I think the main point of the story is not to convince us that he has a good proof. But rather to document how we convince ourselves, and how we latch on to small things and head down a path. Once we are on a path we become commited to it and it becomes hard to turn back.
Notice how he talks about the "crazies" on the forum. How they would use aliases, log back in and mention their stupid "lightning" theory, and he had to kick them out.
However, he then carefully proceeds to discribe how he did pretty much the same. Spent his own money and time building this complicated theory of super smart and efficient russian spies hacking into a satcom of a flying aircraft, also somehow, incapacitation everyone else on board, etc. In the meantime he is dropping clues how his own wife doesn't even believe him.
I think many people here, judging by the comments, misunderstood the goal of the article and took it too literaly.
But, there is a good lesson here. This stuff happens if you program and design software. There are lot of moving parts and lot of imperfect knowledge -- market needs, tools, langauges, platforms, APIs, architectures desicions, etc etc. Sometimes if you start to "just write code" too early. You end up committed to a bad path and it becomes hard mentally to throw it away and restart. Or, alternatively, you spend so much time picking the right combination of tools or redesigning the system that it becomes too later to do anything (someone else already built the system or there is no need for it anymore somehow).
The difficult thing with this sort of article is that while it generally sounds plausible, the layperson reader doesn't know about the specifics. I don't know anything about BFO spoofing or handshake rings. This means that all I can really judge this article on is its presentation and logical reasoning, and while both seem okay, there's no way for me to evaluate the premises and finer points that the piece critically hinges upon.
Reading this article sort of left me feeling the same way I imagine a child might feel when reading Erich von Daniken or a book about Roswell or something like that: a set of allegations that are (1) surprising, (2) seem to make sense, and (3) that are totally beyond the reader's capacity for counterargument.
I will deliver one counter-argument: I think the focus on Yubileyniy might be unwarranted. The extrapolation of the flight-path is mere speculation, and don't forget that there are lots of places to land a plane, even a very large one. Out of all the larger airfields on the eastern hemisphere of our planet, I'm not surprised to see one that's large enough for this plane and that had some apparently-unusual things going on within the last few months. Statistically, I just regard such an event as probable to occur, independently of any missing planes.
I don't know much of anything about that type of technology, but I think it's far more useful to judge these types of theories based upon the political side. This means questions that go like:
If it was a conspiracy, it must have been carried out by some group. Who was that group?
What are the goals of that group?
Why did that group decide that the proposed plan was the best way to use their limited resources to achieve their goal, as opposed to some other plan?
I suppose the group here would be Putin and/or some group of Russian nationalists, and the goal would be to get the Ukrainian conflict out of the news.
Then the plan would involve a highly elaborate scheme of secretly designing sophisticated equipment, performing careful analysis, and smuggling highly-trained personnel onto a flight for the purpose of secretly diverting it to an obscure airfield. Then you'd have to execute all of the passengers who weren't in on it and dispose of their bodies and the plane somewhere where they won't be found for a long time, and make sure that none of the people who were in on it ever talk about it. And if you screw any of that up at any point, then you get the opposite of what your goal was - massive media attention of what a world-class asshole you are.
But if the goal is to disappear the flight for news coverage, why bother with all of that when 1% of the effort and even less risk would get it to crash somewhere in the Indian ocean, where it would likely never be found?
Why bother with any of it at all? Aren't there lots of much simpler ways to distract the news media? Does anybody in Russia even care that much what the Western media thinks?
Another thing - what about China? As far as I know, the US and Europe are currently unhappy at Russian interference in the Ukraine, but China don't seem to care much. There were a lot of Chinese nationals on that flight, though, and I bet China would be very unhappy indeed if it was ever discovered that they were killed by Russia in a ham-fisted attempt to distract the Western media. Possibly enough to lead to a change in the Chinese position on the conflict, including diplomatic, economic, and maybe military support for the Western position. Why would Russia take that risk, when there must be far simpler options out there?
