Vanishing Aircraft

We have been told by much of Western MSM that Air Algerie flight 5017 (hereinafter AH 5017) and its 117 passengers (according to the airline) lost contact with the ground and subsequently crashed in Mali on 7/24due to heavy weather.

A simple, tidy story that; and for all one knows the MSM soporific might even be true.

And yet, true to the times, meaningful questions remain.

Via CNN on 7/24 we have:

“1:17 a.m. local time, Air Algerie Flight 5017 left Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso bound for Algiers. It was supposed to be a four-hour overnight flight but about 50 minutes of takeoff, it disappeared from radar over Mali close to a zone of ongoing conflict between Islamist rebels and the government.”

The Guardian chimed in on 7/29 with:

Radar recordings show the plane’s last contact at 1.47am local time. A witness reported seeing a ball of flame in the crash area at about 1.50am, suggesting the tragedy happened in minutes. One witness said it was “as if a bomb had fallen” on the desert, and that the plane had hit the ground at a steep angle and at full speed, ruling out any attempt at an emergency landing. Police investigators and gendarmes at the scene say the plane was “pulverised” and they have found no bodies. Even finding traces of the victims – who included one Briton and 54 French people, including entire families – is proving a challenge, with stifling heat alternating with torrential rain in a remote area.

The Guardian’s reportage that the plane was pulverized echoed Le Monde’s7/26 assertion that the wreckage was indicative of disintegration.

Matters are so compromised with respect to the status of bodily evidence that France now thinks it could take from three to five months for forensic processes to produce the first identifications.

And then we have the facts that it took hours for airline and government officials to make AH 5017’s disappearance public, there were 51 French passengers, and France, declaring victory, had very recently terminated Operation Serval (a counterterrorism adventure in Mali).

Finally, we have the pending performance on a France/Russia deal whereby Russia is to receive delivery of two Mistral warships. Maybe certain elitist elements would rather see France breach the contract?

Might the demise of AH 5017 be attributable to an act of terror, and might there be additional links to the vanishing aircraft of MH 17, MH 370, and veryconceivably even Air France 447? Newsweek on AH 5017:

“General Gilbert Diendere, head of Burkina Faso’s crisis cell, said radar data showed that the plane appeared to try to fly around the bad weather before reverting to its initial course, which took it back into the eye of the storm. “Perhaps the pilot thought that he had completely avoided it and wanted to return to the original route,” Diendere said, according to the website of French radio RFI. “The accident took place while the plane performed this maneuver.”

Diendere said the last contact with the plane at its altitude of 10,000 meters was at 0147 GMT and the crash was reported by witnesses to have taken place at 0150.

“That means that (plane) fell from an altitude of 10,000 meters to zero in about three minutes, which is a steep fall given the size of the plane,” he added.”

10,000 meters is just about 33,000 feet, so, if the preceding sentence is true, AH 5017 lost altitude at an average of 11,000 feet per minute before being ostensibly destroyed.

The same thing happened to Air France 447.

A quick refresher on that flight from the Huffington Post:

“On the evening of May 31, 2009 [it was in the early hours of 6/1/2009 that the flight went missing], 216 passengers and 12 crew members boarded an Air France Airbus 330 at Antonio Carlos Jobim International Airport in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The flight, Air France 447, departed at 7.29 p.m. local time for a scheduled 11-hour trip to Paris. It never arrived. At 7 o’clock the next morning, when the aircraft failed to appear on the radar screens of air traffic controllers in Europe, Air France began to worry and contacted civil aviation authorities. By 11 a.m., they concluded that AF447 had gone missing somewhere over the vast emptiness of the South Atlantic. How, in the age of satellite navigation and instantaneous global communication, could a state-of-the art airliner simply vanish? It was a mystery that lasted for two years.”

Air France 447, like MH 370, MH 17, and AH 5017 also “vanished without a word from the crew.” Perhaps, then, the official report regarding Air France 447, which explained the affair in terms of heavy weather, a high altitude stall, and pilot error also happens to more or less describe what occurred with AH 5017?

Then again, it was reported regarding Air France 447 that:

“Two pilots of an Air Comet flight from Lima to Lisbon saw a bright flash of light in the area where Flight 447 went down, the Madrid-based airline told CNN. The pilots have turned in their report to authorities. “Suddenly, we saw in the distance a strong and intense flash of white light, which followed a descending and vertical trajectory and which broke up in six seconds,” the captain wrote in the report.

The flash of light contributes to the theory that an explosion is what brought down Flight 447, which was carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.”

To be sure, these reports have gone down the memory hole.

Intrepid readers will have little difficulty locating other disturbing claims about Flight 447, but to be honest it’s difficult to decisively separate mere rumors from plausible alternative accounts.

Be that as it may, what follows may amount to nothing more than a mirage of coincidences (some of them possibly forced)—but it might also suggest something quite significant.

