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On a bridge in Long Island, New York, a man named Mike takes a break from work. It's July, 1996, a warm summer evening. From his standpoint, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, Mike sees what looks to him like fireworks being set off. A small light appears from behind a line of houses, zigzagging its way up into the sky. Its erratic movement smooths into an arc and then it disappears. Moments later, Mike sees a fireball erupt in the sky and the fuselage of a plane plummeting to the water below. When news breaks about the crash of TWA Flight 800, Mike believes he's a witness. He details everything he saw for the FBI agents investigating the cause of the plane's explosion. Sixteen months later, authorities release a video about some eyewitness accounts, including Mike's, which they've animated. It turns out lots of people saw that light moving upward in the sky and there's been talk that a missile might have struck down the plane. But in this video, officials are saying that's not the case. There was no missile involved, and they think they know why. Some witnesses were confused. That's what the video is meant to explain. Only according to Mike, the animation doesn't accurately portray what he saw. He remains certain it was a missile. And he is not the only one. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. You can watch our episodes and more on our new YouTube channel, Onspiracy Theories podcast, and check us out on Instagram heconspiracypod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. This summer, we're jet setting through history on a world tour of mystery and motives. Today we're covering the crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island. The National Transportation Safety Board, or ntsb, concluded there was no crime involved. It was nothing more than a tragic accident. But even some of the investigators on the case say we don't know the full story. The episode includes discussions of death. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. Stay with us. On July 17, 1996, 212 passengers and 18 crew members board TWA Flight 800. The 747 is headed from JFK Airport in New York to Charles de Gaulle in Paris, France. Among them are a newlywed couple on their honeymoon, an interior decorator well known around Manhattan, a trio of women on a highly anticipated girls trip, a high school French club from a Small town in Pennsylvania and a man who'd barely missed his earlier flight. Originally, he wasn't supposed to be on Flight 800 at all. Neither were the two pilots and two flight engineers manning the cockpit. They, along with several of the passengers, were scheduled to fly direct to Rome. But that flight was canceled and they were added to the Paris flight, which will continue on to Italy. Now they're all sitting on the tarmac. Delayed Flight 800 was supposed to depart at 7pm but it's closer to 8 when the captains get the go ahead. The plane speeds down the Runway, and at 8:19, it takes off, heading out past the shoreline and over the Atlantic. If you're watching right now, you can see this map of their flight path. Following directions from air traffic control, the plane banks left, flying almost parallel along the coast. The flight's a few miles from the south shore of Long island when the control tower instructs the 747 to climb to 15,000ft. As it does, something goes wrong. At 8:31, roughly 13 minutes after takeoff, a loud sound is picked up by the microphone in the plane's cockpit. Flight 800 disappears from the radar screen where it was being tracked. 38 seconds later, the captain of an East Wind Airlines flight radios air traffic control, saying, we just saw an explosion out here. David McClane has been watching Flight 800 for a couple of minutes at this point earlier, he noticed a small light on the 747's underbelly. He thought they'd forgotten to turn off their landing lights. But a part of him worried an engine was on fire, so he kept his eye on it. Now he listens to the control tower's futile attempts to contact the plane. Captain McClane then says, it just blew up in the air. And then we saw two fireballs go down to the water. It's in this span of a few moments that Mike Weier and more than 700 other witnesses hear and or watch the crash of Flight 800. Three members of the Air National Guard are in a helicopter when it happens. From 11 nautical miles away. One of the pilots assumes at first that it's a shooting star. A reddish orange light streaks across the sky in a gentle downward arc for a few seconds. When that's followed by an explosion, and then a second and maybe a third explosion. The horror of what he's actually watching dawns on him. He describes a massive fireball that falls for about 10 seconds before hitting the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. The National Guardsmen notify the Coast Guard immediately. Officials arrive on scene about 30 minutes later. Their most pressing task is searching the water for survivors. But they have to navigate a huge debris field. Pieces of Flight 800 are scattered across 70 square miles. That's over three times the size of Manhattan. Some of the plane broke off in massive pieces, and a lot of the wreckage is still in flames. Adding to the danger, it's hard to see. An oil slick on the surface of the water creates a field of fire and smoke. By nightfall, it's become clear there are no survivors. The crash has claimed all 230 lives on board. Some of the victims are right there at the surface, and they're carefully recovered. 