March 8, 2014: Malaysia Air Flight 370 carrying 239 passengers from Kuala Lumpur and Beijing disappeared off the radar. We all remember it. Within the next two weeks, in the absence of a crash site, the conspiracy theories abounded, and so did the hypotheses advanced to explain the disappearance. Among the weirder hypotheses being advanced was my own "it just went 'poof'" hypothesis, which I argued on George Ann Hugh's The Byte Show. My reasons for doing so then were based, in part, on what had emerged by way of explanations from other people pondering the same mystery:

(1) there were eye-witnesses on the peninsula, and in the straits, who heard and in some cases saw, a large jet flying low and to the south east, headed toward the Indian Ocean, and definitely not China;

(2) But then, no wreckage was found in any area corresponding to such a flight path, though the Indian government and the Malaysian government did conduct some early searches in those waters;

(3) When wreckage failed to materialize at any likely crash spot, the Chinese government then made available a satellite photo of what appeared to be wreckage in the South China sea, while Chinese and Vietnamese authorities conducted searches in those waters. The Chinese quickly retracted their satellite photo, for reasons that still remain unclear (at least, to this author);

(4) Then the first conspiracy theories began to appear:

(a) The idea was quickly floated that the pilot of the flight was suffering mental deterioration, and at one point, it was suggested that this was an act of suicidal jihadist terrorism. This idea gained no traction, for in the final analysis there was little evidence of either;

(b) Next came the "hijacking" and the "bait and switch" scenarios: an American general actually appeared on Fox news seriously suggesting the flight had flown closely in the wake of another commercial airliner (to confuse Indian radar and look like one object when it was really two) over and through India, where it landed in Iran and became part of some sort of plot (which was never made entirely clear) by Mr. Putin. This story quickly fell apart when the Indian government released an Official Guffaw and Belly Laugh, saying there was no way anything could enter their airspace and they not know about it; this was followed by the "bait-and-switch" scenario of various versions, where the flight landed at the super-secret US base Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, where the plane was carefully repainted for use in yet another crazy scenario, which eventually emerged when MH 17, flying from the Netherlands through the Ukraine, crashed, and was, of course, blamed on Russia. This story fell apart when Russia presented convincing evidence that they had nothing to do with it.

(c) Then there was the Rothschild computer-chip theory, which argued that several passengers from an American computer chip company in Texas owned by various Rothschild interests were flying to China, and they were taken out by... well, whoever wanted to take them out to prevent secrets from being sold, stolen, transferred, or whatever.

(5) There were, of course, other hypotheses of accidental (or deliberate but covert) missile strikes by everyone from the US Navy (which I doubt, since they can't seem to steer ships to avoid collisions) to North Korea (insert loud laughter here), to the Chinese, who had no motivation for shooting down an aircraft with their own people aboard, and presumably were going to get beaucoups computer chip secrets from the Rothschilds;

(6) And finally, there were the "remote takeover" and "cyber-war" hypotheses, which, in the wake of the USS Donald Cook, Fitzgerald, and John McCain incidents, looks increasingly like a very viable hypothesis.

Throughout this whole early initial period - and I grant you, my "review" is far too short and missing many details - one nagging problem remained: No debris... anywhere. My problem here was that if there was an explosion, a missile strike (accidental or otherwise), or any similar sort of scenario, then there would be debris, and somebody's satellites would surely pick up on it. This led me (and, as it turned out, others) to consider two scenarios: either somebody was covering up the existence of a debris field because it might reveal secrets, either about the means of MH 370's tragic end, or about the satellite technology itself, or possibly both; or the satellites had detected nothing, and the aircraft had truly just simply vanished, and the latter idea implied someone with some very sophisticated and exotic technology, and was showing off, or sending messages, or commandeering the craft. Then early in 2015 well-known American radio talk show host George Noory, and well-known television actor Richard Belzer, published a book with David Wayne considering the various hypotheses titled Someone is Hiding Something: What Happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370?, which reviewed the various hypotheses and evidences, including the "exotic technology-it-went-'poof'" hypothesis( q.v. p. 193)

It was the lack of debris that was so sobering, and suggestive, and I recall suggesting to George Ann Hughs when we were discussing MH 370, that a debris field should emerge soon, but that if it appeared in the Indian Ocean, a very deep ocean, then any recovery of items on the bottom would be problematic, since it would require advanced deep diving technologies to do so. The problem as I saw it then, was that such a debris field could be salted with debris not genuinely from the flight itself.

