THE STYLE BLOG
These are all the Internet’s ‘best’ theories on Malaysia Flight 370′s disappearance
Published: MARCH 18, 2:05 PM ETAs the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight drags into its 11th daywithout tangible progress, Internet sleuths are looking for answers. Any answers. From anyone.
The characteristically outspoken Courtney Love was the latest self-styled expert to weigh in with her theory last night on Twitter -- which is marvelously evidence-based (!), as far as such theories go. Love, one of the thousands of people scouring crowdsourced satellite site Tomnod for signs of the plane, thinks it crashed into the ocean a mile from the small Malaysian island of Pulau Perak.
But what of the Internet's more imaginative conspiracy theorists -- you know, the ones who think the Defense Department orchestrates natural disasters and 9/11 was an inside job? They have a few ideas that make Love look like a veritable aviation expert. We trawled their message boards and YouTube channels so you don’t have to.
1. The plane never crashed -- it's just invisible! In a twist straight out of the”Star Wars” saga, some theorists are claiming that Flight 370 deployed "electronic weaponry" and "cloaking devices" that have simply hid it from radar detection. "Today's electronic warfare (EW) capability includes weaponry that can hide planes," argues an article on the skepticism-inducingWorthyToShare.net, which sadly offers no solution to how said weaponry would get on a passenger plane.
2. Flight 370 "shadowed" another plane into Indian airspace. An Ohio IT worker/hobby aviationist named Keith Ledgerwood apparently started a Tumblr for the sole purpose of propagating this theory -- with pretty decent results. His lengthy post on how the missing plane could "hide" from radar by flying close to another jet has been reblogged nearly a thousand times. “It sounds totally crazy,” an aircraft accident investigator told Business Insider.
Crazy -- but possible! Airplanes can indeed fly in formation. The chances of coordinating and timing such a coordination are just very, very slim.
3. The plane has been at a U.S. Navy base the whole time. The U.S. maintains a logistics base called Diego Garcia in the Chagos Archipelago. Because the Chagos Archipelago is in the Indian Ocean, and because Diego Garcia does indeed have a runway, many a theorist has joyfully concluded that the U.S. military either (a) captured the plane, (b) shot it down as it swooped in for an attack, or (c) planned to divert it to the installation all along. No one ever explains why the U.S. would take such an extraordinary measure, though The Total Collapse -- a prepper Web site that predicts the apocalypse -- is convinced that the plane carried some "highly suspicious cargo" from Seychelles.
It doesn't exactly help that Diego Garcia is, per a book by American University'sDavid Vine, "one of the most strategically important and secretive U.S. military installations outside the United States." As maps of the search area make pretty clear, however, the island is far from either of the routessuggested by Flight 370's last satellite contact -- which would put it west of Perth, Australia, or above the southeast Asian mainland.
No comments:
Post a Comment