Thirty Years Ago Maine Had Not Just One But Two Rumored Connections To Tragic TWA Crash Into NYC Ocean

After TWA Flight 800 exploded in a fiery crash into the ocean outside of New York City, investigators zeroed in on a faulty fuel tank.

But despite their suspicion, a former press secretary to President Kennedy tried to peddle his “friendly-fire” theory.

Pierre Salinger, a Kennedy insider who later went to work for ABC News, claimed he had a secret document showing that the Navy had accidentally fired a missile at the wide-body aircraft 12 minutes after it took off from JFK Airport on July 17, 1996.

Salinger said he had two suspect vehicles that might have carried and fired the warrant missile – both, as it turned out, with Maine connections.

The first was the USS Normandy, a guided-missile cruiser that had been built at Bath Iron Works and launched in 1988.

The second was a P-3 Orion propeller-powered submarine hunting aircraft based at Brunswick Naval Air Station.

The Pentagon argued that neither the Normandy nor the P-3 could have taken down the TWA jet.

U.S. Department of Defense officials said the Normandy was at sea 185 miles from the accident site, allegedly out of missile range.

Similarly, they denied that a P-3 could have been equipped with missiles.

The Boeing 747-100 exploded and crashed into the Atlantic near East Moriches, New York, killing all 230 aboard, including 212 passengers and 18 crew members.

The ill-fated flight, headed for Rome with a scheduled stopover in Paris, became the third-deadliest aviation accident in U.S. history.

The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the probable cause was an explosion of flammable fuel vapors in the center fuel tank.

Although it could not be determined with certainty, the likely ignition source was a short circuit, NTSB investigators said.

An FBI assistant director, James Kallstrom, insisted there was no cover-up, despite Salinger’s claims.

Kallstrom challenged the colorful ex-JFK aide to put up or shut up.

Salinger’s Maine-based friendly-fire theory never gained momentum.

Tom Stalcup, a documentarian,  supported Salinger’s cover-up theory but Kallstrom stuck to his guns.

“Nothing he just said is true,’’ Kallstrom countered. “That’s my reaction. We had a massive investigation. We spent a year-and-a-half with a thousand FBI agents, experts from the military on missiles. We took the missile theory extremely serious. We interviewed all the eyewitnesses, some numerous times, because we knew in the FBI that there were shoulder-fired missiles available, that they were stolen from armories, that they were left on battlefields in Afghanistan and other places. We did a massive investigation of all military assets in the area. It just didn’t happen.”