I find that a lot of conspiracy theories fall apart under this type of analysis, without even paying much attention to the technical details. If you want me to believe that this happened, you've gotta come up with a group and set of goals that make it look like a good idea.
The scenario described in the article could only have gone down with the support of a state level actor. In foreign affairs, states are mostly rational and risk-averse. The risk involved in such an operation would have been astronomical:
- It stretches the imagination that in the Post-9/11 world, hijackers could access a panel in the cabin without raising passenger and crew suspicion. So the hijackers would have required some way to control the passengers. Smuggling this past airport security is already a huge risk to the operation.
- The northern route may be the optimal route for someone looking to avoid detection, but there is still a massive risk that one of these countries might notice the plane on military or other radar. This would be an unqualified disaster to the sponsors of the operation.
- The most probable final ping locations are so far out that the aircraft was almost certainly at or on the verge of fuel exhaustion. How would the hijackers have known the precise amount of fuel on board? How would they deal with unexpectedly high head winds, or some other in-flight issue? Any crash landing would be difficult to conceal.
The sophistication, danger, and lack of motivation for such an operation makes this sound more like a movie plot than a credible theory.
Exactly. Too much work, risk and investment for a very limited gain. I'd still bet my money on an unknown technical fault, everything else is just speculations with no proof whatsoever.
Whatever the merits of the argument about the actual location of MH370, it was entirely inappropriate to dox those two Ukrainians with such circumstantial evidence as to their involvement. At one point he is saying just look at their physique and imagine these guys taking over your aircraft. Right.
Theorising on the internet is one thing, but real people don't deserve terrorism accusations, except through due process of law. Boston bomb media lynching is a case in point.
This is all you ever need to remember when considering the validity of the majority of news sources:
> I soon realized the germ of every TV-news segment is: “Officials say X.” The validity of the story derives from the authority of the source. The expert, such as myself, is on hand to add dimension or clarity. Truth flowed one way: from the official source, through the anchor, past the expert, and onward into the great sea of viewerdom.
1) As an expert, I appear on TV to repeat the Official News Updates
2) I'm there all week, so I'm a regular
3) The experts don't agree at all
4) The experts don't like conspiracy theorists (lightning?)
5) The experts can be conspiracy theorists, too! (Putin!?)
Even his book summary lays out the same trope: CNN Aviation Analyst Jeff Wise sweeps aside the conspiracy theories and misconceptions, then just down below, once they've made the appeal to authority, a radical new hypothesis ought to be considered. Bizarre. A very entertaining read.
I don't understand why an entity with "state level resources" would need to go through this elaborate procedure to acquire a jet (which they presumably want to use for nefarious purposes).
1) What nefarious purpose could they possibly use it for? e.g. let's say they want to turn it into a flying bomb - do they really think the rest of the world won't figure out where it came from / who did it, simply because they're using a stolen plane?
2) Why go through all this trouble with a mission that could go catastrophically wrong, when you could just buy it through your regular black-budget process?
The theory has a lot of holes, but in the absence of the plane and much other hard evidence, it becomes really attractive to believe in it. What were the Russians doing in Malaysia? In fact Russians make up an increasing number of tourists in south east asia. I ran into many when I was in Phuket a couple of years back.
If Russia did it (and I'm not saying there is a shred of evidence that they did) the motive would have been to distract the western media from Ukraine.
It's interesting to me that there is a chunk of the infowars crowd that seized on this theory and IIRC this exact air strip before this guy came along and he will probably get some play in those circles.
I think a clue might be where he stated that the CNN checks stopped rolling in. I could only assume to get them back he needs to have more news and a captive audience.
rdtsc's point above is taken but this guy's idea in particular is really bonkers.
He tries to pass off the idea that you can avoid radar by flying along borders with nothing more than the word of an anonymous military navigator. Maybe he should rent a plane in Kashmir and try flying along the Chinese-India border for a few hours and see if that actually works.
