Was TWA Flight 800 shot out of the sky? As a former pilot, that is a question I get asked about all the time. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but let’s be clear: Yes. I say it was. And I believe the FBI covered it up.
There are many reasons to disbelieve the official explanation of what happened to TWA 800 almost 19 years ago, on July 17, 1996, off the South Shore of Long Island. There’s hardly an airline pilot among the hundreds I know who buys the official explanation — that it was a fuel-tank explosion — offered by the National Transportation Safety Board some four years later.
Lots can go wrong with an airplane. Engines can fail; they can catch fire. Devices can malfunction. Pilots make errors.
But jets do not explode in midair.
If they do, it’s usually because they’ve been shot down or bombed. There’s little to suggest that there was a bomb onboard, but there is ample evidence that a missile of some sort detonated in the air very close to the plane and brought it down.
A former colleague, who will remain unnamed because he was not authorized to speak publicly about this, served as one of the lead investigators representing the interests of the TWA pilots, and I talked to him at length about the investigation after it was completed.
I have also spoken with another former TWA employee, who has knowledge of what went on in the aftermath of the crash.