Julian Dorey Podcast - [VIDEO] - Netflix MH370 Investigator: The Most Mysterious Missing Plane of All Time | Jeff Wise • 195

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up, guys? If you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review. Thank you. It's where Russia's space program is. So Russia has, you know how we have Guantanamo Bay? It's like in this sort of hostile country, but it's like ours. Right. But they have a circle. It's like 60 miles across in Kazakhstan. There happened to be a big runway in a very remote part of this base that like there's nobody lives near it or anything. And so if you flew there and it would be like an hour before dawn, you could refuel it and

Starting point is 00:00:42 fly off and be good. So I said to myself, okay, so if this went to Kazakhstan, you've got a very short list of potential perpetrators because you would have to be, like we talked about, like infinitely sophisticated, like infinitely clever and crafty and ruthless. Kazakhstan is a client state of Russia. So who's on the plane? Well, there were...

Starting point is 00:01:03 Jeff Wise, welcome to the studio, sir. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here. I'm excited to talk with you, too, because you and I had a chance to talk on the phone for a long time, about a month ago, after the podcast that came out in November, which you saw and i i wanted to give people some context before we start but for your chops just so people know you obviously have been an aviation reporter for years all different kinds of publications you have reported on the mh370 case as like an exclusive for the past i mean you do you do other reporting too but as like the main focus over the past 10 years you're currently doing a podcast on it as well. What's the name of that podcast?

Starting point is 00:01:47 The podcast is called Deep Dive MH370. Okay. Great name. Thank you. We'll put that down in the description. But also, you know, when – not to not address the 500-pound elephant in the room. Obviously, when I did the last podcast, there were two of them with Ashton. There was all kinds of drama online after that. That is not something I've ever had to be involved with. It's not something I enjoy being involved with. People obviously get very uptight

Starting point is 00:02:15 about this case. But, you know, that aside, you were a guy, what I really appreciated about you not only watching those podcasts, because I didn't know you when you did, but then also talking with me and having a great conversation is that while I was very complimentary of your career in those podcasts and a lot of the work you've done on this case that we're going to get through today, I also threw some funny side rim shots about your theory on this case. And you were beautifully magnanimous about it and that made me like you so i want to be able to litigate some of that today we'll get to what we get to with it but what i really want to do is try to set like you did an amazing job of figuring out exactly what happened to where we lost where we lost i guess like contact with the aircraft right when this happened and then obviously there are some theories that could go on beyond that but you also did a great job of poking holes or issues into the aftermath over the next couple years

Starting point is 00:03:18 which we will talk all about today right so i'd like to start at the very beginning that little monologue aside okay when did you when when this disappearance happened how quickly did you pick it up as a story was it within an hour or a day it took me a little while actually i had just filed a story i was writing a lot for popular mechanics at the time and i had spent a lot of sometimes you like just pour yourself into a story you get exhausted you're just sick of it you just want to take a break and so at the at this exact moment where this happened i did not want to deal with it i did not want to airplane accidents happen they're tragic um it's part of my what i have been doing and what i was doing at the time to try to understand for the public what happened people are fascinated by

Starting point is 00:04:06 air travel they're a little bit scared of it um when bad things happen they want to know why um so for a couple days i was just like it was in the sort of playing in the background and then slate reached out to me uh and they wanted they were asking if i could cover it i said all right fine i was actually i remember because I was actually sitting in my car, alternate side parking, when the text came through, or the email, I guess. And I was like, oh, I have to cover this story. Next 10 years of your life. Next 10 years.

Starting point is 00:04:37 I mean, it's not the only thing I've been writing about, but I have, obsession is, I think, a fair word. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's so, it's, I mean, correct word yeah I mean it's it's so correct me if I'm wrong it's completely unprecedented for a plane to never I mean I guess you have like Amelia Earhart

Starting point is 00:04:54 back in the 1920s but for a commercial jetliner to so you're hosting the family barbecue this week but everyone knows your brother is the grill guy and it's highly likely he'll be backseat barbecuing all night. So be it. Impress even the toughest of critics with freshly prepared Canadian barbecue favorites from Sobeys.

Starting point is 00:05:16 Go down or whatever happened to it and never have any evidence recovered. We've never seen that before. Well, evidence has been recovered, but it is, you're correct, completely unlike any other case we've ever had. Planes disappear all the time, I mean, from Amelia Air onward. There was a very famous case in 2009 when Air France flight, Air France 447, disappeared en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. And it took them two years to find the wreckage on the seabed and there were some uncanny coincidences i would say between that case and ma370 which happened just a few years later um like what well um so air france 447 disappeared it was a it was a red eye flight as was mh370 it was over water um it had left an area of air traffic

Starting point is 00:06:08 control and was in between over the middle of the atlantic ocean um you're outside of radar contact and so the the expectation is that you say goodbye to the air traffic controller in south america and then some hours later you say hello to the air traffic controller in africa and the plane just suffered um some unfortunate sequence of events and it crashed and so it was several hours before anyone uh realized that it was missing um well where is this plane because they had because there was a blip that was on the air traffic controllers screens that sort of was the marker where we assume this is where it is and so they didn't realize that the the the system was just assuming that that's where it was um they were seeing the plane moving across the screen everything seemed to be in order and so then when mh370 happened it um just it might be useful to your listeners and viewers to know that the plane took off on a

Starting point is 00:07:07 red-eye flight from kuala lumpur to beijing 40 minutes into its flight it was over the south china sea it had left the last waypoint in malaysian uh air traffic control responsibility a waypoint called igari and several seconds later like several heartbeats later it goes electronically dark but it had just entered this area as as i said air france 447 several years earlier had been in this in-between zone and so that when it disappeared nobody was looking at it nobody was paying attention to it this um malaysian airlines mh370 um had just left had said good night to malaysian aircraft control left the last waypoint officially nobody was responsible for it how long what's the longest period of time where no one's supposed to be responsible for it that it can be legally

Starting point is 00:08:00 it was legally supposed to be like three minutes unlike air france 447 which was like in this huge international you know ocean um malaysian airlines was over a fairly small body of water and it was the the air traffic control areas directly abut but there's a handover period there's a certain amount of time you say goodbye hello um but so the the air traffic controllers in ho chi minh city in vietnam were expecting this plane to come onto their screens and it just didn't and they were supposed to wait like three minutes but you know it was the middle of the night they weren't expecting anything unusual to happen like day after day after day imagine you spent your year imagine you spent 20 years sitting in your booth in the middle of the night and planes

Starting point is 00:08:52 come through planes come through planes come through nothing unusual ever happens and now this plane isn't there and three minutes go by and four minutes go by and five minutes go by it takes a little while for you to say wait a minute i better make a call yeah so it took longer than people expected but um you know when you look at it in retrospect it seems like a pretty slapdash effort to find out where this plane went yeah there was all kinds of confusion with the communication from the government so i i'm i will butcher the names if i try it but there were there were two main figures who would talk to the people. There was one – what were their official roles?

Starting point is 00:09:31 Well, the prime minister of Malaysia would get up and speak. This is like days later. This is in sort of the aftermath. And, you know, in the Deep Dive MA370 podcast, what we try to do is talk about the timeline that happened in the flight. Like we were just talking about being in between two air traffic controllers. And then also the timeline of the mystery unfolding. It took people days to realize that, wait a minute, you saw this on military radar um so yeah it's it's a fairly complicated sequence of events which is why my partner andy tarnoff and i decided we need to do like a whole we're now 17 episodes

Starting point is 00:10:14 in and we're only like halfway through yes it's really good so many it's a detailed case and julian the reason i'm grateful for you to having me on is because my mission is to try to talk about the case, but also to talk about how we talk about the case. Like how do you grapple with a case that, as you say, is unprecedented? There's never been anything like this. We don't – we have to almost develop a new set of tools to take it apart. Yeah. Everything about it is different from anything we've ever seen before yes i also get really tempted when i'm talking about this topic to jump around because

Starting point is 00:10:54 there's so many layers to it so i'd like to try to do a good job of being organized today right you've already laid out some of the story right obviously some people watching this would have seen the podcast in november which are available on spotify episode 168 and 169 that i did with ashton but after after the plane lost contact and we never heard from it again would you mind just going through the timeline that happens over say maybe the next 24 hours or so yeah as we know it yeah absolutely you know your analogy um of trying to keep everything organized like if you've ever taken apart like your lawnmower carburetor or anything like that if you've ever if you've ever done it the wrong way you'll never do it the wrong way again you have to take apart as you take it apart you have to lay the pieces in

Starting point is 00:11:44 the order in which you found them because if you then try to put it back together you've got an extra part yeah and you're like where does this thing go especially if it's me so this is a complicated case and we have to treat it like a carburetor like we have to know where everything is and we have to sort of parse it out carefully um so we were talking about how the plane was 40 minutes into its flight. It was over the South China Sea. Nobody was paying attention to it. It went electronically dark.

Starting point is 00:12:15 So it's no longer on the radar screens of the air traffic controllers. It's not sending out any kind of radio transmission. And there's various different ways that a plane stays in contact with people on the earth. And all of them were turned off or switched off. We don't know exactly. You don't have to turn off your radio. You can just not say anything on the radio, right? Are there any known technological outlets that exist outside of, say, air traffic control, maybe when we're talking government, military, that would be able to still read a plane that is turned off like that? Yes. Yes. And it took a couple of days for the public to learn that, in fact, so the plane goes electronically dark. More or less simultaneously with that, it makes a hard left turn. It does a U-turn. A U-turn is so aggressive

Starting point is 00:13:06 that you can't just like plug into the autopilot, like change, turn me onto this heading. You actually, because if you say I'm on heading, you know, 030, I want to go into heading 210, 0, the plane will like do it in a pretty chill way civil aviation is about easy maneuvers um someone did it much a hard turn uh they went back not exactly the way they came but more or less reverse course went back over the malayan peninsula once they had come passed over a malaysian air force base called butterworth then went over this body of water called the Malacca Strait. And they flew up the middle of it. On one side, you have Thailand. On the other, you have Indonesia. So it sort of avoided those airspaces.

Starting point is 00:13:57 Yeah. Can we put a map up, Alessi, if you don't mind, just of this area, you know, where the general area is, but continue. Yeah. And so as it was doing all this dark it was being tracked by military radar which is kind of like um a flashlight or a search light that's being you know in the invisible wavelengths being shined out into the world and it catches anything that is you know um it could be a rain cloud or it could be a plane or a balloon or whatever it was zeppelin even um so anyway it is seen flying doing this maneuver i'm describing and then it left because um just as your flashlight can't go infinitely far out into the cosmos the radar only covers you know

Starting point is 00:14:38 maybe let's call it 200 miles or something like that okay so you get to the end of that range and then you're no longer visible to it so you go invisible again so now the plane is somewhere over the Andaman Sea and it is electronically dark it's beyond the range of Malaysian military radar and it is invisible to the world it is so somebody if somebody has taken this plane they've gotten away scot-free nobody can see them do we know how long that would have been from the u-turn to that point an hour like one hour okay and so then that to me the the thing the the core event of this whole mystery happens which is this box gets turned back on that had been turned off. It's called the satellite data unit. It's a component of the satellite communication system. So when I talk about it, I sometimes call it the SATCOM. I sometimes call it the SDU. And this is the box that is allowing

Starting point is 00:15:38 the plane to talk to a satellite that's run by Inmarsat, which is a British-based company. It has ties to the U.S. government, U.K. government, a lot of speculation, spookiness, the usual suspects. But this company will later look into its databases and realize that it has recorded transmissions that were automatically sent between the plane and the satellite, and then onwards to a ground station, and then onwards to London where it was recorded. So there's been a lot of discussion about how do you turn back an SDU? How do you turn it back on? And then secondarily, why would you turn it back on and then secondarily why would you turn it back on and this is everything that we know about the next six hours hinges on the fact that this box was turned back

Starting point is 00:16:31 on because for the next six hours in marsat was recording these periodic transmissions that were taking place so this the way the system works it's a bit like you have a cell phone right and it's constantly even when you're not using it it's figuring out what the nearest tower is and it's just saying hey i'm here i'm logged in and that way if someone wants to call you they can it'll come through because the system knows where you're right so the the satcom on this plane had a similar kind of arrangement where if nobody used this system which you can use to make calls you can send had a similar kind of arrangement where if nobody used this system which you can use to make calls you can send data text that kind of thing it's it's a lot like a cell phone really um if it didn't hear from the user in an hour it would say hi are you still

Starting point is 00:17:19 there it doesn't want to keep you logged in if you're not there maybe you've shut down maybe you've left and you're now talking to a different satellite because you've gone to a different part of the world and so um the um the so every hour the satellite is saying hi are you there the plane is saying yes i'm here now to slightly complicate matters, if something happens, like somebody does use this system, then that clock gets reset. And so twice in the span of the next six hours, people at Malaysian Airlines were like, damn, where's our plane? Let's call. So twice. And what does that do? So if it gets reset, how does that affect the data? It means that the clock starts from then. So if an hour goes by, the satellite says, hi, are you there?