Sure enough (and just in the nick of time, too! Whew!) debris began to wash up in Africa and Madagascar two years later, and people held up parts and pieces, pictures were taken, studies were done (which, you'll note, conveniently avoided giving any real explanation as to what had happened to the flight), and the result was "mystery over; it didn't explode-wasn't sabotaged/hit-by-a-missile/victim-of-a-bomb-didn't-just-g0-'poof'" and obviously "didn't land in Diego Garcia/Iran/the Netherlands" which means it was not "shot down by the Russians over the Ukraine." I'll bet Mr. Putin breathed a sigh of relief when he received the news he was no longer wanted for hijacking. This triggered searches that were already under way off the coast of western Australia (!) to redouble their efforts, but again, no debris field was found.

This in turn has sparked a new journalism "meme": the "scientists think the debris field is really here" meme, with this or that site being proposed. To top all this off, when the "debris" began washing up in Madagascar and the pictures were being taken, an Australian pilot and a member of my website contacted me with analyses of the pictures. Now, of course, this is purely anecdotal information on my part, so take it for whatever it is worth, but his bottom line was that what was being shown as debris had a few differences from the parts of the Boeing aircraft of Malaysia flight 370. Well, I don't know, as I'm not a pilot. My problem was and remains that a debris field can be salted. And even then, assuming that the debris we're being shown is from MH 370, why is it so damnably far from any flight path that a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing would presumably take? It is this that constitutes the problem for me with the "cyber-jack" hypothesis, for presumably if one wants to cyber-jack an aircraft, one presumably wants to do so because one wants to fly it somewhere in order to gain something from the effort. But no, we're still being told the line that it crashed somewhere in the eastern Indian Ocean west of Australia. This of course, could all be just a "cover story" for the "cyber-jack" to Diego Garcia story.

One might argue that the cyber-jacki/Diego Garcia story gains some credibility here. But my problem remains now what it was back when George Ann Hughs and I first talked privately about the whole thing: Presuming the USA or UK wanted to rec0ver something on that flight, or to intercept a delivery of something to China, presumably they could have done so much earlier in the chain of delivery than they did, and could have done so in a much quieter and less obvious way than to make an entire civilian airliner disappear with no good explanation.

So the bottom line, before we proceed to part two of this story, is that (1) the story or official narrative of Flight 370 is badly mangled, and began to be so almost as soon as the flight was reported missing; this, to my mind, strongly suggests that someone knows something, and is covering it up; and (2) the debris showed up suspiciously late in the game, and wildly out of any area or reported flight path as reported by early eye witnesses, suggesting that, for whatever reason, the flight was wildly displaced from that path; (3) the fact that US Generals would appear on Fox news offering (ridiculous) explanations means that, at some level, the US knew or suspected what had happened, and was attempting either to divert attention to the hi-jacking bait-and-switch theories, or to draw attention to the inadequacy of those theories by appearing to endorse them in a ridiculous way.

And now, add to all this bizarre mix, this story, which many people sent to me. I include all three versions, though they appear to be based initially on the UK Daily Mail version:

Diplomat probing MH370 mystery is shot dead in Madagascar amid conspiracy theorist claims he was about to deliver newly-found parts of the jet to Malaysian investigators

MH370: Murder of man investigating missing plane sparks conspiracy theories

MH370: Murder of man investigating missing plane sparks conspiracy theories

Ponder those as you sleep tonight, and we'll get back to them tomorrow, with our own wildly geosynchronously "out there" high octane speculation...

See you on the flip side...