Also, am I the only one disturbed by OP's implicating the 3 Russian passengers? It's not backed by any investigation, just speculation. And more likely than not those 3 Russians were simply victims.
So if any of this was true it would all just be an amazing coincidence that the pilot was in a courtroom seeing a political figure he strongly supported for years getting a hefty sentence on trumped up charges for challenging the national leader. And then after being observed to be highly upset and emotional have a night to consider it all and then go fly the plane the next day.
Say what you will about the article or his theory, but I thought this passage was really well written and concisely summed up an important observation:
“‘That’s right’ is a feeling you get so that you can move on,” Burton told me.
It’s a kind of subconscious laziness.
Just as it’s harder to go for a run than to plop onto the sofa,
it’s harder to reexamine one’s assumptions than it is to embrace certainty.
At one end of the spectrum of skeptics are scientists, who by disposition or training resist the easy path;
at the other end are conspiracy theorists, who’ll leap effortlessly into the sweet bosom of certainty.
tl;dr: because air disasters are incredibly improbable, the range for speculation is almost completely unbounded, and therefore the probability that any particular speculation is correct is vanishingly small.
24-hour cable news? Probably not. The fact that they have to be saying something for 24 hours a day, without repeating themselves too frequently, is virtually impossible. There's simply not that much news. Not to mention the fact that young people don't watch the news (the State of the Media report in 2014 said that the average age of the evening news watcher was 53) [1]. Honestly it's painful to watch when I'm at the airport.
You could get all of the news that matters in thirty seconds if someone went through the work to organize it that way.
Print news will die even sooner.
Internet/app news (or print resurrected in Internet form) is also in serious trouble. It's a money problem at the end of the day. News agencies are literally making pennies when they used to make dollars [2]. Turns out if you're making 1/10 of what you used to make it's hard to keep people on staff. Those people on staff were the writers and fact-checkers, so now instead of being able to spend a long time thoughtfully reporting there's a lot of "I need three stories on my desk by the end of the day" going on. Combine that with the fact that now your local newspaper competes with every other newspaper, and most of the industry is pretty much screwed.
Yet, I say that as someone who is starting a news company (https://grasswire.com). I think at the end of the day citizen journalism and fact-checking (allowing more participation from non-paid parties) can not only produce higher quality journalism, but can actually save the news from its monetization woes. (In other words, our thesis is that instead of trying to squeeze more out of the monetization end as a result of increase in supply, we should just let that increase in supply decrease the value of each printed word). Basically we're trying to create an open Wikipedia-like newsroom where anyone can curate and fact-check in real-time. It has been working beautifully in private beta, so we'll see.
I like how positive americans are. They wouldn't say people are dumb for coming up with crazy "Lost" and "Twilight Zone" theories. But instead, it's wonderful that everybody is trying to help :)
This theory would have had way more impact without quoting any names or making any direct accusations. It would also have had the benefit to spare his reputation.
On top of everything others said, what kind of nation hijacks a plane with 152 Chinese nationals, unless they want a war with China? (And if they do want a war with China, why bother with such a complicated plot?)
If Russia did it, and if China finds out, does anybody think China will say, "Well, it's Russia, we'll protest at UN and demand economic sanction"? Moscow and Beijing will be in rubbles when the dusts clear.
I just don't understand why if this was a hijacking that there was no media outlet alerted stating demands or claiming responsibility, etc.
If that were the case I can only imagine that something went wrong and they were unable to announce the takeover or there is some sort of cover up that is being implemented to prevent any groups from getting credit for hijacking a plane. Nothing really seems to make a lot of sense to me.
I do think it's interesting that the author doesn't really seem to sure himself and thinks that he may be crazy to think he has the answer.
It seems that a lot of events when thrown into a strange context can seem to both explain something yet sound/be completely crazy(the work to hide the airplane in Kazakhstan in the middle of winter)
It could have just been some government project that just so happened to wrap up around that time. I wonder if this plane will be found...
