, but I want to say up front, I'm doing this as a matter of honor.
I don't want to make a nickel out of this, and I don't plan to.
Yeah, I haven't written a book, they're not doing a movie, nothing like that, huh?
That's not the program.
Let me explain how I got, what started this.
Yes, please.
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 it, the title of the article was, it wasn't a missile.
And his justification was that the center line tank had spontaneously exploded.
Yes.
Now if your listeners don't pick up anything at all that 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.
Yes sir.
Every one of these aircraft that the U.S.
has ever built, these airliners, all basically have the same fuel design that the 747 Flight 800 had.
And they all use empty or near-empty center wing tanks at one point or another, depending on what routes they fly.
Maybe you can help me out right now.
This was an aircraft headed from New York to Paris.
That's a 3,000 mile, roughly, journey, I think, across the Atlantic.
Would it be a normal thing on such a flight to have that center fuel tank empty or nearly empty?
Yes.
And the reason the answer is yes is because in the northern hemisphere, when you're flying east to west, you're fighting a headwind.
In other words, from Paris to New York, for instance, you might have a A hundred knot headwind at about 30,000 feet.
So, when they're coming from Paris to New York, for instance, they need every bit of fuel they've got.
But when they turn around and go the other way, from New York back to Paris, you've got this tremendous tailwind that's operating the whole time you're in flight.
So, in effect, if you filled that center tank up when you left Kennedy, you'd be hauling 80,000 pounds or more of dead weight.
And that's really not safe.
You don't want to land with that extra weight, especially when it's fuel in an airplane.
I appreciate that answer, because I've heard many tacos say it was insane to imagine the center fuel tank would have been empty on that long a journey, but that certainly explains it.
Would there have been some fuel in that tank?
Right.
There was approximately, they're saying now 50 to 100 gallons.
You're talking about It's a measurement that's 20 feet by 20 feet by 6 feet tall,
roughly.
And you'd have about a half an inch, 50 gallons, 100 gallons would be about a half inch, a
little over a half inch of fuel in the bottom.
Now here's what I wanted to finish saying here, that in the whole history of airliners
built in the United States, their entire history of flight, there has never been in history
a spontaneous fuel tank explosion in any tank, not just the center wing tank.
That adds up, conservatively, to 150,000 years plus of flight time.
And now, here we had, back in April, we had the chairman of the NTSB saying up front, well we solved the problem, we just had a spontaneous explosion in a tank.
Okay, to me, that got my attention.
That's what got me involved in this.
I knew it was probably absolute BS.
So I went ahead and I ordered the fuels manual and I studied it and I found out right off the get-go what I really already knew from my military experience.
The fuel that was in the airplane is called Jet A-1 and it's universally used around the world now.
It was created by American fuels technology.
That fuel is extremely safe.
And Art, I want to tell you something.
I mean, I've done this.
I've even made a videotape and took it up to Congress and showed it to them.
You can take the biggest, you know, I actually used two big matches, like long matches, like you'd use to light a fire in a fireplace.
Right.
And you can light the matches and you can just slowly immerse the lit match into the surface of that fuel and it'll go out.
And it'll go out all the way, and you can heat the fuel all the way up to 127 degrees.
Actually, 126 degrees, and it'll still go out.
At 127 degrees, you'll get a slow fire that will propagate across the surface of the fuel.
A slow fire?
Yeah.
In other words, and this is really what the aviation fuels manual tells you when you get into the technical side, and I don't want to go too far afield there, but the bottom line is this.
Is that the temperatures, the normal operating temperatures of that fuel in that aircraft, and remember at the altitude that it was at, the temperature was 21 degrees Fahrenheit.
Understood.
Okay, now, you couldn't even, you could hold a barbecue in the fuel tank and dump your hot coals into that fuel and they'd go out.
Alright?
So here we have the lead safety agency in the United States, The political head of that agency telling the whole world that we have dangerous fumes and fuel tanks, and it's absolute nonsense.
And Congress has put the pressure on, they've farmed out all kinds of testing to Caltech and some other people, and they wouldn't answer the question, what was the temperature in the centerline tank?