99 of them in those first 24 hours. Others have sunk to the bottom of the ocean 120ft below, along with some of the larger parts of the fuselage. Eventually, over many long months, remains of every person on board will be retrieved, identified, and returned to their families. In commercial airline disasters, the NTSB is typically charged with leading the investigation. If they can pinpoint the cause, they can make safety recommendations in the hopes of ensuring these tragedies don't happen again. Word of Flight 800 spreads quickly, and footage of the wreckage is already appearing on nightly news broadcasts. Three NTSB officials are pulled out of a movie theater, and by midnight, they've assigned some of their top investigators to go to Long Island. However, according to the book Deadly Departure by Christine Negroni, the jet that's supposed to fly them there doesn't have a pilot lined up. Meanwhile, FBI agents arrive in droves and begin to move on the investigation. It's notable because the FBI typically only gets involved if there's been a crime. According to the FBI deputy director on the case, Jim Kallstrom, the bureau initially has reason to suspect this might have been an act of terrorism, possibly involving a bomb or a missile. Air traffic controllers never mentioned any major mechanical issues. The pilots never put out a distress call, and witnesses described something moving in the sky prior to the explosion. Also weighing on agents is the whole atmosphere of 1996. Terrorism, both foreign and domestic, is fresh in everyone's minds this summer. Ramzi Yousef is on trial. Back in 93, he was the mastermind behind the World Trade center bombing that killed six and injured over a thousand more. After that, while on the run, Yousef plotted to bomb US Planes. He was caught before he could and is now on trial for conspiracy. And the courthouse is on the same block where Jim Kallstrom works. The Oklahoma City bombing, too, just occurred In April of 1995, soon after the Flight 800 disaster President Bill Clinton appeals to the nation not to jump to conclusions. He says, let's wait till we get the facts. The fact is, most of the evidence the investigators need is is sitting at the bottom of the ocean, including the plane's black boxes, both of which have a story to tell. This episode is brought to you by ebay. We all have that piece, the one that's so you. You've basically become known for it. And if you don't yet fashionistas, you'll find it on ebay. That Miu Miu red leather bomber, the cousteau Barcelona cowboy top. Or that Patagonia fleece in the 2017 colorway. All these finds are all on ebay, along with millions of more main character pieces backed by authenticity guarantee. Ebay is the place for pre loved and vintage fashion. Ebay Things people love Discover Ralph's Club New York. The new fragrance by Ralph Lauren. With blackcurrant, vanilla and sandalwood, this scent embodies the sensuality and confidence of Usher. Like the city that never sleeps, this masculine Fragrance lasts for 12 hours. Ralph's Club New York Ralph Lauren shop now@macy's.com in an airplane disaster investigators look for what's known as the black box. Here's something I learned in this Black boxes are actually orange, so they're easier to find among the wreckage. Why then are they called black boxes? Well, they got their name because they were designed to not let light in. And each plane has two black boxes. One contains the flight data recorder, or fdr, which keeps track of information like airspeed, altitude, heading, the positions of the rudders and flaps, and so on. The second box contains the cockpit voice recorder, or CVR on Flight 800. The CVR has four audio tracks, three that picked up radio transmissions from the captain, first officer, and flight engineer, and one more called the cockpit area microphone, which does what it sounds like if a sound was loud enough, that mic would pick it up. Which means as the Flight 800 investigation gets underway, finding the black boxes is a top priority. They've more than likely settled around the bottom of the ocean, about 120ft down. Day and night, searchers are using remote scanning vehicles like this one, along with other equipment to map out the underwater debris. As they retrieve the wreckage, each part is carefully raised to the surface and tagged to keep track of where