Starting point is 00:18:15 The airplane says yes. And then another 20 minutes go by and someone calls. Now the system is being used and so that timer goes on. So it's another hour it's so it's it's not really that important but it just it wasn't exactly initially when this thing was reported on it was described as being hourly pings that's pretty much true but it's not entirely true because there were these two other events that kind of got in there and messed up the time got it but the

Starting point is 00:18:43 general pattern was I understand yeah so you also, because you were like the lead role in the Netflix documentary on MH370. What's it called again? I just call it the MH370. MH370, The Plane That Disappeared. Got it. So I think there were three parts to that. It's a very good documentary. Hey guys, if you have a second, please be sure to share this episode around on social media and with your friends, whether it's Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, doesn't matter. It's all a huge help. It gets new eyeballs on the show and it allows us to grow and survive. So thank you to all of you who have already been doing that. And thank you to all of you who are going to do so now. But one of the things you were talking about was once it got to that point I want to say when it was over the Andaman Sea right where this starts reading it yeah you don't know the directionality

Starting point is 00:19:32 so it could be north it could be moving north or it could be moving south can you explain yes what how that works and why that is the case yes so we've got these seven pings and what do these pings consist of now the the the malaysian airlines at this time was in sort of financial difficulty so everything that they did they later went bankrupt as in part as a result of this they um they there's different levels of subscription service that you can get when you sign up for your satellite communications. Oh my God. The good one, like when you send each transmission,

Starting point is 00:20:15 it includes like where you are, right? Mm-hmm. From GPS. They had the discount version that didn't have any of those bills and buses. Oh no. Right? And so because of that um these signals were just like housekeeping data that didn't really have any purpose unless

Starting point is 00:20:34 you were trying to maintain your satellite Fleet um and there were but there so the scientists had this data and they're like damn how do we figure out is there some way we can use this data to figure out where this plane is now the mere fact that the data existed is extremely interesting because they had assumed that when they started looking for this plane they assumed it it crashed right where they last saw it because most plane cuts things start to go wrong when things go wrong in an airplane at altitude they tend to come unglued very quickly so air france 447 which we were talking about earlier it had also sent some automatic transmissions of a different nature um but the but the plane was eventually found within five miles of where those last transmissions

Starting point is 00:21:18 were made so the the initial assumption was that this plane is going to be really close to where we last saw it in the andaman sea, as you just saw on that map. The fact that it went for six more hours, that – we were talking earlier about, like, this is a crazy case. Yes. Okay, let's just become comfortable with the idea that strange things are going to happen again and again and again. Yes. Expectations are going to be defied. This is a defying of expectations right here.

Starting point is 00:21:51 The idea that this plane flew for six more hours and you're going like, I don't know, four or five hundred miles an hour. You can go really far in a jet plane in six hours. So this plane could be almost not anywhere. The radius is huge. The radius is huge. And so what else can we figure out from this data? Is there some other clue? We're scientists. We tease out signals from data all the time. So what can we look at? They looked at it carefully. They put on their thinking caps. And they realized that there was two parts of this

Starting point is 00:22:25 metadata that was potentially really interesting. The first one was called burst timing offsets, often referred to as BTO. BTO is a measure of how long it took the plane to respond when the satellite said, hi, are you there? So the plane says, hi, are you there so the plane says hi how are you there the plane received the message thought about it in its machine way and then responded and sent a signal back so there's two components to this time one is the time amount of time it takes light to travel through space and the other is um a well-known um computational. So they can subtract the time for the computational process and what's left is a light speed time. And from that, you can figure out distance.

Starting point is 00:23:12 So from this BTO data, you know how far the plane is from the satellite. And it's just, if you take the universe of all points that are a certain distance from another point, it's a sphere. If you take the intersection of two spheres, meaning the surface of the earth and this first sphere we're talking about, you get a circle. So this plane was somewhere on this circle. Now, you can also rule out because we knew where the plane basically was when the first ping happened.

Starting point is 00:23:41 We know that the maximum speed, this plane can't fly more than about four-fifths of the speed of sound so you you're able to narrow it down so you have these basically what they call arcs and for each of these seven pings you know that it had to be somewhere on this arc and there's another step that you can read about on my blog or we talk about it in the podcast you could there's a kind of math that you can do that will actually allow you to derive a path from those arcs how does that work um it's uh it has to do with probability and and aeronautical um performance and a couple of other things but so let me not get into it right now if you don't okay maybe we could circle back to it if you want to get into it it's like i feel like it's a it's a fairly long walk okay um but you i would definitely encourage people to um we did a

Starting point is 00:24:39 podcast episode called root it talks about how you do that derivation. So when they had this idea, they thought, well, let's test it on some other planes that we have data on because they keep data on all planes. And they did it and it matched pretty well. It doesn't give you an exact line, but it gives you a very narrow probability distribution. So what scientists look for, people tend to think that like scientists like are looking for the answer but really what they're more commonly looking for is a sort of a probability distribution of like what can the range of answers be right like if you if you um if your son is growing up as mine is um and they measure their height every year and from your child's height

Starting point is 00:25:24 each year, they can kind of project into the future as to how tall they're gonna be when they're grown up. And of course, the older the kid is, the more accurate that gets. But you don't know, if your eight-year-old is four foot two, you can say, well, he might be five six, he might be five eight.

Starting point is 00:25:44 Sure, big range. There's a range. And so that's what I'm talking about. They would have thought I was gonna be like five, five when I was eight. Right, I'm six, one. Jay Chowides. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:54 So anyway, you're able to drive a route and it has a certain error margin. So it's like, we know that this plane was kind of going along this route, plus or minus, let's say 30 miles there's a trick though because the way that this method works is it's symmetrical it can either go to the right or it can go to the left so essentially however this plane went and you can do this for any plane you can use its bto data to generate the route that it went, to tell you the route that it went,

Starting point is 00:26:26 but for every route, there's a mirror that it didn't go. It's like a ghost image. And this is like a very important point when we talk more about the sort of possible alternatives is which of these paths is the right one and which is the mirror. And the second, so there's a a and so to resolve that there's they realized that there was a second part of the metadata that was useful this is called the bf or

Starting point is 00:26:50 burst frequency offset and this through a set of mathematical techniques which is even more arcane and took the inmar set scientist a couple weeks to figure, tells you which one was right. And it turns out that when you do the math, the plane went south. So the plane could have gone south, it could have gone north, but we know that the south one is right because we have this metadata called the burst frequency offset

Starting point is 00:27:18 that tells us the plane went south. A way to understand this is that the plane, south a way to understand this is that um the plane the satellite actually um was one it was wandering in its orbit none of this would work except the this so the satellite system was designed to to not have to have a bfo value of zero it wasn't supposed to have a burst frequency offset but because these the um the satellite had been in service for longer than its warranted lifespan so it had run it would started to run out of fuel it carried fuel that allowed it to adjust its orbit but it was running low

Starting point is 00:27:56 so they weren't using it yeah so the satellite was going up and down out of the plane of its orbit and because of that it was creating um a signal and the um so when the plane was going if the plane was going south and the satellite was going south the difference in its relative frequency would be less than if the plane was going north and the satellite was going south that's how they basically could position okay so the theory that emerged saying it would have gone south right for six hours means that it would have ended up run out of fuel smack dab in the middle of the indian ocean correct i think the best place to start there is with the pilot because this is this is where people tried to go right away yeah with oh did we just have a suicidal pilot here right so for people who aren't familiar with the case who was the pilot and what

Starting point is 00:28:53 what did the investigation in the immediate days on uncover about his potential culpability with this attention was focused on the pilot really early on because I mentioned earlier that the the the plane reached the end of Malaysian airspace right it was about to leave air traffic control and they said good night um and then about a minute later they passed this waypoint and the plane went dark you have a minute and the plane and in the transmission, the pilot, whose name is the captain of the flight, was Zahari Amicham. And so how do you, in the space of a minute, if somebody from outside the cockpit had broken in and taken control of the plane. From early morning workouts that need a boost to late night drives that need vibes, a good playlist can help you make the most out of your everyday. And when it comes to everyday spending, you can count on the PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard to help you earn the most PC Optimum points everywhere you shop.

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Starting point is 00:30:48 didn't call Mayday. There's various things that a pilot can do to signal to the air traffic control that he's in trouble. It used to be kind of secret, but then they made a movie with the title of the movie. It was this code that you're supposed to use.

Starting point is 00:31:04 So, I don't think that many people watch it though so maybe it's still valid anyway immediately the fact that somebody made this plane go dark it's and and it's some and it's easy to make a plane go dark from the cockpit who else could have done it sure because the co-pilot was a was a young guy who had just gotten his training finished it was like his first flight, you know, without having to have a supervisor on board to watch him. So he didn't really know much.

Starting point is 00:31:33 It was very clear from the get-go that whoever did this knew a lot about aviation, knew a lot about systems, was, let's just say sophisticated, right? And so Focus was on the pilot, sorry, I'm gonna shout out the captain. So, okay, what do we know about this guy? Is he a terrorist? Is he a criminal mastermind?

Starting point is 00:31:59 Is he deep in debt? What are the red flags of this guy? And if you look at it, I mean, people have various opinions. It's a subjective matter. What do you think about this guy? I look at him and I see a guy who is pretty chill. He seems like he's got a happy family. He doesn't have financial problems.

Starting point is 00:32:17 He makes YouTube videos that are about like how to repair a leaky window. He just seems very relaxed, good-natured. People interview his friends and colleagues, and he seems really well-liked. He's kind of a pillar of the community. He's one of the most experienced pilots from Malaysian Airlines. There seems to be a striking absence of red flags. Another part of it is that if this was a murder-suicide, which is a heinous, heinous thing. Pilots are obviously – I fly recreationally and I hang out at airports. And a lot of pilots also fly recreationally. So I rub shoulders with professional pilots a lot.

Starting point is 00:32:59 And I think that pilots are of a type psychologically. They are – they have their together you can't be kind of scattered irresponsible you know alcoholic um it just doesn't work very well um pilots are maybe a little uptight you know you have to be kind of um anal retentive yes absolutely um you don't want to just wing it i hope they're not winging it when i get on this goddamn plane uh and when they do you know you hear about it yes uh you hear people get a little unhinged sometimes but he seemed very psychologically stable in the way that's kind of familiar to pilots there are cases where people

Starting point is 00:33:46 uh pilots commit mass murder suicide they are rare when was the last time we had one of those well um we had a guy like a few months ago to attempt it with alaska airlines he um he was riding in the jump seat and he like reached forward and he tried to put the fire extinguisher in one of the engines yeah so but he did not succeed was it a co-pilot or a pilot he was a deadheading pilot so he was catching a ride to somewhere else so but I I actually did a Kindle single about... So Malaysian Airlines, MA370 happened in 2014. And there was a lot of speculation that Zahar Ahmad Shah had committed mass murder suicide. The following year, a young German co-pilot was flying, I wanna say from Barcelona to,

Starting point is 00:34:46 I'm gonna get this wrong, Frankfurt or something. And anyway, he programmed into the autopilot to descend to zero feet altitude. And he had flown with the same captain before, and the guy had, I guess, had a habit of getting up and going to use the bathroom halfway through the flight. So the guy gets up, goes to the restroom. This young guy locked the door, locked the pilot out. And so on the black box, you can hear him like banging on the door, like screaming, like, let me in, let me in.

Starting point is 00:35:20 And the guy just sat in the co-pilot seat and just the plane just flew itself into the mountains oh my god yeah and it's really one of the strange aspects of that case was that the mountains where it crashed was really near where this guy had gone he was a glider pilot recreational glider pilot and so he had flown on these mountains um just flying back and forth along these ridges just for fun and he'd seen these kind of rock outcroppings that he wound up crashing into now did they find things in this guy's background that suggested he was pretty fucked up or so yeah this is a great point when they looked at his um the the apple uh screen what do you call those things i'm blanking on it ipad oh look at his ipad thank you i speak english as my native language uh they when they looked at his ipad they found google searches

Starting point is 00:36:12 for ma370 among other things and this guy had a history of mental illness he'd actually been grounded for a while because of his mental health issues so he believed that his career was coming to an end there are there been a handful of other cases where people who have like personal crises in their life have tried to do this kind of thing Zahara had nothing like that there was one piece of evidence yes which is that he was uh such an avid he loved flying so much that he had a flight simulator in his basement and he had done a flight about a month before where he had um flown apparently a similar kind of flight profile to what you would

Starting point is 00:37:03 what who was surmised that he did uh which was to fly up them locust rates and then put the plane sort of in the southern ocean with no fuel and then you know it's not really known didn't didn't he have correct me if i'm wrong here on that particular simulation though didn't they say that he had just for some reason reset a starting point of a new flight to where that was like where it crashed in the indian ocean and then tried to fly to like australia or something no it seems like he it the data was partial it wasn't a perfectly preserved set of data and there's and there's been a lot of controversy and speculation about what exactly it reflects. But it seems like he flew up the Malacca Straits, paused the game, and then kind of manually moved the plane to the southern part of the indian ocean and the kind of thing that doesn't really make any sense about it is that if you're in the southern indian ocean or the northern indian ocean

Starting point is 00:38:10 or the east atlantic ocean it's like it's just ocean it's all the same especially in like kind of a low-res flight simulator like the one he had so what is the significance of being over the ocean anywhere like what does it even matter where you are um it's not like he was practicing what it would be like to fly for six hours in the dark over ocean yes with no kind of goal other than i guess running out of fuel and crashing and dying it seems like a really weird way to kill yourself um certainly to me yeah for sure i back um quite a few years ago now but i reached out to a psychologist who studied suicide and i said first of all do people this is a really elaborate like the whole process which i think i've given you kind of like a simplified version of everything that happened but it's like it's a long multi-hour uh process involving lots of turns and things being turned

Starting point is 00:39:09 off and things being turned back on again and overflying air force bases and all of this it seems very complicated like do people kill themselves in complicated ways generally because the other cases where people have flown themselves into the ground they just put the nose down and fly it into the ground to get it over with like if i'm going to jump off the building i mean my goal is to hit the ground like hopefully as quickly as possible i don't want to like do like paraglide off the roof and then like release myself on a bungee cord and then like cut the bungee cord you know what i mean yeah it's like simple and fast i would think um so but she said look people are people people are fundamentally unpredictable and so yeah for the most part people might do one thing but

Starting point is 00:39:53 she was telling me that she knew of a case where somebody had built like a chainsaw machine for themselves that worked apparently but um you know you can't really say definitively that you can't rule anything or in or out based on human behavior but the fundamental thing about ma3 70 is that whatever you whatever theory you want to latch on to the motivation is is is not there like there's no reason to fly yourself into the remote yeah southern Indian Ocean for any positive benefit including even killing yourself and it seems like the majority of i i previously thought it was all of them but i did find there were one or two who think maybe it was the pilot but the majority of the families of the

Starting point is 00:40:40 239 people do not think that happened right and we'll get to it later but they also don't think that the evidence that was found is from the plane or real they think it's planted a lot of them right but it seems like it and i'm trying to take myself back to that timeline like then when it was happening so i was actually living in rome in it at the time. And I remember this story, but right there at that time, this is when the whole Crimea thing was going on. And that's what everyone was talking, at least in Europe, a little more. So I don't, I'm not as familiar with like the exact days, what was happening when, but like how long were they on that pilot theory before they then said, wait a minute some weird

Starting point is 00:41:25 happened here we don't know if it's that well I think it's important understand that the official search officials have never issued any kind of theory they have they have they I mean implicitly they think it went into the Southern Ocean because that's where they spent hundreds of millions of dollars in several years scanning the seabed um by the way you asked about how mh370 and air france 447 are alike air france 447 at the time was the most ambitious seabed search ever carried out it was like two miles deep and it took them two years to do it. MH-370 then surpassed that. It took them three or four years and it was three miles deep and they wound up searching an area the size of Great Britain, a very huge area. So implicitly they think that it went south and implicitly it was probably only the pilot could could really be on your suspect list but they've never said we think the pilot did it and so we're in this weird kind of limbo where everybody wants to know what happened to the plane and there isn't

Starting point is 00:42:35 like if you compare it to who shot jfk yeah since we're kind of like in this numinous realm of conspiracy theories there's a warren commission there's like an official account of what happened and you can sort of about anybody anybody who isn't buying into the warren commission is a conspiracy theorist but with mh370 right i mean with mh370 there is no official account and with no official account there's no like you know you can't say well explain this explain that um in the official report they said we don't we can't rule out anything really yeah there's the famous press conference where the guy came out and and said i think he said the exact words like it disappeared we we don't know where it is right or something like that and i don't i don't remember

Starting point is 00:43:23 how many days in that was, but something when you go back and watch the footage, it's very easy to have hindsight bias. Now that we're watching it, like obviously we know 10 years later, we still haven't solved this, but still there's something about the tone of how things were delivered. That was so sinister.