If the conclusion was the center tank spontaneously blew up, Then why has there not been great directives from the NTSB regarding changes in the central center fuel tank configuration?
Initially, and that, I've got several letters, I think you've got them, that I've sent back and forth, we've sent back and forth between Mr. Hall and myself.
Yes, sir.
That was my very point, that if you have, the NTSB, if they really thought that there was a severe hazard to flight safety, Then they have a fiduciary duty to the flying public to immediately put in a safety fix, if you will.
Now, I knew from my experience as maintenance officer and safety officer that every aircraft, for engineering and just regular maintenance purposes, all of these tanks have low-point drains.
I knew that you could get a fuel sample out of that tank in almost no time.
After we sent the questions to Mr. Hall, they absolutely wouldn't answer the temperature question.
I went up to New York.
Mr. Hall is?
Is the head of the National Transportation Safety Board.
All right.
So you went to New York?
Went to New York, got an airline.
I can't name which one because it'll get them in trouble with the NTSB.
But I had one of their 747s that was turning around, going back to Europe, exactly like Flight 800 was.
I went ahead and had them pull a sample out of that tank.
It took all of two minutes.
All you do is pop a little access door in the bottom of the wing.
You stick about a four foot hollow tube up there and press on a spring loaded valve on the bottom of the tank.
The fuel goes into the tube, into the container at the bottom of the tube.
Then I had them pour it into a thermos that I had rigged to take the temperature out of.
I took the temperature and the fuel Was exactly one degree warmer than the ambient air.
It was 69 degrees and it was 68 on the ambient air at the time.
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 Uh, by these, uh, compressors, I guess, running.
Right.
And to a temperature that could finally cause an explosion.
Is there any way that could have happened?
No.
No?
The reason is that, uh, when that aircraft was certified 30-some years ago, they go into unbelievable depth into testing, okay, number one.
When they do that, they create documents that go to maintenance people and they create documents that go to pilots.
And the document that goes to pilots specifically says, due to the testing that was done 30 some years ago, that extended, meaning long periods of time of air conditioning unit operation on the ground may raise the temperature 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the center wing tank.
From the ambient.
Right.
Okay.
Now, what I found out when I did that little simple two minute test, it cost me about 15 bucks for a thermos and a thermometer.
Sure.
The NTSB has spent millions on instrumenting airplanes and flying them around and they still won't answer the question.
What's the temperature in the tank?
Okay?
And they're sticking to this thing like, you know, like glue to something.
And they won't give it up.
But they're in trouble because, you know, I just can't imagine that there's any way to fabricate an answer here.
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 centerline of the tank exploded.
There was an overpressure event that was a fuel error event in the tank.
I've just spent ten minutes saying that can't happen.
Well, there is a way that it can happen.
Anytime the tank is subjected to a severe amount of energy, for instance, if the aircraft is involved in a mid-air collision with another airplane or it crashes on the ground or even hits the water, What happens to the fuel in the tank is it's slammed against the walls, especially an empty tank like that, and the fuel is misted into the atmosphere.
Misted fuel can explode.
All you need is the spark, okay?
And it can explode, even the safe fuel, at very low temperatures compared to a stable tank.
But again, let us be clear.
Under normal, slight conditions, even ascending, an airplane under power ascending, going through 10,000 to 13,000 feet, There would be no way, under those conditions, that you would get fuel misting in that center tank?
No.
There's no, unless the, what the graphs show you in the fuels manual is basically, they show you what you could do, for instance, instead of a 747, we're talking about an F-15 for instance, and it does a lot of aggressive acrobatics, then there is a An agitated tank figure that drops the temperature about 50 degrees.
But that would not be the case with a 747.
No, I've never been on a 747 while they're pulling loops and rolls.
All right, Bill.
Hold tight.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
Take a break and we'll be right back.
Listen carefully, folks.
Listen very carefully tonight as you decide what really happened to Flight 800.
I'm Art Bell, and from the high desert, this is Coast to Coast AM.
Once again, William Donaldson, Bill Donaldson.
the once again uh... william donaldson bill donaldson
uh... mister donaldson in your considerable expert opinion what did
bring down flight eight hundred well uh...
jump into the bottom line i think that uh...
the highest probability by far is a uh... a missile engagement with uh...
external warhead detonation well outside the hall
relatively large muscle In other words, a proximity detonation.
