Insider Report

TWA Flight 800 Disaster — Four Years Later the Evidence Mounts

Dwight Brumley, at the time an active duty Navy specialist on his way to a Navy conference in Rhode Island, actually viewed most of the incident while flying as a passenger in a nearby commercial airliner. His assertion that a missile destroyed the TWA plane was supported by another eyewitness, Michael Wire, who saw what he originally thought was a single "firework" rising from the beach. As Wire watched "it rise and arc over," he saw a major explosion that "shook the bridge" on which he was working. Wire later found out that gross distortions of his testimony, given to the FBI, formed the basis of an eventual CIA-generated video explanation of the incident that all participants at the conference deemed either "absurd" or "garbage." These two men are among 755 eyewitnesses interviewed by the FBI. All of their statements were kept from the public for three and a half years.

Marjorie Gross, a retired TWA flight attendant, lost a brother and 10 friends in the disaster. She begged the crowded assemblage of media representatives not to "believe that what the government says is truth." She recounted pursuing James Kallstrom, the man who led the FBI investigation of the crash, while attempting to recover her brother’s personal effects shortly after the 1996 tragedy. In her presence, Washington Post reporter Serge Kovaleski told Kallstrom, "It had to be a missile." And she insists that Kallstrom responded, "You’re right but if you quote me, I’ll deny it."

Also appearing at the conference was James Sanders, the author of The Downing of Flight 800, who was prosecuted by the government last year for receiving a piece of seat fabric from the downed plane and having it tested at an independent lab to determine if it contained residue of a missile’s rocket fuel. He showed photos of the wreckage and pointed to the "precise spot" on the plane where "red residue" indicates a missile hit. He charged the government with a "conspiracy to change the pieces of the recovered center wing tank" in order to support its flawed theory.

Dr. Tom Stalcup, the chairman of Flight 800 Independent Researchers Organization (FIRO), based at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, successfully obtained important radar data that the government had been withholding for three years. Terming the center-wing-tank theory "impossible," he discussed the finding of "foreign bodies" in the recovered corpses of some of the victims.