it was found. Then these pieces are transported to an enormous hangar where they're logged and identified. On July 24, one week after the crash, a U.S. navy scuba diver radios up to his crew on the surface. He's found one of the black boxes, the one containing the flight data recorder. The discovery of the second box happens almost simultaneously. Both have been damaged, but the magnetic tape inside them is perfectly fine. Analysis of that tape finds that the CVR doesn't yield the kind of clues everybody was hoping for. There's no conversation between the pilots hinting about any kind of malfunction. Nothing gets spelled out clearly. But the microphone does pick up a single loud noise lasting a fraction of a second at the very end of the tape. Then both devices lost power. That happened at 8:31pm at the same second flight 800 disappeared off the radar. Analysts also note two momentary blips on the tape, which could indicate an earlier disruption to the power supply. As for the flight data recorder, the one that shows how the plane was operating, it shows no troubling anomalies leading up to that loud sound at 8:31. Presumably that sound was an explosion. But the data doesn't really explain what could have caused a blast, which is odd. As one of the analysts tells author Christina Negroni, the most intriguing part was the lack of anything intriguing. The black boxes aren't investigators only hope at finding answers. Though not by a long shot. All those pieces of wreckage being logged and stored in that hangar are revealing new clues every day. Dr. Merritt Burkey is the NTSB's lead fire and explosions expert. In the documentary TWA Flight 800, he describes looking at portions of the plane's center wing fuel tank. Based on the burns and damage to its walls. He has to wonder if an explosion originated inside that fuel tank and caused the Flight 800 disaster. He's even studied a different damaged center wing tank before from another crash and and it appeared similar to this one. If you take a look at this diagram, you can see this particular airplane model has seven fuel tanks. Three in the left wing, three in the right wing and one in the center running below the main cabin. That center tank's designed to hold more than 12,800 gallons of jet fuel. But that much fuel is heavy and which slows a plane down and makes flights more costly. It's usually only filled for long haul flights. Here's what investigators gather about Flight 800's tank specifically. The plane had flown into JFK earlier that day from Athens, Greece. The center wing tank had been filled up for that longer trip. But for the shorter trip to Paris Green ground crews only loaded the six tanks in the wings. 50 gallons remained in that center tank from the earlier flight. That left a Lot of open space. Burkey and other investigators start to theorize that under the wrong conditions that 50 gallons of fuel warmed into combustible vapors. After all, the explosion happened on a hot summer day and the plane delayed over an hour and sat on that tarmac with its air conditioning units running for even longer than that. Plus, on this particular make and model of 747, those AC units are situated directly underneath the center wing fuel tank. Like you see in this diagram, when those air conditioner packs get really hot, some of that heat could transfer into the center tank and stay there. Ok. Running the AC and even heating up the center wing tank isn't typically going to cause a catastrophic accident. I mean, the plane servicing Flight 800 had flown for 25 years without any major incident. But Berkey knows it would only take one faulty wire near that tank to hypothetically ignite those fuel vapors. For some of the investigators, a picture is coming into focus, one that shows a mechanical problem as opposed to a criminal act. They consider the order in which certain parts of the plane fell to the ocean. Take a look at these two diagrams where the NTSB has color coded three sections of the plane. It appears that the middle of the plane, which you see in red, right where the center wing tank sits, fell to the ocean first, followed by the front of the plane in yellow, which included the cockpit, then the rear in green from the wings on back, which stayed in the air the longest. It's one more reason to suspect the problem started in that center tank. The FBI's Jim Kallstrom later tells CNN the various agencies involved do get on board with the theory that the center wing tank exploded first. They're just not ready to agree on how the tank exploded. There's still no smoking gun. Nothing that's coming out of the water seems to give a definitive answer. So. So the FBI can't wrap up their part of the investigation just yet. By now, the hangar's getting fuller and fuller. Searchers eventually recover 95% of the wreckage. And it's looking like a baffling jigsaw puzzle scattered across 300,000 square feet. The thing about a puzzle, though, is you can piece