Right, and most people don't have a lot of technical knowledge about this stuff, but Modern anti-aircraft weapons, missiles, are designed and are actually far more deadly if they use a proximity fuse and do detonate away from the hull of the aircraft.
Why?
In other words, the NTSB and everybody else kept looking for a giant hole in the plane where a missile would have penetrated.
Well, not only that, but they were looking for, when you have a detonation and the fireball actually touches the metal, You get deep metal pitting from an extremely high velocity gas from the detonation, and scouring, they call it, where the metal actually looks like an orange peel or something.
They did not find that?
No.
See, what they're doing is they're saying, well, we didn't find that, so therefore a missile or a bomb didn't happen here.
And there is a gross, gross fallacy with that.
I don't know what a good metaphor would be, but for instance, some of the larger missiles that are in various inventories are designed to go off as far as 40 to 60 feet away or more away from the hull.
And if that happens, what you'll get is penetration of the hull with extremely high velocity metal fragments.
And depending on the orientation of the missile when it's approaching the aircraft, And I think, by the way, after going through, Richard Goss gave me a good lead and I went, two investigators that are inside this thing, I can't tell you who they are because they'd be in deep trouble, but there's 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,
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.
My God, now wait a minute.
You're telling me, if I'm listening carefully and hearing this, that there was a large hole
in a door, both entry hole and exit hole.
Right.
It actually didn't go through the door, but it was in close proximity.
In other words, we had an entry on the left side of the aircraft, just adjacent to and right next to a window, actually, of the L2 door on the left side.
This large piece, it had to be at least six inches in diameter, went through the cabin and exited going through just above the R2 door.
Now, that's critical because in the breakup sequence of the aircraft, one of the first major structures that came off the aircraft was the R2 door.
And actually, it's a big piece that contains the door.
And when that happened, it was the beginning of the nose coming off the aircraft, which
happened very, very quickly.
From the Kingdom of Nile, across the country, around the world, and throughout the universe.
How could we not know about that until just now?
Listen, I'm not the guy that discovered it.
The investigators told me, okay?
radio network mister donaldson how could such a glaring piece of evidence
forensic evidence not be reported how could we not know about that until just
now listen
i'm not the guy that discovered the investigators told me okay i i i can see
on i've got four color photographs that uh...
that show the uh... the actual it's clear as a as a bell to me because
that fragment hit one of the longitudinal stringers in the uh...
in the fuselage above that door with such force that it forced the stringer through the skin of the
aircraft from the inside okay
If you look at the photograph you'll see what looks like a hatchet cut almost going Uh, from the inside out through the, uh, just above that door.
Now, I'm going to tell you some stuff that's a lot, uh, that's even worse than that.
But, but before you do, again, I've got to ask you, these investigators that you spoke to, who told you this, who supplied you with the photograph or whatever.
Right.
Uh, why, sir, did this not get into the news?
Why did this not become an integral part of the investigation?
Why was it not reported?
Or if it was, why was it ignored?
Well, I assume it's the same reason that there's probably 20 or 30 other similar proofs, if you will, of a, 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 uh...
of an engagement of a weapon they find some way to you know
denied or talk around it and one of the most ridiculous things i've ever seen on
television was mister kahlstrom the other morning and one of the morning shows
and he's he's telling this young lady that uh...
he was taking on tour around uh...
hanger there with the wreckage and he said well we've done these muscle test and and we've proven it's not
a missile and he showed her
what i'll call hit plates when you do a test uh... firing of a warhead
at various ranges you use aluminum sheets and so on and see what the damages
Well, what he showed, I mean, I could have done that much damage with my 12-gauge shotgun from 15 yards away.
And what they tested, obviously, were very small, like shoulder-fired weapons.
At a distance from the hip plates and you know you've got relatively small holes, less than the size of your fist.
What I'm talking about and what I know happened to that airplane, that airplane was in a train wreck at 13,700 feet.
There's no other way to explain it.
The last two days I've been meticulously grafting the debris field on graph paper.