Starting point is 00:43:42 Yeah. It was sinister. Well, it was sinister well it was sinister but also like pollyanna-ish in the same way where they were like we know that the relatives are dead we like we've done the math i mean this was a thing for the first year and a half all they had was this data that had been transmitted from this plane as the result of this box being turned on. And nobody could explain how or why

Starting point is 00:44:08 this box would have been turned back on. And it seemed to me, which struck me as quite uncanny. And so they were very confident and sort of, oh yeah, your gorillas are dead. We did the math. And by the way, we've done the math and we know where this plane is and we're gonna get it.

Starting point is 00:44:31 And we will find it. And we have, the quote that I keep coming back to is, we have a bottle of Moet chilling in the fridge or chilling nicely in the fridge or something. There just, there was an incredible level of like, yes, we have this in hand. Don't you worry your pretty heads about it. They said a bottle of my way chilling in the front yeah oh my god yeah and for the most part the media really bought into it i mean i think pretty much every mainstream outlet was

Starting point is 00:44:54 like okay these guys are gonna find this plane um and uh yeah it's as good as solved yeah like you said it was the largest literally the the largest rescue mission ever for a plane. I forget the number. Ashton had this right. But the number of countries who were involved, the number of boats that were involved, I don't remember them offhand, but it was nuts. So you think about it. And my head does go to, though, like they're searching the Indian Ocean. I forget the exact percentage, but like something like 90% of the ocean that we know exists we haven't even explored.

Starting point is 00:45:30 So how possible is the explanation that, oh, well, the ocean is so deep and it's so mountainous down there that it fell into a crevice and no one will ever be able to find it? So, yeah, that becomes the question it's like we okay we know we know that it went to this area but then we search there and it's not there so why isn't it there and this is like a major goal of my podcast is to kind of go through okay what are all the possible explanations the the sort of top level explanation might be well the ocean is big and the plane is small so that's why you wouldn't find it but I was talking earlier scientists talk about um error bars right like what is the probability distribution and we know where this plane was on

Starting point is 00:46:17 the arc is is like plus or minus like five kilometers or something it's like a couple of miles uncertainty and so um it's not that much it's really not that much and so it wound up on the seventh arc the plane is it's believed based on the interpretation of what these signals meant the assumption is that this plane had been out of fuel for about three minutes and it was descending at they have two data points on nine seconds apart and the first one it was descending briskly and then in the second one it's like descending almost nose down so like the plant somebody has been pushing the plane right like into a vertical dive

Starting point is 00:47:05 and so and then there was another transmission that would have taken place like 90 seconds later that wasn't so the plane was probably not in the air for 90 seconds after that so it would have dived very briefly it would have taken about a minute for that plane to hit the hit the water assuming like a 30 000 35 000 foot altitude right okay right um and so it gives you a very narrow band to look in actually that band was searched really early on but they just had to keep on making it bigger and bigger because it kept on not finding the plane so why isn't it there one explanation is that you mentioned it fall. Maybe it fell into a crevice or something. Sure.

Starting point is 00:47:48 And when they searched the seabed, they kind of scanned it back and forth. And like, I'm looking at your table now. It's like a picnic table. It has cracks in it. Maybe the plane went to one of these cracks. Right. Now, percentage-wise, you would think that would be quite a stroke of luck, right? It just happened to turn out that way.

Starting point is 00:48:04 And again, something that we see again and again in this case is like something happens and it was either just a stroke of luck or is it because something else is going on um and so maybe it fell into a crack they went back and they searched they sent these little robots uh robot subs down and to look in as many of these little cracks and crevices they could they didn't send james cameron down i'm i would i would be surprised if they didn't talk to james cameron i'm sure i'm sure he was i'm sure he was he popped up in a few conversations yeah um so that's one that's one explanation that it was in this defined area but they just you know missed it for whatever reason um the officials themselves don't think that that happened um the other

Starting point is 00:48:49 possibility is that the plane went into this steep dive and then the pilot thought wait a minute what am i doing this is a terrible idea and pulled it out and then glided it for like 50 miles not impossible but again strictly by the way to by the by the physical projection of the plane at this point no engine because he's out of fuel correct right you could go 50 miles like that um i mean it is possible that you could get beyond the search area now again the question is how likely is that and then there's a third possibility which is that that it's hard to explain why in simple terms like why this is unlikely but you could have done a series of turns and you could have wound up further north um north of the search area

Starting point is 00:49:40 and so when they called off the search having spent a lot of taxpayer money searching this area unsuccessfully and having promised we're 97% confident we're going to find it. So they failed and they wrapped up. They said, look, we didn't fail. That's not really the right word. We just didn't succeed. And the reason is because the plane did this stuff that we assumed it didn't do, but I guess it must have done. And now it's north of where we looked. But we don't have any money, so goodbye and good luck.

Starting point is 00:50:11 Where are we at at this point? Like how many, how long after the initial crash? This is like 20, I wanna say end of 2016. Oh, so, okay, a while. It's a couple years later. It took them a while. It takes a long time to search a seabed like this. One thing I wanna make clear is

Starting point is 00:50:26 I have been sort of critical and skeptical, but what they did was amazing. It was an amazing feat of just technological bravado in searching an area that's three miles deep. Like that's incredible. And it was a thousand miles from the nearest port. I mean, it was really difficult. I would not wanna be in these guys' shoes, like terrible rough seas, everything.

Starting point is 00:50:46 So what they did was heroic, hats off to them. It didn't succeed, and now we need to figure out why it didn't succeed. They said, it must be north of the area we searched, but we don't have any money, so we're gonna stop. And so they did, and they sort of said, case closed. Then this company comes along that nobody knows who they are they're called Ocean Infinity

Starting point is 00:51:07 and they say we are going to search this area and you only have to pay us if we find it and we have this new generation of technology we have these Fleet of robot subs that all kind of work together and bounty hunters basically well actually business week just had a um a really long article about this outfit uh a couple months ago yeah they were they were treasure hunters they had they had invested all of this money so one of these tax write-off kind of things were like rich guys like one of like it's it was all really shady and like and the archaeologists were like you're destroying the wrecks and you're like no we're just taking the gold bars you know so they basically developed this technology so they could go around the world and look for wrecks so they're they're like we're gonna find so they're they're thinking well okay we're gonna we want

Starting point is 00:51:52 to scan the seabed and find some nice juicy wrecks but we're also going to like get the malaysians to pay for it if we find the plane um so they volunteered they said we're going to search this other and they they searched like another whole area the same size they did it much faster because their technology was better but they searched the area where the australian officials had said we know it's in this other area but we don't have enough money to search for it it wasn't there either so these guys you know you've got this kind of shrinking probability distribution. They keep on searching where they know it is

Starting point is 00:52:29 and that area gets smaller and smaller. And so the question then becomes like, okay, well, is it there or not? Is it there or not? Because you said very confidently in that tone that you, I think, very accurately identified a sort of male overconfidence, white male overconfidence, we can say. You know, so where is it?

Starting point is 00:52:54 It's not there. Now, to get on your timeline with all this, though, you ended up through your blog posting and obviously reporting on all the channels basically everywhere on this case. You ended up at the forefront of this thing called the independent group. Yes. Right. When did that – so that's basically like a – I'll have you explain the full thing to people. public crowd campaign to try to solve this case with people, random people around the world who have sometimes expertise, sometimes just like trying to solve it, coming together with whatever information they can pull to find this plane. When did that first start?

Starting point is 00:53:37 That started in the first few weeks after, well, when the search officials let it be known that they had this Inmarsat data and that the Inmarsat data said certain things, it had this, we were talking earlier about what does this data mean? A lot of people who care deeply about the case were like, wait, what are you talking about? Like, how can you tell these things

Starting point is 00:54:01 that you say you can tell, and especially the BFO data. And so people were trying to understand what they were talking about and i had some ideas i was going on cnn a lot at the time um uh i was writing about it on my personal blog um on air i would just talk about the stuff that like everyone agreed on and that the i basically the job of a station like cnn is just to sort of take whatever officials say and sort of restate it okay but i was like really interested in what the data meant like what could we tell about what was happening and it was like a little bit too technically arcane for an audience like that so i was writing about on my blog and then people would reach out to me mike exner being one of them and he said look this is what this satellite system is this is where this is who made it this is where

Starting point is 00:54:48 it's located in the plane did you explain off camera or on camera who mike was i can't remember was that right before camera we were talking about that um so mike exner is a um scientist engineer who lives in colorado and he's worked on satellite communication systems for many years and so he's very well versed in how they work and got different parts of it so i get this email or i got actually i think it was a comment on my blog i forget which but this guy reached out to me i think it's we talk about also in the in the um the documentary on netflix he reaches out to me he sings he's laying some technical information on me that's like way above my pay grade i don't even know what he's talking about but i reach out to him and he explains who he is and how he knows this stuff i start emailing with him there are some other

Starting point is 00:55:32 people who are also blogging about this stuff and we all kind of get this email chain going it's all very informal one of the members pipes up and says we should call ourselves an independent group and they did and like so this rant like literally random group of internet commenters comes together and forms like you know the wonder twins and um and we start trading information trading ideas discussing possibilities trying to work out where the plan could have gone etc and like these guys some of them are i some of them i like more than others some of them i have more respect for than others but the best of them have like just a truly phenomenal knowledge of physics and um engineering and how satellites uh communication systems work and so forth

Starting point is 00:56:19 so i think we were able to really understand in fairly uh great detail what these scientists are talking about and um and what it means for the plane could be and these guys um wind up developing a quite a close relationship with the search officials and when the australians issued a final report um which is i think 2016 or 2017 they get thanked by name they thank the independent group and they thank some of these individuals like Mike Exner by name Wow I should hasten to add by this point I've long since been kicked out of the independent right so that was I was kind of team that sure no sure because what what year before I get into this what year did you come up with that theory we're going to talk about like how long after after the crash so i believe it was june of 2014

Starting point is 00:57:14 so about um three months after june right okay three months after the soian government releases the information to explain how we use the BFO data to tell us that the plane went south, okay? As soon as they explain it, I'm talking to Mike and I say, okay, this definitely, okay, let me back up one little step, which is to say that this all seemed very strange to me uh the idea that you would do this elaborate set of things and commit suicide it seemed to me more

Starting point is 00:57:53 likely that uh that when we knew that it could go north or south it seemed to me north because if you go north you get to be alive you get to stay alive it's land up there it's land and so I said this plane probably went north and I said to my editor at Slate I want to write an article saying that I think the plane went north and she said well nobody else seems to think it went north I said okay listen I really want to write this article if I if you let me write it and I'm wrong I will publicly apologize she said okay you're on so when the so in june when the uh officials released their explanation of how the bfo data works i i rolled up my sleeves i polished my um you know high school math and i did i did the calculations and it took me a while because i was very rusty but i'm like oh i get it it went south like the

Starting point is 00:58:45 right the bfo data means that it went south right so i went to my editor and i said okay here's your article explaining where i went wrong and she said okay this is nick this so she ran it and she said this is an article explaining where you went wrong this is not actually an apology which is what you which is what you promised oh so you had already said the theory that you thought it went north to kazakhstan right at this point okay uh i i think it was so early that we didn't know that it was kazakhstan i thought it was like central asia there was a kind of like um nascent uprising in china involving the uighur minority yes um zhing zhang so anyway i thought it was there that turned out to be really off the map. So at this point, I think it would be clear to anybody that I am wrong sometimes.

Starting point is 00:59:33 I am not always right. You know? God, sometimes people are unwilling to say that in here. I am too while we're at it. Well, it's important to acknowledge your flaws. It's not a flaw. I mean, this is the thing. I wrote this piece.

Starting point is 00:59:45 I'm like, listen, I was wrong, but we didn't know as much then as we know now and now we know more and now i i see that i was wrong i was taking we're trying to do the best of what we have yes so but she did make me write a second article explicitly apologizing for but and i still like kind of weaseled out of it by saying, look, I'm not really sorry. I was trying, I was doing my best. So anyway. I understand what you mean, yeah. But, okay, so I apologize.