it together and, and that's exactly what happens. Starting that August, a 93 foot long portion of the center fuselage is reconstructed. You can see it here on your screen. Putting it all back together is a team effort between the ntsb, FBI, the plane's manufacturer, and representatives of the pilots, flight attendants and machinists unions. They also rebuild a second portion of the Plane consisting of the main cabin. This allows the investigators to see the big picture. And just as important as what they do see is what they don't. An FAA administrator reportedly takes one look at the rebuilt fuselage and is appeased. There's no evidence of a missile hitting the plane or a bomb going off inside. To be on the safe side, experts take a closer look. Metallurgists and members of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms find no signs that the plane came into contact with any such weapons. If it had, they'd be seeing the telltale marks, like pitting or metal that eroded due to hot gases. They say they don't see any of that. And according to the ntsb, every single hole in the wreckage was caused by something originating from the inside of the plane. Moving outward, they see nothing to suggest a missile or its parts entered the plane from the outside. Flight 800 had been flying too high to be hit by something like that anyway, says one senior army representative. And if a missile struck the plane, it more than likely would have hit the engines. But all the engines were recovered, still mostly intact, despite sustaining crushing damage when they hit the water. So overwhelmingly, the physical evidence seems to be supporting the NTSB's theory the crash was an accident. Four years after the explosion of Flight 800, the investigation wraps up with a final hearing. In August of 2000, the safety board releases a 425 page report and proposes the chain of events they believe caused the disaster. They've also released a video depicting what happened, which you can follow along with if you're watching. You already know their suspicions about the air conditioners heating up the center wing fuel tank and filling it with flammable vapors. Something ignited those vapors, they say, causing a small but damaging first explosion that cut the power to the flight data recorder and the rest of the plane. It also caused the front walls of that center wing tank to bow out. These pushed against a large structural beam, rotating it forward and stressing that whole section of the plane's fuselage until it cracked. Then the bottom center of the fuselage broke open. That's the first section that fell to the ocean. At that point, there was an unstoppable domino effect. Structural damage, the front end of the plane was the next breakoff. The NTSB suggests the main fuselage continued to fly upward in what they call crippled flight. Due to its momentum and the fact that the engines were still attached to this section, it climbed as much as 2,000 more feet into the air, slowing as it reached an altitude of about 15 to 16,000ft as the back end of the plane arced and then fell. Leaking jet fuel likely caused a new fireball. Additional fires or explosions erupted as the wings separated before impact. Most experts and media outlets fully accept the NTSB's version of events. In their hefty report on the investigation, they go into great detail about how they arrived at their conclusions. But something is missing from the story, which the board readily admits they never could pinpoint exactly what ignited that initial explosion in the center wing tank. They think a wire short circuited outside of the tank, passing high voltage into the tank. That explanation isn't enough for some people, they say. There are key points in the story where we simply have to take the investigators word for it. And according to them, there's reason to suspect that we shouldn't discover Ralph's Club New York the new fragrance by Ralph Lauren with black currant, vanilla and sandalwood, this scent embodies the sensuality and confidence of Usher. Like the city that never sleeps, this masculine Fragrance lasts for 12 hours. Ralph's Club New York Ralph Lauren Shop now@macy's.com the eyewitnesses did not see a missile that was the sentiment repeated throughout a video produced by the CIA and presented by the FBI's Jim Calstro in a press conference. It's also one of the major issues in this story that not everyone agrees with. It was November 1997 when the FBI announced they'd found no evidence of a criminal act leading to the explosion of Flight 800. The CIA, brought into the investigation early on by the FBI, said they also found nothing to suggest a deliberate attack, one point they made over a year after the crash. No terrorist group had come forward to take responsibility. Perhaps they all knew the missile theory wouldn't go away so easily, though. So the CIA produced their video asking what did the eyewitnesses see. They used some of the witness statements