> One was sure the plane had been hit by lightning and then floated in the South China Sea, transmitting to the satellite on battery power. When I kicked him out, he came back under aliases. I wound up banning anyone who used the word “lightning.”
That's some seriously messed up moderation. Who is this guy and what forum is he talking about?
> The MH370 obsessives continued attacking the problem. Since I was the proprietor of the major web forum, it fell on me to protect the fragile cocoon of civility that nurtured the conversation. A single troll could easily derail everything. The worst offenders were the ones who seemed intelligent but soon revealed themselves as Believers. They’d seized on a few pieces of faulty data and convinced themselves that they’d discovered the truth. One was sure the plane had been hit by lightning and then floated in the South China Sea, transmitting to the satellite on battery power. When I kicked him out, he came back under aliases. I wound up banning anyone who used the word “lightning.”
I have no experience moderating a large online community, but this feels like a particularly bad way to do so.
[+] [-] rdtsc|11 years ago|reply
Notice how he talks about the "crazies" on the forum. How they would use aliases, log back in and mention their stupid "lightning" theory, and he had to kick them out.
However, he then carefully proceeds to discribe how he did pretty much the same. Spent his own money and time building this complicated theory of super smart and efficient russian spies hacking into a satcom of a flying aircraft, also somehow, incapacitation everyone else on board, etc. In the meantime he is dropping clues how his own wife doesn't even believe him.
I think many people here, judging by the comments, misunderstood the goal of the article and took it too literaly.
But, there is a good lesson here. This stuff happens if you program and design software. There are lot of moving parts and lot of imperfect knowledge -- market needs, tools, langauges, platforms, APIs, architectures desicions, etc etc. Sometimes if you start to "just write code" too early. You end up committed to a bad path and it becomes hard mentally to throw it away and restart. Or, alternatively, you spend so much time picking the right combination of tools or redesigning the system that it becomes too later to do anything (someone else already built the system or there is no need for it anymore somehow).
[+] [-] johnloeber|11 years ago|reply
Reading this article sort of left me feeling the same way I imagine a child might feel when reading Erich von Daniken or a book about Roswell or something like that: a set of allegations that are (1) surprising, (2) seem to make sense, and (3) that are totally beyond the reader's capacity for counterargument.
I will deliver one counter-argument: I think the focus on Yubileyniy might be unwarranted. The extrapolation of the flight-path is mere speculation, and don't forget that there are lots of places to land a plane, even a very large one. Out of all the larger airfields on the eastern hemisphere of our planet, I'm not surprised to see one that's large enough for this plane and that had some apparently-unusual things going on within the last few months. Statistically, I just regard such an event as probable to occur, independently of any missing planes.
Anyway, it was an interesting read.
[+] [-] greendestiny|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhouston|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ufmace|11 years ago|reply
If it was a conspiracy, it must have been carried out by some group. Who was that group? What are the goals of that group? Why did that group decide that the proposed plan was the best way to use their limited resources to achieve their goal, as opposed to some other plan?
I suppose the group here would be Putin and/or some group of Russian nationalists, and the goal would be to get the Ukrainian conflict out of the news.
Then the plan would involve a highly elaborate scheme of secretly designing sophisticated equipment, performing careful analysis, and smuggling highly-trained personnel onto a flight for the purpose of secretly diverting it to an obscure airfield. Then you'd have to execute all of the passengers who weren't in on it and dispose of their bodies and the plane somewhere where they won't be found for a long time, and make sure that none of the people who were in on it ever talk about it. And if you screw any of that up at any point, then you get the opposite of what your goal was - massive media attention of what a world-class asshole you are.
But if the goal is to disappear the flight for news coverage, why bother with all of that when 1% of the effort and even less risk would get it to crash somewhere in the Indian ocean, where it would likely never be found?
Why bother with any of it at all? Aren't there lots of much simpler ways to distract the news media? Does anybody in Russia even care that much what the Western media thinks?