Starting point is 01:00:13 I have a habit of saying that I'm wrong, but then like being like, but am I really wrong? So anyway, so in June, I'm like, Mike, how does this BFO data get generated? Like, how does the plane, how does this thing work? Like, let's just like break it down for me, because the question I want to know is, the BFO data tells us that the plane went south. Is there any way that the BFO data could be generated?

Starting point is 01:00:44 Let me put it this way. Is there any way that that data could be tampered with? Could you mess with it? Is there any way that a devious, like let's just say, let's imagine somebody on this plane of kind of unlimited deviousness and skills and resources and everything. Can we say, like, how does this work?

Starting point is 01:01:03 Is there a way that it can be interfered with, right? And I remember like standing, I remember where I was standing, where Mike was explaining to me how this data is generated and realizing that like, it comes from a part of the plane that anybody can access. Like there's an unlocked hatch that goes into this thing called the electronics bay. And in the electronics bay, you have all the electronics that control the entire plane. And where would that be on a standard commercial jet?

Starting point is 01:01:38 Like I walk in off the whatever that thing is that connects to the plane and – Take a left. Okay. Take a left. Go into first class actually it was styled as business class on this particular flight you go up stay to the left side of the plane go up to the first toilet on your right near the galley there's going to be a carpet if you pull up that carpet there's a hatch the hatch is not locked it's not locked it's not locked and if you go open it up and go down in

Starting point is 01:02:06 there you have all of the computers that feed the navigation system that control the wings and the ailerons and the rudder is this locked today now um i don't think so i don't think so i but but i should say that i'm checking that next time I get on a plane. Everything that I'm gonna describe- Lock that thing up. Could not happen today. Okay. It was a particular time.

Starting point is 01:02:33 It was at a very specific moment in time when this particular technology, like, remember I said that they were subscribing to the cheapest version of Inmarsat that didn't have the GPS embedded? When MH370 disappeared they started giving GPS embedding for free okay that's that's reassuring it's good to know so um so it turns so I so I could walk you through it piece by piece if you want it's also in my podcast it's also in

Starting point is 01:02:59 my book which I should have this part I'd love for you to walk through okay piece by piece because you there's an elaborate i guess this is like in may june when you're coming up with this 2014 right there's an elaborate potential theory right that comes out of this so let's walk through this so yeah this is where it gets this this is where i need to tell you you need to tell me where i'm getting too deep into the weeds because it involves this it so this is the bf this is what the bfo data is um you know that when when a train is going towards you the horn sounds like a higher pitch and then when the train passes you it's a lower pitch right yes when things move in relation to each other, that change of velocity changes the perceived wavelength or frequency of the thing, whether it's sound or light, okay? So imagine you're a geosynchronous satellite.

Starting point is 01:03:58 You're 23,000 miles up looking down on the Indian Ocean, and you're looking at India, you're looking at Eastern Africa, you're looking at Southeast Asia, you're looking at india you're looking at eastern africa you're looking at southeast asia you're looking at australia and all of these people down there there's like like literally a billion customers probably or pretend not customers of inmarsat but people who are doing things with the radio wavelength they've got cell phones they've got garage door openers they've got walkie-talkies and you need to communicate with your customers amidst all of this noise and so one what you do is you're looking for a very

Starting point is 01:04:30 narrow bandwidth you've been assigned a little patch of the frequency and you have to stick to that patch or you're going to be in violation and they might take away your license okay so complicating that um is the fact that your customer some of your customers are on boats that's no big deal some of them are on land that's no big deal the problematic ones are the ones that are flying around in airplanes because these guys are going hundreds of miles an hour to and fro and that they're causing significant changes in the frequency because of their motion relative to you. So how do you get rid of that? There's a thing called Doppler precompensation.

Starting point is 01:05:11 What that means is that if I know that you're a moving relative to you, I'm gonna transmit at a lower or a higher frequency so that to compensate beforehand, so that when it gets to you, okay, so you're expecting me, let's say our frequency is 100, right? And I'm flying towards you in such a way

Starting point is 01:05:33 that what you get is you're gonna get 102. The 100 is gonna, because I'm flying towards you, that 100 is gonna turn into 102 by the time you receive it. So what I'm gonna do is being very clever, I'm gonna transmit at 98. And then when you get it it's 100 so it looks perfect right so how can you do this there's two ways there's two different manufacturers of these boxes one is called rockwell and they have a patent on the best way to do it which is you transmit it to me at 100 and i'm picking it up at 102. so i just subtract 102 102. i'm going to transmit to you from 98

Starting point is 01:06:07 and you're going to get 100 boom done easy but it's got a patent on it so i'm working for a company called talus which gets bought by honeywell and they built a box and they can't use that technique because it's under patent to their by their main rival so they have to the math is under pat like just a mathematical? No, the technique of subtracting your income. But you can patent that? I mean, listen, somebody could write and say, Jeff's wrong, the patent's not like that.

Starting point is 01:06:34 That's my understanding it may be wrong. The fact is that this is how Rockwell does it, whether it's because of patent or not. So this is how TALIS does it. TALIS takes information from the, it's called the IRS, the inertial reference system. It's basically a kind of fancy GPS. It knows where the plane is based on GPS

Starting point is 01:06:55 and some other things. And it calculates, it knows where the satellite is and it knows where it is and it knows how fast it's moving. And it calculates the relative speed calculates the doppler shift and then transmits at that frequency so it's a calculated value and this is what mike exner told me that made me drop my sandwich which was if you can change the um the navigational data going into this box you can change the frequency that it transmits in so you could make the plane seem like it's going south when it's really going north

Starting point is 01:07:31 that changes the game for you and so i'm like wait a minute because now like things start to make sense in a way that they hadn't before remember we talked about how this box got turned back on and no one could explain why they couldn't explain why why would a captain who wanted to commit suicide turn the satellite box on and off again and there were various theories that people came up with but they seemed pretty outlandish is there a way that that could have been an accident though um people have speculated on things like a fire or something but when when a fire happens on a plane it's very catastrophic and deadly. It's one of the most dangerous things

Starting point is 01:08:07 that can happen on a plane. And so you would either try to land it as quickly as possible, you'd issue a mayday, you'd try to get down, or the plane would just crash. It's possible, there's always like an X factor, like maybe there's an explanation that we just don't, we haven't had yet. When Air France 447 was found

Starting point is 01:08:26 and they retrieved the black box, this was a mystery on par with MA370 at the time. Until they found the black box and they realized what happened, it was a kind of strange combination of events that nobody had predicted. It really was an unexpected turn of events. So there may be an explanation that is quite um you know that's true that we

Starting point is 01:08:47 just haven't thought of or just is too you know idiosyncratic for us to kind of imagine um but but if if this was somebody on the plane we're imagining this kind of infinitely clever you know attacker it explains why this box was turned back on because they were essentially leaving a false trail of breadcrumbs to make it look like the plane was going south when it actually went north is there a part of you and and i gotta challenge this just because like in my line of work for example the way i came up with this podcast was i had to edit crazy clips right and you sit here with the same say 60 second area you listen to it 700 times right a thousand times between the edit you put a song with it you put visuals with it you there's this suspension of reality that happens

Starting point is 01:09:41 where you're so deep into it that you get to a point that when you have to do the audio master at the end like if i do a 20 25 hour edit right i'm not sure if i can hear the voice better over the song because i've heard the same thing said a million times right versus if like it actually is correct so i'll send out you know i used to send out like a clip to alessi or someone who hasn't edited it to that point to get their thought. And I'll explain where I'm going with this in a minute to get their thoughts on, you know, okay, how the first time you heard this, how well did you hear what's being said versus the music? Cause I don't want the music to overtake what's being said. Meaning

Starting point is 01:10:18 there's just this suspension that happens where you have to get a second eye on it because you're biased within that search. So relating that to what you do at this point you've now been working on this case for months you are knees deep in it consuming what you do this is like of all the reporting you've ever done this is probably the most wild case at least in aviation you had covered to that point is there a part of you that says like, okay, maybe Mike and I found this thing, but step back for a second. Am I now trying to fit the peg into this square peg into this square hole that we found to explain it versus, hey, we found a square hole, but we may not have a square peg. Meaning like maybe the theory you end up coming up with, which is that someone from the jet goes down into that box and controls it maybe that's not what happened but it would make sense if it did i might be reaching though in doing that like i'm suspended in in where reality

Starting point is 01:11:16 is because i've been working so deeply on this case you know like charlie and it's always sunny trying to solve it you know yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely um so maybe one way of answering it is like what was my confidence level that this is what happened my confidence was extremely low but but what i was trying to do was to answer the question are we 100 confident that this bfo data was generated in an innocent way meaning whoever like because you have to understand that if zahari amat shah took the plane the captain had taken the plane in order to commit suicide there's no way he could have known about bto or bfo data he was that even people in the you'd because it's a very arcane thing within the world of satellite communications

Starting point is 01:12:05 like you would have to work in satellite communications to know that that that these are parameters that are important in keeping up your network it's like a part of network maintenance um it's very technical it's very arcane um and the bto data, we keep talking about Air France 447, they had only started recording BTO data within the previous year because they realized that it would have been useful potentially in an Air France 447 type of situation. So Air France 447 in a way really inspired MH370 in some ways.

Starting point is 01:12:42 So I was wondering, I was like, oh my oh my god there's like there really is another thing that that really struck me as uncanny was that there was a whole bunch of things that had to be true in order for any of this to be possible again we talked about it had to be a talus box not a rockwell box yes um it had to be um a boeing airplane not an airbus because only boeing has an accessible hatch to the electronics bay it had to be a triple seven and not any other kind of boeing airplane because the triple seven was the only fly-by-wire airplane the the 787 is also fly-by-wire but it doesn't have an accessible hatch it also required that um that malaysian airlines be subscribed to the lowest level and all these things line up and all of these so if you take

Starting point is 01:13:31 and another one is that the plane this the two routes had to be north and south because this the satellite wobble only discriminates between north and south it doesn't discriminate from east and west also the um to discriminate um north and south it would be helpful if there was on the equator this plane disappeared very close to the equator why would it oh because of the positioning of the satellite right right right um another thing is that you would do you would want to have your mirror flight going over open ocean now remember this plane was originally flying east. If you wanted to just stitch it into the ocean, you could fly east and go to the Marianas Trench. You'd never be found there. But instead, it went back. Why did it go west? So all of these things lined up

Starting point is 01:14:17 to make this scenario possible, which itself to me seemed uncanny, right? But did I know that it happened? Did I know it's even possible? I mean, I speculate that if you could get into this box, then you could make this false trail of breadcrumbs. But did I know that it was actually possible? I mean, I didn't know why it wasn't possible, but it was only a suspicion. And so what i did was i

Starting point is 01:14:46 thought okay if it went north where would it go it would go basically over india over nepal over the himalayas over far western china into tajikistan into kazakhstan and it would have wound up in central kazakhstan very unpopulated kind of place and it would Borat it would yeah I mean Borat is actually not really anything like has nothing to do with like actually but um yeah it I mean more interestingly it's where um Russia's space program is so Russia has you know how we have Guantanamo Bay it's like in this sort of hostile country but it's like ours right by treaty they have a circle it's like 60 miles across in kazakhstan that belongs to them because that's where they launch um people into space and they were launching americans into space

Starting point is 01:15:33 too because our space shuttle blew up and we didn't have a replacement for it so um there happened to be a big runway in a very remote part of this space that like there's nobody lives near it or anything and so you could if you flew there and it would be like an hour before dawn you could like refuel it and fly it off and you'd be good so i said to myself okay so if this went to kazakhstan you've got a very short list of potential perpetrators because you would have to be like we talked about like infinitely sophisticated like infinitely clever and crafty and and ruthless and you're you're winding up in kazakhstan so who like is allied with kazakhstan kazakhstan is a client state of russia yeah so who's on the plane well there were there was a russian sitting about 12 feet from the hatch

Starting point is 01:16:17 in first class and there were two ukrainian guys sitting under the uh the satellite data unit like friendly to russia ukrainian guys or so you know that's kind of this was at an important distinction it's it is an important distinction and it's it's confusing i mean it's something that i think a lot of ukrainians have had to explain a lot of people in ukraine in ukraine speak russian as a primary language let's speak ukrainian the fact that you speak russian does not mean that you love putin doesn't mean that you're culturally any any different from anybody else but when this happened you mentioned you were in italy at the time and that what people were obsessed with was was crime and annexation of crimea now how did putin do it now put, it's important to realize, is a spook.

