A conservative government watchdog has released a new documentary pushing federal investigators to reopen the possible Maine links to the TWA 800 disaster on the crash’s 30th anniversary.
Judicial Watch Inc. Director of Investigations and Research Chris Farrell’s documentary suggests the FBI blocked the National Transportation Safety Board from getting to the bottom of the real cause of the July 17, 1996 tragedy.
TWA Flight 800 blew up in the sky just 12 minutes after taking off from New York City en route to Paris.
The FBI concluded the crash that killed all 230 aboard was due to an explosion of fuel vapors in one of the Boeing 747-100’s fuel tanks.
But Farrell and a number of industry analysts he features suspect the plane may have been accidentally struck by a domestic military missile – possibly fired from a Maine-based Navy reconnaissance plane – or by a terrorist projectile.
“Eyewitnesses saw a missile, rocket or flare rising off the horizon, a projectile as it were,” Farrell says in the new documentary.
The theory was first raised in the wake of the disaster by Pierre Salinger, a Kennedy insider who later went to work for ABC News.
But the FBI pooh-poohed the suggestion as fiction.
Salinger claimed he had a secret document showing that the Navy had accidentally fired a missile at the wide-body aircraft after it took off from JFK Airport.
The former press secretary to President Kennedy identified two suspect vehicles that might have carried and fired an errant 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.
An FBI assistant director, James Kallstrom, insisted there was no cover-up, despite Salinger’s claims.
Kallstrom challenged the colorful ex-JFK aide to produce credible evidence backing his claim.
Salinger’s Maine-based friendly-fire theory never gained momentum.
Tom Stalcup, a documentarian, supports Salinger’s cover-up theory but Kallstrom refused to buy into it.
“Nothing he just said is true,’’ Kallstrom has said. “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.”
Farrell claims Kallstrom strong-armed the NTSB into accepting his theory of the crash.
Retired TWA Boeing 747 Captain Al Francis, who was council chairman for Air Line Pilots Association, appears in the new documentary disputing the government’s version of what blew the plane out of the sky.
Francis argues that a terrorist attack or external force may have brought down the aircraft, challenging the official NTSB conclusion of a center wing fuel tank explosion.
The sponsor of the new documentary, Judicial Watch, Inc. describes itself as a conservative but non-partisan educational foundation “which promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law.”