as examples. While they don't name anybody, they it's clear that one account they focus on comes from Mike Weier, the man who watched the explosion from that Long island bridge. Using animation to reenact the event, the video claims the arcing white light Mike saw wasn't a missile. It was the main fuselage of the plane as it continued climbing into the sky after the nose broke off. Then he saw the larger explosion, presumably due to the other fuel tanks catching fire. Only Mike says the CIA animation simply did not match what he described to FBI agents and whether or not they think a missile was involved. Other witnesses feel the exact same way that the official Story doesn't match what they saw that night. The NTSB's own report notes that it was the FBI that conducted all of the initial witness interviews. The Bureau didn't turn those over to the safety board until three to four months into the investigation. Even then, many of the names were redacted. The NTSB didn't get access to the full reports until 1998. Then they only re interviewed an unspecified limited number of these people, even though hundreds were believed to have seen and or heard the event from all over Long island, as seen in this map of their locations. The NTSB felt the FBI did a good enough job of recording the witness statements, even though they noted a potential for bias in how the interviews were conducted. Apparently, some agents had been given sample questions to ask which directly alluded to weapons, like how long did the missile fly? Yet the NTSB still didn't re examine most of these witnesses, partially because their research suggested memories aren't all that accurate. Apparently, they often find inaccuracies between witness reports and what their investigations reveal. The NTSB did want to check on one detail, though. They conducted a missile visibility study to see whether such a weapon could even be seen from miles away, as some witnesses believed. They stationed viewers at intervals up to 14 nautical miles from the launch point. Everybody saw the missiles, even the observers standing farthest away. Most described it as a flame or light moving up into the air, disappearing and then reappearing upon detonation. Kinda similar to what Mike Weir says he saw on July 17, 1996. Another point of contention is whether or not there was suspicious residue on the wreckage. One month into the investigation, the FBI announced they found traces of plastic explosives. But they assumed it came from a training exercise for a bomb sniffing dog held on the same 747just two and a half weeks before the crash. Based on where the traces were found and how the plane exploded, the bomb theory still didn't make sense to them. But some people aren't so sure the dog training story happened the way agents said it did. Journalist Christina Borgesen finds the timing of that training exercise implausible. She says flight logs show the plane took off, which with nearly every seat occupied, way too soon after the exercise reportedly ended. Stranger still, it's unclear how agents could have found traces of explosives on those samples in the first place. The FAA conducted tests on how the residue held up in ocean water. They found that just two days of exposure left their samples totally clean. But it wasn't just the FBI who said they'd found suspicious residue during the investigation, at one time, investigators were focusing on a reddish brown substance on pieces of fabric from the plane's seats. Lab tests were ordered, but according to the ntsb, the substance turned out to be adhesive. Then a freelance journalist named Jim Sanders got his hands on some of that fabric and paid for his own tests. He claimed his results came back positive for explosive residue from a missile. The thing is, Sanders and his wife were eventually convicted of conspiring to steal evidence. He later had this to say at a news I find it amazing that anyone would give any government official any credibility. That said that 600 and some odd witnesses were incredible. Couldn't be believed. How many people in this country are put to death on one or two eyewitnesses? Then there are the whistleblowers who came forward. Years later in 2013, Christina Borgesen, the same journalist I mentioned earlier, directed a documentary. It featured several career investigators who'd been on the Flight 800 case. Some of them allegedly saw agents tampering with evidence, like swapping tags on the wreckage in the middle of the night. Others were worried about careless disorganization. And a few of them blatantly disagreed with the NTSB's conclusions, specifically that the main fuselage of the plane could have possibly continued gaining altitude for such a long time after the nose broke off. When these concerns were brought up to their superiors, though the whistleblowers claimed they were ignored in response to the documentary, the NTSB stood by their initial conclusions. Okay, so why the COVID