Starting point is 01:17:07 He is a former KGB officer. Right, right. And he looks at the world through- Yeah, you got me for a minute there. I was like, where's this going? Anyway, so he does things in spooky ways, right? He was famous for, I mean, this is alleged, but I think it's widely believed that he when he first came to power he wanted to go to war with chechnya he did and so he put these he blew up like yeah i had david satter in here the guy who broke the

Starting point is 01:17:37 story he's been in here twice he i before the kgb there was the nkvd in the 30s that was responsible for murdering hundreds of thousands of people. Like the pogroms and stuff? No, no, no. Pogroms were ethnic anti-Jewish for the most part. Right. Riots. No, this was the great terror during the 1930s that Stalin launched against real and imagined opponents in order to bring the country completely to its knees if you read david's books and look at the evidence he has 100 okay so here's a guy who's not afraid to blow up or kill hundreds of citizens for the purpose of like whatever arcane purpose he feels like might be merited um he takes over crimea not by rolling tanks over the border but these guys

Starting point is 01:18:24 show up little green men they're not wearing any insignia they claim to be local separatists or something not aliens to be clear you got to be careful in here you know yeah exactly um but yeah I mean but it's like that kind of like we don't know what reality is they are little green men they are like from another dimension we don't know who they are they could be anybody and this kind of like state of confusion and denial and crazy stories and theories and like people coming out of the woodwork and so you don't know which way is up and so these guys are they speak russian they were um soviet army veterans which doesn't mean anything because everybody of that age group had to serve in the military right but they're like kind of stocky looking

Starting point is 01:19:09 guys and their family doesn't want to talk about them and they were supposedly on this but that's a whole nother thing this is what you I think you're starting to understand like why I had to do an open-ended podcast about this mystery yeah because it like you said layer upon layer upon layer yeah this this I and I think I told you on the phone i said i don't know how many of these you're gonna do but this is hundreds of hours potentially if you're really gonna if you're really gonna go through every nook and cranny impossibility i mean the things we've been talking about today and i apologize to people who wanted me to ask

Starting point is 01:19:40 all these questions in the middle i'd be cutting you off every two sentences if we went you know there's some things i have asked to clarify on but you know that's why you're doing the podcast where you can bite size you know for 30 40 minutes each one of these things individually so today you're doing a good job with the overlay thank you um so in june of 2014 three months into this mystery i'm like okay who are these Russians uh I'm gonna I just call them the Russians even though two of them are Russian-speaking Ukrainians from Odessa um so what are they doing on the plane I hire um researchers uh freelancers one in Irkutsk where the Russian in the first class is from and and um i hire somebody to do some inquiries for me in odessa

Starting point is 01:20:25 in ukraine where the the two furniture salesmen are from and who like when you say you hire someone like some kid on the street looking for 10 bucks or like an actual reporter um i didn't know how to do it i had never done it before and so i have a friend at the new york times and i was like can you recommend a good person in irkutsk and the times being who they are have a very extensive network of fixers and freelancers and and people who can they got some fixers in there huh yeah so we need some fixing and um so this really so this really fantastic person was was was working on it for me and I was like okay we're gonna figure out if the Russians are behind this so I oh these people were a busying at work when I get a call in July 29 July 29 2014. was it July 29th it was somewhere in July 17th maybe anyway I

Starting point is 01:21:20 got the date wrong already I get a call uh can you come into cnn and talk about the malaysian airlines triple seven that was shot down in ukraine right and i was like uh i think you mean uh malaysia and they're like no no this is a different one yeah and i was like holy that one they did do because uh i'd been thinking like that maybe this whole thing is about ukraine because the so everyone was like well what's the point why would you steal a plane and take it to kazakhstan and the one of the there's again no good motives really but the thing that that one of the fact that this ms370 had was that people stopped talking certainly in america maybe not in rome but in the united states people immediately stopped paying attention to Crimea and

Starting point is 01:22:05 started talking to me 370 CNN talked about nothing else for like two months I believe that in America I wasn't in America at the time but every time and it wasn't out of nefarious or Ness or whatever but like the fact is that every time CNN tried to talk about anything else their ratings cratered oh funny how that happens funny how that works yeah so people were legit obsessed with this and it's all they wanted to talk about and so so i so so it kind of made sense that there was a nexus between um you know this this spooky espionage leader of russia and this sort of like difficult to parse kind of nonsensical action that involved like killing a lot of civilians do you think like immediately one of the major issues i'd have with him being involved with this kind of thing

Starting point is 01:23:01 though is the fact that i don't remember the exact number but a significant number of people on the jet were from china right which is his next door neighbor who he's not trying to make enemies with and if and i think there were only three americans or something on this thing yeah like if you took this down it's a potential china problem for him so listen there's lots there's actually lots of problems with what I call the spoof theory the idea that somebody tampered with this data and Ryan really went north there's actually a lot of problems with it it's not a good theory in many regards but it answers questions like how come the plane isn't on the southern seabed how come the sda was turned back on how

Starting point is 01:23:45 come there was no floating debris found for the first year and a half things like this and so i'm not trying to tell you that this is a perfect theory that doesn't have problems and um so yeah but but the question is like how can we explain the data that we have? And as time went by, when I first, so I waited some time. I worked on it, I floated it past some people. I was very not confident. Everybody was saying that the plane went to Southern Indian Ocean. There was no doubt that it went to Southern Indian Ocean.

Starting point is 01:24:21 So I was the only person saying that. Now, there was a whole lot of other sort of stuff that was coming out of left field that was like there was a lot of sort of what they called the hero pilot theory which is the plane had caught fire and it was um the hero pilots were trying to save it and then they got then they succumbed and so the plane flew south there was um people i mean if you watch the um netflix documentary you have people like florence de shanghai who were saying that the americans shot it down um there was um we'll come back to that there was um a lot of discussion about supposed eyewitness accounts um one of which was by some islanders in the maldives who claimed that they saw this plane go overhead and then a lot of people were like it went to Diego Garcia which is a U.S British

Starting point is 01:25:09 base and and so there was like all kind but but there was no evidence for any of these things and so they're just kind of being thrown out there and so this I would consider this sort of part of the like sort of a fog of of I mean you call it, let's just call it misinformation for the sake of ease. So I went on, so when I came, I eventually came forward in early 2014, and I said, look, if you don't find this plane in the Southern seabed, there is a possible explanation that I'm gonna run past you.

Starting point is 01:25:44 It may be, it's physically possible. I don't have evidence that this happened i can't prove to you that this happened but it is i it seems to be that there is a possible physical possibility that you could do this thing that would make it seem like the plane went south when it really went north this was widely dismissed as another conspiracy theory it was like put on par with diego garcia because we've been talking now for a while right a long time many light years more time than you can spend talking to richard quest on cnn right what i've been talking to tell you about about doppler pre-compensation is not something i can get across in a two and a half minute hit on cnn so there's no way that i can say my idea with and and also justify it in a short clip so basically i'm going on and people are saying so jeff you believe that the plane was

Starting point is 01:26:37 stolen by putin and i'm like whoa whoa don't don't we not start with that no that's good it's like i'm trying to say that like the that the that the evidence is puzzling and there may be an alternate explanation that we really need to consider and so the disappointment for me isn't that people don't immediately believe this idea um the disappointment for me is that the officials have refused to even acknowledge that this observation has been made. Is it also possible though – because again, if it's provable that it could have gone either way potentially, which I think you have pretty good evidence for that, that it's possible. Maybe the pilot – and I don't think the pilot was suicidal. I agree with you. But for the sake of sake argument let's say for

Starting point is 01:27:25 a minute he was right maybe you want to go sightseeing north on as his last descent you know what i mean and then it and then you know we never even looked there because the whole search went into the sea right and it went into some nondescript area maybe it wasn't even kazakhstan maybe it was somewhere else east or west or whatever crashed into a mountain no one ever heard from it so possible so so basically i said there's two there's two possibilities either the bfo data is innocent and it was generated as a result of things that people did who didn't know how the bfo worked or it was tampered with which requires such a level of sophistication that it would have to be a state level actor because you would have to understand not only how to fly a plane not only how air traffic control works how satellite communications work um but essentially you have

Starting point is 01:28:17 to you have to have a sophisticated electronic warfare capability because what you're doing is something that is very arcane in any corner of the world except for electronic warfare which we can talk about later or more or now if you want but it's but it's a mindset that a pilot would certainly not have it requires very specific skills and very specific outlook can you actually i mean you're using the word warfare right so we do got to dig into that a little bit. What's the connotation there? So there's an entire field of the defense industry called electronic warfare. And it started with the development of radar during World War II. And so radar is a way that you can see where your enemy's aircraft are, they can see yours. Yes. are they can see yours and so you get um to once you develop detection measures you have to develop

Starting point is 01:29:09 counter measures or it behooves you to develop counter measures one of the earliest one was they would fly these giant bomber formations um at the the british would do it at night and they would just dispense chaff like little part like little fluttering pieces of tinfoil like um like they throw in at new year's in times square what's that stuff called confetti yeah yeah it's like metal confetti and you strew this and because there's just so when you beam your radar waves at this cloud of confetti it can't see it's like a shroud, right? Yes. And so as the decades go by, there's all kinds of crazy things that you can do. And one I think that's worth talking about, it's pretty cool, which is,

Starting point is 01:29:54 so you're sending out your radar and we talked about Doppler before, right? So if you're flying towards me and I shine my, to use this example of a hundred i'm sending my thing out at a frequency of 100 it's hitting you you're coming towards me fast so it's coming back to me at 110 right yes and so what i can do is i don't want to see birds i don't want to see clouds i'm only worried about invading fighter jets okay so i have a thing called a um a gate a doppler gate i, I'm not gonna look at anything

Starting point is 01:30:27 that's under 105. It's like a noise gait, it's the same concept. Exactly. And so you're flying at me at 110, you're flying at me, it's bounding about 110. I see it, you're the only thing that I see because you're the only one who's moving fast. I'm easy, you stand out like a sore thumb, right?

Starting point is 01:30:44 Okay, now your guys on the other side know that I'm doing this, this Doppler gaining. And you're like, how do we avoid this? And we were talking about Doppler precompensation before. You do a version of that. You say, okay, I'm going to measure what your radar is sending out. And I'm going to blip you back at like a really strong, like 100. I'm gonna precompensate. So you think I'm not shining at 110, I'm shining at 100. And I get like out of the gate, something like that.

Starting point is 01:31:13 And so this kind of Doppler spoofing is basically something that's been going on since the 50s. There was a famous case during the Cuban Missile Crisis where the Cubans were expecting to be invaded by the Americans. And the Americans sent up these balloons, I think out of a submarine or something. And the balloons were transmitting this Doppler shifted radar frequencies.

Starting point is 01:31:42 So the Cubans were like, oh my God, there's like a whole squadron of American planes coming in. And this is in the 50s. So fast forward now 60 years. And this is like, so when I talk about Doppler pre compensation to 99.99% of humanity, they're like, that is the craziest, most arcane thing I've ever heard.

Starting point is 01:32:00 But if you work for in the electronic warfare warfare business you're like yeah that's that's what we do we wake up and we have Wheaties and doppler pre-conversation real quick I just gotta go the bathroom we'll be right back all right we're back so just staying on this whole electrical hatch what's the official term again electrical it's? It's called the EE bay. Okay. It's probably simpler to call it just the electronics bay. Got it. So the way that you had laid it out was that – and I'll have you kind of explain the whole thing. But this Russian who was 12 feet away from the bay could have gone in there and effectively could have, through certain measures, had the ability to take control of the cockpit and therefore the plane. In the documentary, you were telling me

Starting point is 01:32:50 this off camera, in the documentary and also publicly, guys like Mike Exner were saying, were refuting that and saying, there's no way this could have happened. Right. You're not saying it did happen. You're saying we need to look at the possibility and you think you have, it hasn't been proven to you that you couldn't do this definitively. Am I saying that correctly? I think the question that search officials have to address

Starting point is 01:33:15 is, is there any possible way that this data could have arisen from a different way? Is there a non-innocent way? And they've never even like addressed it and so um i guess what i've been the drum i guess i've been beating is okay listen i i understand why you think it went south i think i think it's important that the public understand why you think it went south but i think it's also important to interrogate whether it's possible that there's another explanation.

Starting point is 01:33:45 And essentially I would say that I raised the possibility that the seabed search might fail at a time when no other person- Was willing to do that. Even could entertain the possibility. And I was kind of ridiculed at the time, but I thought, well, I'm gonna get my satisfaction when they search the seabed and it's not there

Starting point is 01:34:04 because people will say, well well we didn't find it what about that guy back in early 2015 who said that it might not be there surely they'll be coming knocking down my door yeah which that's not what happened actually because people were like well we're we're sure it's there we just didn't find it so that didn't that that that's another area that i was wrong about but when as far as going down there what would that take like you laid out some of this in the documentary but what would guy goes down and into the bay what happens next okay so you have a particular model of plane where there's a hatch that you can you know pull back a carpet open pull the lever and go down and now you have access to the computers that control the

Starting point is 01:34:53 flight surfaces the plane and there's a kind of principle in cyber security that if you have possession of a machine you can in principle get that machine to do anything that it's physically capable of. You have it. You own it. It's in your possession. You can do what it may. You can make it dance to your tune. Is there like a computer system down there with a keyboard?

Starting point is 01:35:16 Or is it all electrical like boxes? There is a system called, I believe, PMAT, which is a keyboard that you plug in it's it's not to take over the plane it's so that that usually ground personnel maintenance people can get in and check the status of various things you can upload software into it um some of these things can only be done when the plane is on the ground with weight on wheels it's called um so you know could you spoof a weight on wheels signal i don't know i don't really know how any of this would work in detail but what i'm saying is if you imagine somebody who is incredibly sophisticated and they are they own your box then i think you should have less than 100 confidence that they aren't going to make it do what they want there's

Starting point is 01:36:03 you know i'm sure some of your viewers and listeners uh you know are familiar with cryptocurrency there's this idea that like if you have the key to you to this bitcoin amount you should not store it online um not your keys not your crypto right not your keys not your crypto and so if you so if i have it i'm started on my phone and i hand it to you and you're an israeli cyber security firm you know do i still own this bitcoins maybe not yeah so if you so it's a principle in crypto uh security that if you want to really be certain you write it down like in paper pen and ink on paper yes and you put it like in a safe, in a locked safe. And you don't tell it to your wife slash girlfriend or anybody.

Starting point is 01:36:51 So you're now, we're positing that these, that this, in this particular, you know, uniquely, this model of plane, you can go down and be physically present with this computer. I don't know how somebody, so people have definitely said this is impossible um a a well-known aviation writer named william langavish who wrote an article for the atlantic in which he said that this is impossible for so many reasons that i can't get into it i was like just one just give me one um so yeah it's it's a completely unresolved issue it's is it I can neither give you a specific mechanism by which it can be done nor can anyone give me a specific reason why it can't be done you're just having people as making assertions understood so when you were looking at this and then taking it to the next level with Russia's involvement your idea to bring it full circle was that because there was so much heat on putin at the time due to the whole crimea thing everyone

Starting point is 01:37:50 paying attention to that that something like this would have provided a extremely welcome distraction for that story to kind of die off a little bit is that fair to say i i would kind of i would i in response to that question which is a question i got a lot in fact i would say it was the number one question that everyone always asked anytime i started talking about russian and spoofing is that i'm trying to explain what might have happened to the plane like what was happened like why putin wanted to do it or what he would have benefited from it or whether whether it would have been a good decision or a bad decision i'm just trying to say is it physically possible should we entertain the possibility that this happened i'm not trying my my job is not to make it seem like an attractive prospect that every every right-minded

Starting point is 01:38:45 citizen should go to as immediately as possible what i'm saying is is it conceivable that this could happen is it physically possible and then sure let's match up does it match up with something that vladimir putin would do well in 2014 there was a country that was known to destroy Malaysian Airlines 777s. This was Russia. So I like to tell the analogy of, imagine you're a chicken farmer, right? And you have had a chicken farm for many years and you've never lost a single chicken.