Another thing - what about China? As far as I know, the US and Europe are currently unhappy at Russian interference in the Ukraine, but China don't seem to care much. There were a lot of Chinese nationals on that flight, though, and I bet China would be very unhappy indeed if it was ever discovered that they were killed by Russia in a ham-fisted attempt to distract the Western media. Possibly enough to lead to a change in the Chinese position on the conflict, including diplomatic, economic, and maybe military support for the Western position. Why would Russia take that risk, when there must be far simpler options out there?
I find that a lot of conspiracy theories fall apart under this type of analysis, without even paying much attention to the technical details. If you want me to believe that this happened, you've gotta come up with a group and set of goals that make it look like a good idea.
[+] [-] javert|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alaskamiller|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobmoretti|11 years ago|reply
- It stretches the imagination that in the Post-9/11 world, hijackers could access a panel in the cabin without raising passenger and crew suspicion. So the hijackers would have required some way to control the passengers. Smuggling this past airport security is already a huge risk to the operation.
- The northern route may be the optimal route for someone looking to avoid detection, but there is still a massive risk that one of these countries might notice the plane on military or other radar. This would be an unqualified disaster to the sponsors of the operation.
- The most probable final ping locations are so far out that the aircraft was almost certainly at or on the verge of fuel exhaustion. How would the hijackers have known the precise amount of fuel on board? How would they deal with unexpectedly high head winds, or some other in-flight issue? Any crash landing would be difficult to conceal.
The sophistication, danger, and lack of motivation for such an operation makes this sound more like a movie plot than a credible theory.
[+] [-] jonah|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|11 years ago|reply
And radar coverage is much bigger in the northern arc.
China/Russia/India/Pakistan, etc
[+] [-] kbart|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huherto|11 years ago|reply
Oh yes. This is a great insight. Thanks. Why would take great risks when you are on top?
[+] [-] lovemenot|11 years ago|reply
Theorising on the internet is one thing, but real people don't deserve terrorism accusations, except through due process of law. Boston bomb media lynching is a case in point.
[+] [-] adaml_623|11 years ago|reply
Obviously accusations such as these are not very nice for the families of those gentlemen but not really the same as doxing.
[+] [-] jasonm23|11 years ago|reply
> I soon realized the germ of every TV-news segment is: “Officials say X.” The validity of the story derives from the authority of the source. The expert, such as myself, is on hand to add dimension or clarity. Truth flowed one way: from the official source, through the anchor, past the expert, and onward into the great sea of viewerdom.
[+] [-] arh68|11 years ago|reply
1) As an expert, I appear on TV to repeat the Official News Updates
2) I'm there all week, so I'm a regular
3) The experts don't agree at all
4) The experts don't like conspiracy theorists (lightning?)
5) The experts can be conspiracy theorists, too! (Putin!?)
Even his book summary lays out the same trope: CNN Aviation Analyst Jeff Wise sweeps aside the conspiracy theories and misconceptions, then just down below, once they've made the appeal to authority, a radical new hypothesis ought to be considered. Bizarre. A very entertaining read.
[+] [-] defen|11 years ago|reply
1) What nefarious purpose could they possibly use it for? e.g. let's say they want to turn it into a flying bomb - do they really think the rest of the world won't figure out where it came from / who did it, simply because they're using a stolen plane?
2) Why go through all this trouble with a mission that could go catastrophically wrong, when you could just buy it through your regular black-budget process?
[+] [-] damian2000|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yaur|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkhpalm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steko|11 years ago|reply
He tries to pass off the idea that you can avoid radar by flying along borders with nothing more than the word of an anonymous military navigator. Maybe he should rent a plane in Kashmir and try flying along the Chinese-India border for a few hours and see if that actually works.
[+] [-] nandemo|11 years ago|reply
Also, am I the only one disturbed by OP's implicating the 3 Russian passengers? It's not backed by any investigation, just speculation. And more likely than not those 3 Russians were simply victims.