“Numerology”

An earlier contribution to Global Research on the subject of MH 17 stated:

Next, here are a few other curious tidbits. The flight 17 crash shares an anniversary with the demise of TWA 800, which AT’s own Jack Cashill has compellingly argued was, in fact, brought down by a missile on July 17, 1996 and subsequently covered up by the US government. And, the maiden flight of flight 17 occurred in 1997 on the date of, you guessed it, July 17. [Moreover Russia’s last ruling monarch of the Romanov family Tsar Nicholas II, together with his wife Tsarina Alexandra and their five children Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei were executed on 17 July 1918. Subliminal message to Putin? No doubt it’s another “coincidence”] So “17s” are everywhere. To be sure, though, each of the items in the last paragraph is easily ranged under the heading “coincidence.”

With respect to AH 5017, we obviously encounter “17” again in the number of the flight. And, we have the fact that the flight left at 1:17 AM. Plus, some early reports indicated 117 passengers.

In a related vein, as previous quotes show, “7s” and “11s” seem to reverberate around facts pertaining to Air France 447 and AH 5017. And, MH 370 was lost on 3/7/2014 at 17:20 UTC.

Of course, many other numerical facts connected with the three flights have nothing to do with 7s, 11s, or 17s.

It is unquestionably easy to get carried away with this sort of thing; one very serious problem is that in the absence of a consistently applied, rationally based rule for combining digits and assigning times, it is easy to mold phenomena so as to reach conspiratorial conclusions when nothing obtains other than coincidence (and perhaps not even that).

In short, we do not want to consume witches’ brews or magicians’ potions; instead, we should ask whether there might be scientifically sensible reasons as to why intelligence enterprises and their associates might want to play numerological games.

Rare events and events that are meaningfully singular in their description (such as the vanishing of MH 370) are next to impossible to predict statistically, especially if one is attempting to predict the precise time, date, and place of occurrence (almost by definition there’s not enough data to support valid statistical analyses). It is just such “black swan” events, though, that often exert the greatest, and most reverberating, impacts on global dynamics. Because such events are difficult to predict even with a great deal of information in hand, they are difficult to prevent—even with a tremendous amount of information.

With these thoughts in mind, consider that when singular, rare events such as plane vanishings that receive intensive coverage take place, the threshold geopolitical question is really whether the occurrence was accidental or in some way planned. It is here that “numerological” factors may come into play. It may be that the numerological properties of events can function as ways of indicating human agency, even though such agency will, of necessity, be invisible to algorithms and associated databases. If human consciousness, on the basis of ironically non-quantifiable meaning, considers an event to be too significant to perfunctorily ascribe to an accident, it will react accordingly even if the “data” and surface authorities (such as certain visible bureaucrats and news anchors with far more proximate connections to the public) say otherwise.

If these ruminations are accurate, it may be that the degree of brazenness of “numerological” ties functions as a measure of the danger we confront. Surface authority, in spite of its nearly universal mathematical illiteracy, has been successfully conditioned to believe that the only measures of scientific significance are those that can be quantified. Therefore, it is blind to many potential indications of agency that could indicate covert conflict.

However, had a flight numbered 7077 crashed on 7/7/2014 after having disappeared from radar at 7:07 PM, even surface authorities might have been forced to acknowledge design—even if they were told in so many terms by deep authority that “Big Data” could not back it up. Since even the dimwits of surface authority would be talking design, the risk of overt hot war would rise substantially. It is for reasons such as these that the rather glaring 17s surrounding MH 17 are unsettling.

The Global Elite

Now consider these utterly bizarre remarks made by none other than IMF chief Christine Lagarde at a 1/15/2014 National Press Club speech:

“Now, I’m going to test your numerology skills by asking you to think about the magic seven, okay? Most of you will know that seven is quite a number in all sorts of themes, religions. And I’m sure that you can compress numbers as well. So if we think about 2014, all right, I’m just giving you 2014, you drop the zero, 14, two times 7. Okay,that’s just by way of example, and we’re going to carry on. (Laughter) So 2014 will be a milestone and hopefully a magic year in many respects. It will mark the hundredth anniversary of the First World War back in 1914. It will note the 70thanniversary, drop the zero, seven– of the Breton Woods conference that actually gave birth to the IMF. And it will be the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 25th, okay. It will also mark the seventh anniversary of the financial market jitters that quickly turned into the greatest global economic calamity since the Great Depression. The crisis still lingers. Yet, optimism is in the air. We’ve left the deep freeze behind us and the horizon looks just a bit brighter. So my hope and my wish for 2014 is that after those seven miserable years, weak and fragile, we have seven strong years. I don’t know whether the G7 will have anything to do with it, or whether it will be the G20. I certainly hope that the IMF will have something to do with it.”

Can anyone recall the last time a global elitist of the stature of Lagarde made such bombastic reference to numerological notions during a speech, whether “jokingly” or not? That someone like her would even speak in such terms is decidedly odd—conceivably even unprecedented—irrespective of the particulars.

Aside from the very audacity of even mentioning numerology, the key 1/15/2014 language may very well be the G7/G20 wording; Lagarde states the alternative pretty starkly in terms of either/or but not both—and the G20 does not include Russia.

Dr. Jason Kissner is Associate Professor of Criminology at California State University. Dr. Kissner’s research on gangs and self-control has appeared in academic journals. His current empirical research interests include active shootings. You can reach him at[email protected].