I have the internal documents that were generated by the NTSB that shows precisely where every piece of metal went into the water.
And I'm going to tell you that what they showed you on that CIA cartoon is a total fabrication.
When you study a debris field and do the ballistic geometry on that debris field, and I'm looking at something that's only 7,000 feet long, I'm looking at, it's not broken into three distinct debris fields like they've been telling the public.
They're saying that, you know, there's debris from the first explosion and then the nose came off in one big piece and landed in a hole and then further on the rest of the airplane crashed.
I saw the cartoon.
Okay, that didn't happen, okay?
There are two distinct debris fields, not three, and this is critical because That whole cartoon, the only way that they can get professionals to even swallow this line is if there was some kind of an explosion in the center wing tank would not be really very powerful.
And it's hard for people to believe in the business that it would take the nose off a 747 to begin with.
But what I'm going to tell you next indicates Whatever that was was far, far more powerful than anything that a center wing tank could do.
Go right ahead.
Okay.
When you look at the debris field, what you do is you determine where the course of the aircraft, it was flying on a heading of 071 crew at 13,700 feet when this event occurred.
at 13,700 feet when this event occurred.
When the event happened, and what I'm going to say happened was a missile approaching
from the left low front of the aircraft did a hard left turn.
It was approaching almost perpendicular, slightly below the left wing.
Turned hard left and detonated in front of and below the left wing tip.
The reason I say that is that there's debris in the first part of that debris field that should never be there if it was only a center wing tank explosion.
That debris Wingtip antenna debris off the left.
There's a HF antenna on each wing.
Wingtip.
And there's a piece of that that'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.
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.
That's one indicator.
There's another indicator.
When the event occurred, the aircraft didn't break up at the center wing tank first.
The first big pieces that hit the water, there was one piece of the spar that came out of the center wing tank.
I think that was the result of the secondary fuel explosion caused by the weapon going off.
But the left forward cargo compartment, 16 feet in front of the center wing tank, a big piece of that came off first.
And then a little further aft in that left compartment, lower left compartment, actually was blown from the left side of the aircraft over 2,000 feet to the right of the aircraft track, way, way out there.
Wow.
And that's why I described it as more like a train wreck at altitude than it was a center
wing tank explosion.
You can't get a piece of the left cargo, left side of the fuselage of the airplane displaced
2,000 feet to the right of track with a center wing tank explosion that's, you know, that's
in the center of the airplane.
Have you raised this issue with the NTSB?
No.
You're hearing it for the first time, and this is a product of a detailed study in the last two days that I've been doing on this graph material.
I was shocked when I saw this, because what it means is that within the first month, when they started putting this stuff together, that debris field is a perfect fingerprint For a massive explosion in the sky.
It was not a center wing tank explosion only.
That was a collateral result.
Now here's the other thing.
I mean, slow me down if I get too pumped up on this.
Go right ahead.
But the nose section that you see sort of, you know, tumbling off, falling down, looking like it's intact.
Yes.
That's a total fabrication.
That nose section was blown to kingdom come.
It came down, not in one big piece, but it came down in groups of five.
There were five sections of multiple pieces that hit the water.
One of those pieces, groups of pieces, like six or eight pieces of fuselage, landed way, way off to the right, like 2,000, again, 2,000 feet to the right of the track of the aircraft.
Now, you know, they're telling you that this nose just kind of tumbled off and, you know, it sort of broke off and fell in the water.
All right, for those who didn't see it, what I saw of this CIA cartoon or graphic representation of what occurred was the plane was going along, that it showed a large explosion, the front portion of the aircraft fell forward intact, while the airplane itself actually rose in altitude in this cartoon, and then, of course, then, of course, came down in the fireball.
That could not have happened?
No.
Well, let me address the on the nose thing.
What they're telling 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 sub-components.
And that some of them were blown so far off the course of the aircraft.
It takes a tremendous amount of energy to do that.
That's why I keep going back to it's like a train wreck.
It's like a freight train hit this thing from the left side.
Okay, that's what the debris field saying.
Now the cartoon, the most absurd thing that I've ever seen in my life dealing with aviation was what the CIA put together there.
that aircraft with all that gross tonnage of the nose coming off will pitch up 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.
