Regular readers here know that I am fascinated by the strange - and still unexplained - disappearance of Malaysia Air Flight 370. So when Mr. R.M. sent this article along, I knew I'd be blogging about it, and here we are. It's short, to the point, and as always seems to be the case with this strange story, it raises more questions than it answers(I've provided two links to the story):

MH370 SHOCK: Pilot makes ‘MASSIVE DISCOVERY’ by finding plane’s engine in Cambodian jungle

MH370 SHOCK: Pilot makes ‘MASSIVE DISCOVERY’ by finding plane’s engine in Cambodian jungle

And here's the central claim:

The investigator Daniel Boyer discovered the unusual white objects he believes to be the plane’s engine, tail and cockpit just 16km from a “crash site” identified by the British film producer Ian Wilson. Using Google Earth, Mr Boyer claimed two of the objects are the same size as the Boeing 777 engine and cockpit. Mr Boyer told Daily Star Online: “I couldn’t believe it when I made the sighting. This is a massive discovery. “First the cockpit can be seen, and now this. “The debris definitely needs to be investigated.” Mr Wilson claimed to have found a “plane-shaped object” in the jungle south of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh on Google Maps.

Now, if you're like me, you're probably thinking, "But wait a minute, what about all that other alleged MH 370 debris that washed up in Madagascar and other islands in the west Indian Ocean?" Well, thankfully, the article mentions this as well:

However, if the sightings are real and plane parts have been found in the Cambodian Jungle, the MH370 did not crash into the sea. Another theory is that the plane did not crash as the passengers’ phones rang for four days after the disappearance.

Consider all the problems here: (1) if the debris in Cambodia is not from MH 370, then what is it debris from, and why haven't we heard about it? And similarly (2) if the debris found in the western Indian Ocean islands is not from MH 370, then what is it from? (And, just for the record, a few pilots contacted me privately to express their doubts about the pictures of that debris when they were first shown in the media). And there's a third possibility here that no one seems to want to entertain: (3) if the debris in Cambodia and the western Indian Ocean islands is from Flight 370, then what the dickens happened to it? That may seem to be a rather oddball way of stating the problem, but a less odd ball way is to recall that some eyewitnesses report seeing and/or hearing a civilian airliner with Malaysia Air type markings flying back across the Malay peninsula to the southwest (hence giving rise to all those initial "Diego Garcia" theories, along with the functioning passenger telephones, of course), and hence away both from its presumed crash site in the eastern Indian Ocean to the west of Australia, and also away from Cambodia.

Now all of these speculative questions raise even darker possibilities in terms of our daily dose of high octane speculation: are we looking at (1) "salted" debris fields, deliberately designed to obfuscate the data so badly that no determination can be made on what caused the flight's disappearance? Or (2) assuming the Cambodian and Indian Ocean debris are all genuine, and assuming this debris has not been salted, then what the dickens happened to the flight? How does one account for such an impossible distribution of debris? And while we're at it, we might as well recall that Vietnam and China both suspected it went down in the South China Sea, and that the Chinese made a military spy satellite photo available shortly after MH 370's disappearance, and then quickly retracted that, while American generals went on television and proposed that the flight secretly continued on into India, flying closely behind another civilian airliner (I kid you not!), to land in Iran as part of some dastardly terrorist scheme sponsored by Iran and (of course) Russia and Vladimir Putin! India, you'll recall, quickly denounced that story as nonsense and made it very clear that anything entering Indian air space would have been detected by their air defense systems.

When you put it all together, it's simply ridiculous; we have a flight crashing in the South China Sea, the eastern Indian Ocean, Cambodia, and somehow managing to fly and be seen by eyewitnesses to the southwest over the Malay peninsula in a direction away from all its various presumed "crash sites". The Malay ambassador to Madagascar, who was responsible for the collection of the washed up debris in the Western Indian Ocean islands, is murdered, the French government continues its own independent investigation and isn't talking very much, and on and on it goes. An American general comes up with a ridiculous theory, which India quickly shoots down (not to coin a pun).

It's that second possibility - the impossible distribution of all the alleged debris - that captures my attention, for if that be the case, then whatever happened to flight 370 may have been something very exotic. In any case, someone knows the story, and they're not talking.

See you on the flip side...