up? If the government is supposedly pushing the idea that this was a mechanical issue and hiding evidence of a missile, what's to gain? Well, early on, a conspiracy theory popped up on the Internet. Remember, this was 1996, the days of dial up and TWA Flight 800 was a popular topic of discussion. One theory went that the plane was brought down by friendly fire. The USS Normandy had recently been on the water relatively close to where the plane went down. It took part in military exercises that day, along with Navy aircraft and submarines. And the Normandy did have surface to air missiles on board. According to Agent Kallstrom, the FBI seriously considered this angle. They interviewed every last service member on board and did a thorough accounting of all ordnance on the cruiser. They found nothing amiss. Kallstrom later told cnn, those missiles on the Normandy could not have even reached Flight 800. They were out of range. But still, the friendly fire theory broke the bonds of the Internet in November 1996, when it was seemingly given weight by Pierre Salinger. Salinger was a former White House press secretary to JFK and reporter. He claimed to have proof that it really was friendly fire and that the government was covering it up. He said he'd gotten his information from a friend in French Intelligence. It turned out Salinger was referencing a document that had been floating around on the Internet for months for anybody to find. The media already considered the document debunked, not totally deterred. Salinger came back with more evidence. Videotape of a radar screen purportedly showing a missile in the air at the time of the plane's explosion. Explosion that was later debunked by the NTSB and media as well. In the accident report, the safety board explains there was data that needed further review. 8 Radar returns were recorded by a radar site in Islip, New York, that did appear to show something in the sky at the same time as Flight 800. The NTSB concluded these came from another plane's radar returns reflecting off tall buildings and other structures. And they could tell because these returns were irregularly spaced and had varying signal strengths. Plus, Flight 800 was picked up by multiple radar sites. But the suspicious anomaly was only picked up by the one in Islip. The accident report included this diagram of those eight radar returns and pointed out they were moving away from Flight 800, not toward it. Detractors say that's only if you believe them. Kristina Borgesen wrote that the NTSB could have theoretically pushed through the analysis they wanted the public to hear. If you take a quick gander at the NTSB's reports, well over 400 pages long. So maybe not so quick a gander. It's hard to say. They don't spell out how they got to their conclusions. I mean, they reconstructed a huge portion of the plane and documented it for all to see. The fuselage was kept in that hangar and used for training purposes up until 2021. It was photographed and recorded countless times. Not exactly hidden away. And yet a few questions remain in the Flight 800 case. First of all, how did residue end up on parts of the plane? The official report says that maybe it was because of a training exercise with plastic explosives, but the timeline doesn't add up. Also, they say the ocean would have washed away those residues. So why are they still there? I think that's something that can't just be overlooked. Secondly, what ignited the center wing fuel tank in the first place? It is the entire cause of the accident, and we don't know what it is. That question looms large for me. And third, why do so many witness statements differ from the official series of events. The CIA animated video shows one thing and many of these witnesses say that is not what they saw. I think it's important to listen to the people who actually saw it now. As a result of the investigation, the NTSB made safety recommendations that were adopted and mandated over the years by the faa. Older planes were re examined, improvements were made to wiring and efforts have been made to reduce potential flammability of fuel tanks so that this kind of disaster hopefully never happens again. Thank you for watching Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram, heconspiracypod and if you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts for more information. We found Christine Negroni's book Deadly Departure as well as Christina Borgesen's documentary TWA Flight 800 and CNN's witnessed the crash of TWA Flight 800 extremely helpful to our research. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story and the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written and researched by Miki Taylor, edited by Connor Sampson, fact checked by Sophie Kemp, engineered by Sam Emezqua and video edited and sound designed by Ryan Contra. Special thanks to Nick Johnson, Paige Ransberry, Andrew Byrne, and Jonathan Ratliff. I'm your host, Carter Roy.