Starting point is 01:39:17 And then one day you wake up and there's a bloody mangled chicken carcass on your front yard, okay? And you don't have no idea who did it, absolutely none whatsoever. And then four months later later you find a fox jumping over a fence with a chicken in its mouth right there you go don't know who killed your first chicken but somewhere on your list of suspects there has to be a fox right and there's not a it's not like you really have a list of suspects outside of that because we're talking about one other plane that we know they shot down.

Starting point is 01:39:45 Right. Now, as a little bit of a challenge point there, the context was different. I mean it was obviously horrible what they did to it and they never admitted to it, the one that they shot down over Ukraine. down in what was viewed as an ongoing i guess like a small war between the two countries going on and i guess they might have thought it was some sort of military jet and then shot it down it was commercial whereas the one that we're talking about is in a neutral area of the world away from there not involving necessarily outside the three passengers Russians and Ukrainians it's all a bunch of other people there are many differences between the case however it is an uncanny coincidence that these two planes went down four and a half months apart they were both

Starting point is 01:40:34 Malaysian Airlines triple sevens of which there were only 16 in the world out of 20 some thousand really commercial aircraft yes and so um there's only 16 777s in the world? Well, after MH-17, there were 14 because two were destroyed in the span of these. I didn't know that. It was an extremely unlikely event. And also, so it was initially, it was really quite striking to me

Starting point is 01:41:00 that when MH-17 was shot down, there was a, r i'm going to say retired in quotation marks um gru russian military intelligence officer named igor gherkin um who um you know uh said oh we shot down hey hooray for us we shot down a a military plane belonging to the those dastardly ukrainians whoops so hooray for us and then it was discovered oh it wasn't a ukrainian military plane it was um it was a malaysian civilian plane um so everyone's like oh look they they gave themselves away well listen gherkin is a russian military intelligence right we talked about putin himself is is a spy right yeah you're talking about you're talking about people who's

Starting point is 01:41:52 who's wake up every morning again they have their wheaties and they commit mind right yes that's what they do and so you're going to take this guy's just, you're going to take his explanation like face value. This plane, so everyone thinks that. This guy right here on the screen. That's the man. Got it. He's in jail right now. Not in Netherlands where he was convicted of mass murder for killing all the people aboard MH17, but in Russia because he criticized Vladimir Putin.

Starting point is 01:42:24 Oh, that's a big no-no there it's tough it's tough to be a hustler you were doing so well shooting down planes now you're going to prison so um so russian military intelligence becomes a very interesting suspect um these are people who the little green men um you know the use of intelligence for military purposes to try to achieve your goals um the it's going to be a busy couple of years for the gru because they're going to get up to all kinds of hijinks which which we can talk about some of them are very relevant to america can you talk about those sure no um but before i do let me just fit just to put a cap on this mh17 business um initially it was accepted by all right thinking people that this was a mistake that that the russians

Starting point is 01:43:21 were had taken this piece of equipment that didn't have a full radar and it didn't was able to identify its targets and so when they they shot kind of mistakenly at something that they thought was something and it was something else and it was all it was all terrible but it was an uh let's call it an honest mistake well one of the really fascinating things about this case is that technology is so important and technology is changing and new things are happening and new innovations are being developed as it's unfolding. And it changes the nature of the game. And what happened was an unemployed guy in the UK named Elliot Higgins is sitting in his underwear on his sofa um watching coverage of syria and the there's some suspicion that the assad regime is poisoning its own people with gas

Starting point is 01:44:13 right and so he develops this thing called open source intelligence and he's using he's sifting through stuff that people put online to try to gather and like try to piece together what's happening. Fast forward to MH17 getting shot down and his team of volunteers from around the world, much like the IG that we were talking about earlier, people are kind of pitching in and lending their expertise and saying, okay, we're going to look at dash cams and other information that people are putting forward, and we're going to be able to match the movements of this rocket launcher as it moves across the eastern part of Ukraine it's been

Starting point is 01:44:51 sent in they're able to identify the military unit that belongs to they're done and they're able to identify who's under whose command it was operating so this is not a militia that had managed to capture a piece of equipment that they didn't understand how to use. This was a regular Russian military unit operating under the command of GRU, the military intelligence. And so they drive this thing into a field. They sit under a busy international air route. And they're watching plane after plane after plane after plane go by for several hours and then they pick MH17 out of the sky and shoot it down they're later convicted the the people in

Starting point is 01:45:32 charge of this operation are later convicted in absentia in the Netherlands yeah so um it was an accidental I mean some people still um even in Bellingcat, say that was a mistake. But the thing that I push back against that is a modern military air defense system isn't just a rocket launcher with a radar next to it. It's a distributed system in which all of the sensors are interconnected and all of the rockets and other assets are also interconnected. So it's a distributed system. And just because this thing was in a field dozens or hundreds of miles away from, you know, whoever was in charge of it, you don't do one of the main things you learn when you study to be a anti- will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for.

Starting point is 01:46:43 Public Mobile. Different is calling. Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side. Or B-side. Or Bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. That can reach 70,000 feet. Is you do not fire it unless your officer tells you to do it.

Starting point is 01:47:09 Right? So I have a red button in front of me. I don't just push that red button ever unless the lieutenant who's my boss tells me. And the lieutenant doesn't tell me to do it unless his boss tells him. Yes. So there's like multiple levels up because obviously we have the Vincennes case in the United States where a U.S. naval ship shot down an Iranian airliner during a time of heightened tension in the Gulf. When was that? Roughly.

Starting point is 01:47:38 The 90s, I want to say. Vincennes, Iran Air Flight 655, is that it? that it that's it 1988. whoa i don't know about this okay so what happened here well this is an example of if you're a little careless with your anti-aircraft missiles it's easy to shoot down a civilian airliner there was a there was more recently actually a ukrainian plane was shot down um in i was at an iran as well boy the brain holes are opening up um this is what you want to avoid is okay so this was in the persian gulf uh there was tensions between the united states and iran and um an iranian uh passenger flight flew off and it flew towards a u.s naval ship which misunderstood it to be an attacking iranian plane um so this basically the claim about ma-17 was that it was a similar kind of scenario where they just mistook

Starting point is 01:48:41 the plane the difference between uh ma-17 and this is that a there really was like a shooting war about to erupt obviously there was a shooting war in Ukraine but that's a long story right um but this this this really was flying right at uh it was it was uniquely flying at this plane whereas mh17 was one of many many planes that were flying innocently over this along this route but to go specifically to what you were saying that they would chances are they would have had to deliberately pick this out and it wasn't an accident are there any i know less about mh-17 right with the case on the ground are there any decently evidence-backed theories as to people who were on that plane or some sort of

Starting point is 01:49:26 Backwards ass logic behind why Russia would have wanted to purposely shoot it down Well It's difficult to It's it's it's it's so now we're getting into like this sort of hybrid warfare. Yeah talk We're talking about making moves and you're not really clear why you're doing it. And I mean, was the uncanny echo between MH17 and MH370 intentional? I sophisticated attack imaginable, MH17 was like hitting someone's skull with a sledgehammer. Right. Yeah. Straightforward. Which again is something that Russians have been known to do. But, so it's, again, it's not probative, but it's just one of these weird things. Like, is there a link between these two incidents that happened so closely together and were so unlikely um but you what

Starting point is 01:50:31 you have in the wake of mh17 also is um on the one hand a whole bunch of russians skulldudgery where russians are doing these they seem to have launched a kind of multi-front war against the West. And in the context of this, I'll try to keep it as brief as possible, but basically Putin was consolidating his hold on Russia and he was trying to promote a vision of himself as this kind of czar

Starting point is 01:51:08 who could make the empire great again. And he felt it was an existential threat to him for Ukraine, which had been under the rule of a Putin ally to go into a pro-Western democracy, which had just happened in sort of late 2013, early 2014. Yes, with Maidan and all that. The Maidan, right. Color revolutions and all this. So he felt like a red line had been crossed,

Starting point is 01:51:36 that the West was impinging on what they call the near abroad. It's a bit like the Monroe Doctrine in the United States in the early 19th century. It's like, you cannot – this is our area. You can't act in this area. He's concerned they're going to join NATO and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. And also just provide a model for how to live.

Starting point is 01:51:56 I mean he wanted – I was talking to a friend of mine who's kind of an expert in this area and he was saying that the putin's worst nightmare is for russians to look out the window at their next door neighbor and see that things are better over there where there's liberal democracy so he wants liberal democracy to fail and so you have um russian involvement in things like um uh they're assassinating uh dissidents yes yes there's a really interesting documentary that was made about the doping scandal oh yeah the Icarus one Icarus oh my god it's one of the best documentaries ever made I mean it's absolutely fascinating because the parallel that the relevance that struck me was that all of the experts thought that these urine collection vials were untamperable there was they were made in switzerland by the experts and you cannot tamper with them and the only reason that it's emerged is because like this guy basically came forward and said yeah

Starting point is 01:52:59 i ran the program and we did it and i'm going to tell you exactly how we did it and i watched that talk i mean i'm like damn i wish somebody would come forward like that oh my god how perfect was that that fell in that dude's lap and brian fogle's lap when that guy came in right it's it's like that's one of those documentaries where the universe just wanted it to happen yeah yeah crazy and i make some of us envious that you had that stroke of luck because but but the lesson is you think you're so much smarter than your the the most dangerous belief that you can hold is that you you are much smarter than your adversary and your adversary could never outwit you and that you can we talked about measures and counter measures to believe that your enemy

Starting point is 01:53:39 can't provide a counter measure to you is foolish very very dangerous and so the GRU gets involved in tampering with brexit they got the fancy bear hack they took the DNC servers Jerry you same people yeah I had Andy Greenberg in here to talk about that he wrote he wrote the book Sam worm which goes through turns around goes into the into the master bedroom and finds that causes laptop is there and still open and alive logged into Alpha Bay causes arrested he's taken to Thai jail essentially he agrees the extradition and then a week after his, he's found dead in his jail cell. Alleged suicide.

Starting point is 01:54:27 Right, yeah. So. GRU team 77455 or 445, one of them. But yeah, I mean's it's pretty crazy and you know that's the world we're living in though now too where you can electronically create chaos around the world from a little office somewhere i have an article that ran on january 2nd i think in new york magazine about electronic warfare against civil aviation.

Starting point is 01:55:06 And now there's multiple areas in the world right now where there is spoofing going on, where GPS signals are being tampered with. And the result is that these civilian airliners are going off track. They're essentially, they're sort of navigational systems. Hacking is too strong of a word, but basically the signals are being altered.

Starting point is 01:55:31 In many cases, it's part of air defense. It's like a defense against drones. In other cases, we might not know exactly what the purpose of this is, but it's a kind, but electronic warfare is now in the realm of civilian aviation. Yeah, my friend, Sean Ryan, when I had him on the podcast. When you're in Baghdad in that time period, you could just hear the car bombs going off all day, all night.

Starting point is 01:55:54 Hear the gunshots, hear the gunfights. And it was just bombs, terrorists, suicide bombers all the time. People coming back off the dump, seeing these vehicles getting blown up seeing what's left of them if anything i mean it was this guy died this guy died this guy died this guy died and that's why we're so busy we were killing these guys they were making the bombs we were killing the guys that were planting the bombs we were killing the guys that were detonating the bombs and it was saving American lives. He talks a lot about something that's also a passion of mine, which is the scare of the power grids and how vulnerable that is. i've been talking about on this podcast now for three years is russia was running in 2014 2015 like december 2015 especially they were running basically like dummy hack attacks just to like

Starting point is 01:56:57 test what they could do right and they were shutting down for hours at a time the kiev power system right and it's like dude if you have governments around the world who could hack in and create a mass outage on a power grid do you know i mean that would the damage that could cause is monumental well i think if you talk to cyber security experts you clearly do a lot um we're all doing it i mean i'm sure the united states is doing it as well absolutely um china recently according to the washington post was was hacking into systems in i think it was a power grid in hawaii or something this kind of stuff goes on a lot and the the goal isn't necessarily to take down uh the power i mean china isn't our adversary right now they could be i mean

Starting point is 01:57:47 and you know the way these these countries the intelligence services work it's like england is our best friend but you think we don't spy on them too of course yeah yeah there's no such thing as friends with espionage right and so listen civil aviation is infrastructure it's a form of transportation it's um that's that's the one water utility sure in china we have the article that you were just talking to on the screen okay interesting i'm sorry yeah no but um so if you're in an environment in which it's a multilateral world where many people have this kind of um espionage hacking capability and they're always looking to have potential leverage on each other um aviation is a part of that aviation is infrastructure um and there's also there's an important um point i think i want to

Starting point is 01:58:39 make historically civilian transport is sacred to a certain extent like you know when the lusitania was sunk that really drove us into world war one because you can't sink civilian ships and similarly you know whatever's going on on the ground it's been kind of accepted that aviation is like a separate world and it doesn't get touched this is why mh-17 caused so much surprise because even though it was flying over a war zone they thought well the war is on the ground and we're in the air there have been multiple incidents where the sacrosanctity of aviation has been breached i would say and one of them was um an incident and this is another one maybe you could call oh that's the article i was talking about air travel is not ready for electronic warfare this is the one you

Starting point is 01:59:30 wrote in january and i don't mention it in this article but clearly what i'm thinking is was mh370 the first example of what we now know to be a trend of of countries using the techniques and technologies of electronic warfare against civilian aviation again it's no longer as sacrosanct as it once was you have and I can't cite you chapter and verse on this maybe you can pull it up but there was a case where a Belarusian dissident was pulled off a Ryanair flight that was flying over Belarus. It wasn't going to or from Belarus, but they basically said, you have to land. And the pilot was like, I don't want to land. And they sent up a fighter. Yeah, he gets... So this plane was flying innocently in international airspace and they forced it down and pulled the dissident off.