All right.
Mr. Donaldson, Pierre Salinger, as you well know, stuck his neck way out and claimed he had evidence of a friendly fire missile accident.
Right.
All of a sudden, Pierre Salinger just sort of went away.
People said he was duped and he just sort of went away and you don't hear any more about it.
Did Pierre Selinger have it wrong?
The short answer is yes, because what he did was he jumped to the conclusion that if it was a missile that shot it down, it had to have been a friendly fire incident.
And the problem with that, and the problem with the book that was published along the same lines, Stating the same thing is that once the main media jumped on that and started trying to fact check it, and there are no facts that support any military activity of any significance that you could put your finger on.
Now there were some submarines that were operating within 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 consider this, once I talked to the Chief of Staff down at Airlant in Norfolk.
I mean, I know the guy socially, and he said, hey, we had a cruiser about 130 miles out.
They were coming home, and they were out of range.
We just didn't have any assets in the area.
There was a P-3 airborne in the area that shows up on the radar tapes and so on.
What I'm trying to say is, remember, I'm a naval officer.
I'm in retirement as a regular officer.
I could be recalled tomorrow if the Commander-in-Chief said he wanted to do that.
And after this show, you may be.
I know, I've been thinking about it.
The point that I'm making is, the fact that it wasn't the Navy that did it doesn't mean that there wasn't a missile fired.
I understand.
Tell me, almost without a shadow of a doubt, that, and I'm not even talking about all these eyewitnesses that I've interviewed here yet, but without a shadow of a doubt, there was a major event that was caused by a missile on that aircraft, and there may have been two.
There are eyewitnesses that saw two launches, and I think that one was launched vertically, that's the, you know, that Goss saw that one, and so did Major Myers.
But when you go further to the east, I had an eyewitness that I wanted to get on with you, but he's working early in the morning.
He couldn't do it, but he was out at Quigg, 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 helo thought he saw a missile coming from the left.
I saw one coming from the right.
That would have been his co-pilot?
Right.
I haven't talked to him.
He works for one of the government agencies and they basically told him to stay out of this.
Mr. Donaldson, you believe it was a terrorist missile or missiles that took this plane down?
Through logic, yes.
I can't imagine that there really is anything else that could have been.
There's a reason for this.
In a way, it fits a fingerprint there because of the tactics that were used.
What I'm getting as a firing position is about four nautical miles straight out from where Richard Goss was sitting there at the West Hampton Yacht Club.
That puts it about three nautical miles offshore.
And the reason I could find that is, unlike their testimony of the way the FBI did the investigation, I went up there with GPS satellite equipment and ran these people down, went out to the site that they were at, took bearing line information to where they first saw a flare or missile on the surface, took that bearing and put it on charts.
I've got Suffolk County Police reports from all up and down the coast.
Almost to a tee, all these people saw something very close to the beach being launched.
In fact, I got witnesses that are 60 years old that thought that the stuff came right off the beach itself.
They were on the back side of the barrier beach and they go running, huffing and puffing over the sand dune to look down and see where the heck this damn thing came from.
At what altitude was that plane when the described high detonation explosion occurred?
You know, I'm saying it was at 13,700 feet.
I've watched the radar tape, and that's when the transponder went dead.
It was indicating exactly 380 knots.
is indicating exactly three hundred eighty knots thirteen five thirteen five
13.5, 13.5.
uh... what kind of yeah thirteen what what what kind of missile
could do that in my last letter to mister hall i pointed out a scenario
where i picked one and uh... and that's really all it is
I don't have physical evidence of the missile.
That's fine.
What did you pick?
Okay, I picked the Iranian AIM-54A Phoenix.
That missile weighs 985 pounds.
It's got its own onboard terminal radar guidance system.
In other words, Once the missile's fired, it's totally all by itself.
Capable of reaching what altitude, Mr. Donaldson?
That missile could reach 100,000 feet.
100,000 feet.
All right, Mr. Donaldson, stand by.
We're at the top of the hour when we come back.
Shortly, we're going to try to get the phone lines open.
I'm Art Bell.
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