[+] [-] ars|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gustomaximus|11 years ago|reply
Someone did claim to see a fireball. http://www.thewire.com/global/2014/03/oil-rig-worker-says-he...
[+] [-] damian2000|11 years ago|reply
Incidentally, the kiwi oil rig worker who claimed he saw MH370 come down in a fireball was sacked for saying that, and hasn't worked since.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&obje...
[+] [-] DavidPlumpton|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] n1c|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cshimmin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjradcliffe|11 years ago|reply
Speculation on the location of MH370 is evidence of innumeracy, at best. Insanity, at worst: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1364
tl;dr: because air disasters are incredibly improbable, the range for speculation is almost completely unbounded, and therefore the probability that any particular speculation is correct is vanishingly small.
[+] [-] 8ig8|11 years ago|reply
It was one of those rare stories where I was looking at my scroll position hoping I wasn't near the end. Usually it is the other way around.
[+] [-] melling|11 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpVd7k1Uw6A
Can anyone fix American news?
[+] [-] austenallred|11 years ago|reply
You could get all of the news that matters in thirty seconds if someone went through the work to organize it that way.
Print news will die even sooner.
Internet/app news (or print resurrected in Internet form) is also in serious trouble. It's a money problem at the end of the day. News agencies are literally making pennies when they used to make dollars [2]. Turns out if you're making 1/10 of what you used to make it's hard to keep people on staff. Those people on staff were the writers and fact-checkers, so now instead of being able to spend a long time thoughtfully reporting there's a lot of "I need three stories on my desk by the end of the day" going on. Combine that with the fact that now your local newspaper competes with every other newspaper, and most of the industry is pretty much screwed.
Yet, I say that as someone who is starting a news company (https://grasswire.com). I think at the end of the day citizen journalism and fact-checking (allowing more participation from non-paid parties) can not only produce higher quality journalism, but can actually save the news from its monetization woes. (In other words, our thesis is that instead of trying to squeeze more out of the monetization end as a result of increase in supply, we should just let that increase in supply decrease the value of each printed word). Basically we're trying to create an open Wikipedia-like newsroom where anyone can curate and fact-check in real-time. It has been working beautifully in private beta, so we'll see.
[1] http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2012/network-news-the-pace-of...
[2] http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2012/newspapers-building-digi...
[+] [-] yodsanklai|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] datamingle|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simlevesque|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] peteretep|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k4renio|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yongjik|11 years ago|reply
If Russia did it, and if China finds out, does anybody think China will say, "Well, it's Russia, we'll protest at UN and demand economic sanction"? Moscow and Beijing will be in rubbles when the dusts clear.
[+] [-] sleepyhead|11 years ago|reply
Well they were mostly middle-class normal tourists. Probably not important enough for the Chinese leaders to care about.
[+] [-] prawn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] signa11|11 years ago|reply
reminds me of sting's "russian" song, specifically, "i hope the russians love their children too..."
[+] [-] jfoster|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] S_A_P|11 years ago|reply
If that were the case I can only imagine that something went wrong and they were unable to announce the takeover or there is some sort of cover up that is being implemented to prevent any groups from getting credit for hijacking a plane. Nothing really seems to make a lot of sense to me. I do think it's interesting that the author doesn't really seem to sure himself and thinks that he may be crazy to think he has the answer. It seems that a lot of events when thrown into a strange context can seem to both explain something yet sound/be completely crazy(the work to hide the airplane in Kazakhstan in the middle of winter) It could have just been some government project that just so happened to wrap up around that time. I wonder if this plane will be found...
[+] [-] Kiro|11 years ago|reply
That's some seriously messed up moderation. Who is this guy and what forum is he talking about?
[+] [-] baddox|11 years ago|reply
I have no experience moderating a large online community, but this feels like a particularly bad way to do so.
[+] [-] brfox|11 years ago|reply