Starting point is 02:00:22 And he's still in jail. Oh, Belarus forced it down. Oh, whoa. So Belarus is obviously a close client state of Russia. Yeah. And then another example. What's that guy's, Poroshenko? Raman. Did I make that up?

Starting point is 02:00:36 Right. No, I think you're right. The president? Right. You know. But so then another example I would give is the shoot down of Progozhin's plane. Progozhin was obviously somebody who had gotten on putin's wrong side yeah um and as with um uh igor gurken you don't necessarily want to be on putin's wrong side that guy looked just like

Starting point is 02:00:58 mike ermantrout from from from uh what's it called break it bad right every time every time i saw precaution i thought like mike was gonna be like here we go again well um so prego everyone's like pregogion reached a deal with putin so he tried to stage a coup d'etat yes that was what june is that right i have no idea whatever it was last year but you know if you would strike at the king you better kill him and come with the king you best not miss that's right so uh pregogion's plane gets shot down or had a very unfortunate mechanical accident yes unfortunate so much unfortunate um so we so again we've seen this again and again where this thing that was unthinkable

Starting point is 02:01:47 in march of 2014 is becoming less unthinkable yes now when you see something like that though at least you know progosian's plane going down he's a active military type because he ran a mercenary group within a country actively at war and i mean it's russia too like like you said all bets are off but your point is taken that we do have a with that with our interconnected world we have some very blurred lines about what types of i don't want to say things are on the table but what types of things countries may be capable of that shouldn't be on the table i mean that's that one about belarus pulling a plane onto the ground and yanking that is and that's not even shooting down a plane and killing people right that's interesting though they had no business tampering with that plane yeah so

Starting point is 02:02:41 to give you some context when it was june of 2014 and I was starting to think about this stuff, I didn't know that this was right. But what terrified me was the possibility that it was right. Because if MH370 was this like almost inconceivably sophisticated attack, it raised the question of like what was next? Like what would come next and though all the things that i was most afraid of happened like what well the fancy bear attack being the worst i mean basically you have the united states media reporting that hillary clinton's emails yada yada yada so the entire 2016 election gets to be about all this stuff that was basically put there by the GRU.

Starting point is 02:03:29 And we are dealt with the consequences of that. And now to this day, I mean, Russia is still pulling all of these hijinks. There's like, I mean, then they invaded, then they did a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the horrors the hundreds of thousands of people dead um we are in a death match for democracy versus totalitarianism and these guys are absolutely ruthless and i think smarter apparently than us because i feel like

Starting point is 02:03:59 they are carrying out these things in a way that we seem unable to prepare ourselves for not to underestimate them i do try to be careful with that but like you know ukraine is unfortunately you talk to everyone on the ground they're not really in a position to win this war that said we would have thought russia would bowl over ukraine and be in odessa in like two days everyone thought it was going to be a three-day right and they have not like to the credit of the ukrainians on the ground they have not done that like they and not to discredit ukraine as a country but like y'all can't even beat ukraine there's there's a part of me that goes okay maybe they're not like i i know who putin is as a person i know who those oligarchs are as people it's not an argument of like oh maybe they're not that bad they're bad but like maybe a country with the gdp of italy

Starting point is 02:04:49 isn't such the problem that i once thought it was i mean i thought in all fairness like this is something i was one of these people for years kind of like oh my god we gotta look at this russia thing and no one would listen and now everyone's listening about it and i'm and now i'm kind of like yeah they're a problem i but also who's going to replace him like i feel like they're going to be as bad as he is you know i mean i don't disagree with you but i sort of feel like if you were in sort of the summer of 1944 saying like all right everyone talks about how bad hitler is but like look and come on the soviets are pulling and pushing in from the east we've got most of france by now it's like come on their gdp was huge though they were taken so many sit that that's the other problem with because david satter says the same thing and

Starting point is 02:05:33 i fully hear him because like david satter's life has been dedicated to this prudence killed his friends right i love david he's a very good friend of mine but like at the same time like hitler was taken the whole what's it the sedaten land right he had poland within his reach he was going to be going west like his gdp with they were humming now coming out of the great depression if you will early years there that affected everyone around the world like there was a real economic impact there whereas when i look at the situation now and i certainly have like a lot of questions about china and how much of that might even be overdone like china's gdp is more concerning because they're i think the numbers from like 2020 were like 19 to 17 trillion like

Starting point is 02:06:15 u.s china whereas you know russia's farther down the list again don't want to discredit or discount a problem we see russia killing people on british soil with polonium i mean they're very very reckless all of this hadn't happened yet yeah when i started worrying about the possibility of a russian yes yes so all so the things that kept me awake at night the the my worst fears came true is what i'm saying yeah now is it is maybe maybe it could have been worse okay maybe it could have been worse but it the thing is it's just that um well i think you get what i'm saying i do it was um it's it's worrying because uh it's it has not been always fun or easy because i i have been widely ridiculed and like made fun of and like you've had your experience with like angry common commentators and everything it's like it's

Starting point is 02:07:09 not always fun being in the public space and talking about ideas that are not widely accepted and i appreciate that you do it and you walk right into it you say what you say you lay out your case you're you're very matter of fact about that i i admire that a lot. Well, thank you. And I really appreciate you reciprocating and like having me on to talk about this. I mean, you, I guess, kind of like, you know, kind of, you did kind of ridicule my theory on your show. And I reached out, I said, listen, it's like not, let's talk about it.

Starting point is 02:07:37 And now we're talking about it. And that's great because that's what I want to do. I want to like engage. I want to talk about this case, but I also want to talk about how do we talk about this case? How we engage you had this guest on he had this theory it was pretty bonkers he was very confident and um that is that is not ultimately how you fix a broken watch correct you know you've got to be like you've got to have all the pieces

Starting point is 02:08:06 lined up on your towel and we have to go through and talk about now am i sure that the spoof theory is correct no is it possible that the pilot took it and went south yes um but we need to i think i think that there's a my sort of my mission here is not to convince people that this is what happened at the plane. Although I think it is an interesting story in itself. And I'm a journalist. I like interesting stories. And like the twists and turns in this case

Starting point is 02:08:36 are like pretty. Yeah, you got that made for you on this one. Right? It was made to be entertaining. I think it was literally made to be entertaining. Like shoes kept dropping. It was like a cereal where there's twists and turns and cliffhangers and all that.

Starting point is 02:08:50 But I think it's important. We live in this age in the last 10 years, and YouTube is a big part of it, frankly, where everybody can say anything. And how do you sift the wheat from the chaff? How do you separate the noise from the signal? It's hard. And I'm here kind of just to to sit at your knee and and and learn because i do think that like you know we've been talking for i don't know maybe a couple hours a couple

Starting point is 02:09:16 hours something like that and we've kind of just scratched the surface but we've already told much more information than was they were able to get across in the Netflix documentary. Yeah. Now, if you said to me, before I was involved in that project, if you have three hours to talk about MH370, can you get the gist of it across? I would say, yeah, I think I can. But then once you start to actually lay out

Starting point is 02:09:38 all those pieces on the tower- Yeah, there were so many different narratives in there. There's so many different narratives and parts. Well, they also spent a lot of time, beautifully, I think, think, you know, sort of invoking the grief of the family members. But then they also spent an entire episode talking about Florence DeShangy, who I think is just a case study in how not to talk about this case. Can we actually, if we're on it, can we go to that right now? So she came up when Ashton was in here too. What was he saying? he talked to her or

Starting point is 02:10:06 something i don't remember yes yeah yeah and then he was he was what was he saying alessi i think he said something in regards to he'd reach out to her and he said that it was shot down and then we were going back and forth being like oh your theory it doesn't make sense because or she's oh she was denying she was denying he, oh, he completely denied it. And then we were like, wait a minute. All the articles are saying that this is what she said. Right. And she said it herself on the documentary, which could be taken out of context.

Starting point is 02:10:33 But then she wrote a whole book on it. Exactly. Wait, she's denying that she said the plane was shut down? Yeah. So she was, and this is, because again, you can be taken out of context on cameras. I know that's why we film this like so direct so that people don't ever have that happen and we talk for three hours so it's like you get it out there but like when people are editing a documentary or something i mean you can

Starting point is 02:10:54 do a lot with words i'm sure you saw that from some of your own cuts i've been on both ends of that so i've i when she says something like that i hear it and then she writes a whatever 400 page book laying out this theory and then saying oh i never did that yeah are my red alarms going off yes they are and they weren't for ashton suede a disagreement there but she she laid out the theory on the documentary but can you at least like run through that again just so people who aren't familiar with the documentary will understand what she was trying to say i confess i have not read her book um so my knowledge of her specifics is limited um she the long and short is that she thinks that the americans shot it down over the south china sea and that everything that happened after that was like made up um i just when you if you

Starting point is 02:11:48 have a theory you want to have on the one hand positive evidence supporting it and you want to have an abs an absence of negative evidence making it ruling it out how did she get the awacs like as a piece of evidence so i i've heard people claim that there was some kind of u.s military exercise going on nobody's really i mean if it was my theory i would like try to get people on the ships to talk to me about it or at least pin down that like i don't know the deployment of naval ships can't be that secret i mean it's got it's a massive thing with hundreds of people on the board it's like i i haven't had to do it so but there was as far as i can see no attempt to kind of validate her claims i mean based on the the netflix documentary it seems like a major uh piece of evidence is something somebody

Starting point is 02:12:37 that she can't name told her in a parking garage yeah it's always tough these days with anonymous sources yeah so she doesn't really have any compelling evidence for, and she has a lot of compelling evidence against, namely all of the MRSAT data, all of the debris that washed up in the Indian Ocean, which we haven't even talked about. We're going to get to that in a minute. Okay.

Starting point is 02:12:59 But I don't know why they put her in this show. I mean, I know why they put her in this show it doesn't I mean I I know why they put her in the show they wanted to make it seem like there's a lot of possibilities and I think that's a that's an instinct that a lot of people in the mainstream media have and it's a bad instinct because it's just it's not correct there's not that many things that could have happened to this plane really like not that like what else I guess it is like kind of you start getting to a little bit fairy tale land you can start yeah i mean even to say like okay i i can i can describe like some of the the species of things that come across uh over my transom i think you said this at the beginning by the way but you're

Starting point is 02:13:45 a pilot too right yeah i fly light aircraft okay um so a lot of people are like well there was some employees of this outfit called free free skill semiconductor yeah yeah this one has a lot of holes in it well it's not even it's not it's not that it has holes so much as like it's not a theory. It's like you're sort of positing a motive. But a motive like untethered to any mechanism is not a theory. It's just an idea. You can also have a whole genre of theories that are like I don't like Americans. I don't like Chinese people.

Starting point is 02:14:21 I don't like Russians. I actually do like Russians. I just don't like Chinese people. I don't like Russians. I actually do like Russians. I just don't like Putin. So, you know, there's – people get very'll say something. I had read a lot about and talked to people about a lot of aircraft accidents. I know what a normal aircraft accident is. And one of the sort of principles, like broad principles of aircraft accident investigation is that eyewitnesses are pretty useless. Like the average person was like, I have an eyewitnesses are pretty useless like the average person was like i have an eyewitness test of me you know in practice if someone says oh i saw this plane fly overhead and it had two engines it probably had one engine or something they're just notoriously unreliable yeah and so

Starting point is 02:15:16 someone says oh and then a lot you know there's a lot this woman saw this plane glowing as it flew overhead oh dude you know you know what is just ringing in my head from that podcast which obviously got a lot of tread online but like i swear to god because i live right here next to new york city right i now can't not fucking look at a plane every time it goes over and be like well can't see the cockpit i wonder how far away that is oh that's a thousand feet can't see in it every like last night I'm walking along Sinatra Drive and I'm like looking up at planes. I'm like, no, can't see it.

Starting point is 02:15:47 Yeah. It just has ruined me looking at planes now forever because these people are making claims that are just like, just think of human capability. It's patently not possible.

Starting point is 02:15:58 Well, how many times do you even notice the deployment? I mean, now that you do, but it's like planes fly overhead a lot. So people are like, yeah, I was walking down the street and this uh boeing this malaysian airlines triple seven flew overhead you're like really it was 300 miles away i saw it right there so there's that kind of stuff

Starting point is 02:16:15 yeah but anyway i forgot what we were yeah so we but we were talking about like some of the we start with florence de cheng and some of the theories that are pointed out you've explained well now at least the angle you were coming at it which is well you can't prove me wrong on something like this or you can't prove that this is impossible that this could happen so let's introduce the possibility do you see though how some of these other people including florence de cheney could make the same kind of argument though for their quote-unquote claims i so we've been sitting here for two for however many hours right and i've been talking i've been sort of walking you through the detail and evidence how do you open the hatch how do you like what how does doppler pre-compensation work she can't talk about anything in detail because she had her ideas are just vague so like if i was if i was florence

Starting point is 02:17:05 deshangi i came on your show i'd be like the the this ship was there this ship was there this ship was there this ship was there this guy was on it this guy was doing this the plane a plane took off at such and such a time there was loaded with this missile when they came back to port they only had four but they launched with they set off with five you know what i'm saying it's like we could be able to do what they what bellingcat did with mh17 with the united states navy and mh370 got it she doesn't do she doesn't have detail because detail because if you want to really if you really hunger for a story like if you're a historian and you're totally obsessed with like the 2009 lakers or whatever right you would know exactly who was on the roster every game that they played what kind of shoe they were wearing and it's there you can dig it out and you go you go down the rabbit hole yes if you're if you have

Starting point is 02:17:57 a super vague theory that you just don't really want to interrogate too closely because there's nothing there that's when you get really vague claims and so fun to think about though if you i t if what's fun to think about sometimes it's fun to think about like how advanced some military stuff could be or things we don't know about you know it's and you got to be careful with that because that's a problem it's fun it's like i think it's fun i mean, to a certain extent, it is satisfying to like say, well, I wonder how the Doppler precompensation is. Like, because if this was a huge box, my theory would go out the window.

Starting point is 02:18:34 Oh, right. Because you can't, that's not how, they don't do the Doppler precompensation in a way that can be altered using the software. So it's, I think a story that has credibility is one that you can,

Starting point is 02:18:57 so a good theory asks questions. Yes. And it provides avenues of inquiry. So people come to me and say, oh, I think this happened. I'm like, okay, so what are you gonna do next you know you think that um it flew to Diego Garcia like how like tell me how the BFO data was generated in that case tell me how tell me how you would explain that the bto data doesn't match the ping rings like give me a mechanism that's what I was trying to do with the BFO data I'm like saying I'm saying the BFO data could be altered and this is the way it could be altered. Right.

Starting point is 02:19:27 And so I think there's a lot of, you know, it's just, it takes some care and attention. This is why YouTube is exciting to me because you can't talk for three hours on TV or you can't write a magazine article. You can write a book, but like a lot of people don't wanna read a book. That's right.

Starting point is 02:19:44 And people want something they can put on the side. That's what we have on authors to talk about their books. And then people actually do buy it afterwards, but some people never will, right? They're just going to listen to it. So I did write a book about it. If people want to like companion guide to all this. We'll put that link in the description.

Starting point is 02:19:59 What's the name of the book? It's called The Taking of MH370. I had written a book in 2015 called The Plane That Wasn't There, which is kind of a poetic way of pointing out that this plane actually disappeared three times. It didn't just disappear once. Right.

Starting point is 02:20:14 And so, but then I wanted to kind of, when I did a second edition, I wanted to really cut to the chase. This plane was taken. This plane was definitely taken. A lot of people will, oh, thank you. There it is um yeah we'll put that link in my amazon store great for the book so people can click my link down

Starting point is 02:20:32 there and you'll see jeff's book in what what do we what do we name that section books from the podcast or something yeah i think it's that something like that it'll be like books from the podcast or julian dory's books or something like that right it'll be right there at the top but you one of the things they talked about in the documentary at some length that i wanted a lot more on that you and i were talking before a camera about is the whole blaine allen gibson thing so this if you want to talk about like russia and some interesting things this guy his presence in the case gives it some oxygen. So essentially, for people who haven't seen the documentary, there's this guy who's a self-described, and you're probably going to explain it's more than this, but he's a self-described like world adventurer, world traveler, Blaine Allen Gibson, who decided in 2015 that he wanted to find potential wreckage of MH370. And so allegedly, he's the luckiest man

Starting point is 02:21:29 in the world, just incredible luck. But he talked to, I'm using his words, but he talked to quote unquote experts online who told and asked them, where's the most likely place that according to the currents that this, if it crashed in the indian ocean that it would wash up to and at first they told him i think mozambique so he flies to mozambique and within 20 minutes yeah within 20 minutes he had a piece of mh370 just went to the right beach at the right time in the right place and got it within 20 minutes he's like oh look at this and so then he goes to the quote-unquote experts online doesn't say who they are once again and he says all right what's the next place and they go madagascar he goes to a beach in madagascar i think it was within two hours he had 19 pieces or something

Starting point is 02:22:13 something like that of of mh370 allegedly i don't know if he got 19 that quickly but he did wind up getting something like that eventually um but he's he's a magnet for this stuff yes and so this all came what needs to be said is this all came on the heels of allegedly the is it called the i forget the flapper on the flapper on which is a large piece of the plan we can pull that image up mh370 flapper on on what's the name of that famous surfing island la reunion la reunion island so it it washes up on shore there and they go oh my god look we have the flapper on right of mh370 now there's there's two angles to this there's whether or not this was it and then there's blaine coming in so maybe actually right before blaine right i want to bring up, you wrote a pretty unbelievable blog post at the time.

Starting point is 02:23:08 Right. I think I have it here. Called, it was called Bioforensic Analysis of Suspected MH370 Debris. And this is the updated one. So it was the second one you did. And what you broke down was that this stuff that was found roughly like a year after on La Reunion, the sea life that existed on the Flaperon could not have developed in the type of currents it would have been in and the time it would have had to do it before it washed up on shore. Meaning it would have been planted, no? So obviously, yeah. to do it before it washed up on shore meaning it would have been planted no so obviously yeah i mean just to back back up one step i had come up with this theory that the plane could have been taken north that it didn't go into the ocean and as time went by and no debris washed up people

Starting point is 02:23:58 were expected people were like there were thousands of people coming they're like they do beach cleanups in western australia and they're looking for pieces nothing washes up i'm like the longer this goes on the stranger it looks and then like a year and a half later this piece watches washes up in the western part of the indian ocean that we're just talking about and everyone's like okay well this definitely jeff is definitely wrong because we have these pieces. And I was like, yeah, okay, I'm probably wrong. I actually wrote a piece saying like, despite what I speculated about earlier, clearly the plane went into the southern ocean.

Starting point is 02:24:32 Then I was like, wait a minute, let me just, for my own sanity, just like convince myself that this is definitely not like somebody just ripping a piece off the plane and throwing it in the water for a little while. There were various aspects. there's a drift modeling there's the question of like this this piece is totally covered in barnacles on every surface and so but barnacles only grow underwater and things can't float totally underwater i do a whole actually our last podcast episode was was i think the one that is is is airing this thursday is all about this

Starting point is 02:25:06 so but the part that i really sank my teeth into was the question of how big are these barnacles and because these these these creatures um are they they they their little larvae swim around in the ocean they're basically plankton and as soon as they find something that's floating they glue their head onto it and they stick their feet in the water and they grab food out of the out of the water and they could bigger and they grow really fast because the way they evolved is that they were attaching onto things like logs and like even pieces of seaweed that eventually decay and sink. So they haven't got a lot of time. They've got to grow, grow, grow, reproduce, reproduce, reproduce.

Starting point is 02:25:49 And not, they have no economic value except negative economic value. If they grow on your boat, it makes your boat very slow. And so a very, like six or seven people have like had been studying this before I got interested. And it's called Lepus Anitifera, goose barnacle. And I went really down a rabbit hole with these things. Yeah, you're deep.

Starting point is 02:26:11 I was really deep. I will spare you the details, although I would love to spend four hours talking to you about Lepus Anitifera and their mating cycle. But suffice to say, they grow at a certain rate. When I showed pictures of these things to experts in these barnacles, they were like, it's a month old. It's two months old.

Starting point is 02:26:28 This plane had been crashed like 15 or 16 months before. So how come? And also the thing about leopards, like I said, anything that's floating in the ocean, they'll grab onto it. They'll start. You know, when they find a body in the Meadowlands, they like look at the bugs. Yeah. And depending on the time of year. I know a few guys that buried somelands, they like look at the bugs. Yeah. And depending on the time of year. I know a few guys that buried some bodies out there.

Starting point is 02:26:48 Hey, come on. We're in Jersey. What am I talking about here? I have to be careful. I don't want to wind up in the Meadowlands. I'm not going to disparage. You're with me. All right.

Starting point is 02:26:58 I got your protection. Okay. So you can look and you can see based on what kind of bugs or how big the bugs are, if they're eggs. So the same thing. It's like a crime scene time chronology.

Starting point is 02:27:18 And a woman had just published a paper when this happened that she looked at a body floating off the coast of Italy, and it had barnacles, and they were able to sort of guess the time of death. So it doesn't match. Why? Well, if you want to think that this might have been planted maybe it was planted and maybe somebody took a piece they people were starting to talk about how suspicious it was that there was no debris flying they took a piece and they put it in the water and they soaked it there for a couple months and they put on the beach or you might think that we don't understand these creatures that well. Maybe they grow slower depending on the nutrients

Starting point is 02:27:47 that are available in the water. There might just be something we don't know. Maybe it was floating along and then a turtle came and ate all of the lupus and then they had to start again from scratch, something like that. There might be an innocent explanation. In all of these theories and all of evidence that we have you can always either say it was a coincidence there or there's an innocent explanation or it's actually evidence

Starting point is 02:28:11 of what i'm talking about you know what i'm saying so everything has to be taken in context but then we for a long time we only had this one piece this was an amazing piece by the way this was this piece had serial numbers on the inside that allowed investigators to definitively link it to mh370 it had these great fully grown fresh barnacles that could allow you to not only tell how old the barnacles were but as the barnacles float through water of different temperature it shows up in the composition of the shell so scientists can use the shell almost like a data recorder to tell them how warm the water is and that they were hoping to use that to tell them what what

Starting point is 02:28:50 part of the seventh arc that the plane crashed in didn't work because the shells were too young but there's also i forget what it's called there's a plate on the inner part of the flapperon that is supposed to have a unique identifier that was convenient that would have actually officially identified that boeing 777 that was mh370 but it was conveniently not there so it was missing and so this again is one of these things were like is it just innocent that this because this piece is it's kind of beat up you can tell the whole like trailing edge of it had been like kind of worn away ripped off they did a good job it was kind of um it was messed up and so would it would floating in the ocean cause this nameplate to fall off or not i mean it's it's up to you to decide how suspicious you think that

Starting point is 02:29:38 is the point is that even without that plate they were able to put an endoscope into it and read the serial numbers and track it back to handwritten logs that were kept at the factory in spain where it was made so there's no question that this came from mh370 the plane that crack the paint the plane that went missing this flapperon is from that actual aircraft i misunderstood that when i read it back then so it is okay yeah this is from mh370 so what you okay all right hold on let me back up for a minute okay because you've written a lot on this so obviously i misunderstood some things what you could be saying though is on the basis of the biomaterial found on it from the ocean seeing as the timelines and environments would have had to go through do not seem to line up according to your analysis

Starting point is 02:30:34 that it could have been taken from wherever the jet was taken placed into the indian ocean to wash up yeah that's the idea and then that's all we have for a long time there's only that one piece and it's like got this weird barnacle situation going on okay so and then how long until blaine comes in the picture this is what was this june 2015 or or march i think this is july 2015 when this was found yeah so it's been a year not quite a half yeah 16 months and then so that's july and then blaine shows up i think it's january or february of 2016. now blaine was had been on my radar before because i had a discussion i had a jeffwise.net is my is my website and people were commenting and um there was a kind of a community of people discussing the various possibilities and he had reached out to me saying i'm this

Starting point is 02:31:32 independent guy um i'm looking around i'm talking to people i'm like going here and there and the other thing he had this weird theory involving there was like supposedly this um material that could melt metal and like maybe if you spilled it on a plane it would melt the metal i didn't know what the hell he was talking about i thought he was a i thought he was an odd bird frankly um and then he reaches out to me in february and he says i've got this piece and then he tells me the whole story and getting your kids to school safely is important to you it's important to us too Toyota for what matters most I interviewed him at the time and I was

Starting point is 02:32:18 like I I you know I just tried I reported what he told me. And the 20 minute part definitely struck me as odd. And then he wound up collecting a lot of pieces. Now this piece is called No Step. I don't know if it any, it doesn't have any identifying numbers. The piece we have on the screen right here? In the upper left, he's holding No Step. That, okay.

Starting point is 02:32:43 Yeah, and he even sent a video of the thing floating so you could see how it floated. It's interesting. He found it on a sandbar that was awash. And some fishermen from Mozambique had taken him there. He had said, where's a place to find debris? And they said, this sandbar. So they went to the sandbar and he found it

Starting point is 02:33:03 or another guy found it and handed it to him. It's interesting because this uh when they when investigators searched closely examined this piece later we didn't know this for many years later until the final report was issued they found remnants of um shells and things that had been living on this, but none of them were like remained. Like if there had been Lepus on it, they had been scoured off. So the thing about, not to obsess about Lepus and Antifra barnacles, but they only live in the open ocean.

Starting point is 02:33:37 And the minute they wash ashore, they die. The one that was found in Reunion Island had just washed ashore. So it was fresh and these things were still probably alive. But very quickly they get eaten by seagulls. The one that was found in Reunion Island had just washed ashore, so it was fresh, and these things were still probably alive. But very quickly, they get eaten by seagulls, by crabs, things like that.

Starting point is 02:33:52 And so this piece that he found looked like something that had been stripped of its sea life. He found it in, it had just washed ashore. It was on a sandbar that was awash. So to be in the condition it it in, it had just washed ashore. It was on a sandbar that was awash. So to be in the condition it was in, it would have to have washed ashore, getting picked over by predators, and then washed back out and then found by him.

Starting point is 02:34:17 And all of the pieces, there were a couple of others that wound up having healthy size lipus on them, maybe one or two others. Everything else, there's about three dozen, I think, that were potentially part of MAS-370 that that were collected most of them by blaine but none of them had the kind of sea lift that would tell us like how long they've been in the water so he had reached out to you as you said but now he starts going very public with this story in 2016 and you start looking into him more and this is what was interesting because he look if you watch the documentary i agree with you 100 with my first impression the guy's an odd bird right like this is not a normal person and then when you see the

Starting point is 02:34:58 veracity of the claims that he's making and then he did really find this stuff right and that he apparent and he found it quickly like even if let's say he's an exaggerator and he said 20 minutes and it was really like four hours he's still the fact that he went to the right place and was right there and got it it's like crazy to me and they did talk about and had him respond to it in the documentary some odd ties in this case to russia which do it do appear weird but you found that in much more when you looked into him i imagine this is like 2016 you really start digging into like who is this guy well in in my conversation with him he was telling me about his life as an adventurer and he talked about how he had gone every kind of great mystery um he had tried to solve it himself and

Starting point is 02:35:47 one of the great Mysteries was tunguska the meteorite that hit um in Siberia in 1911 or something okay and it was a great it's a great mystery it's fascinating that some something happened in the sky and all this great area of taiga got flattened um and to this day nobody knows it's widely believed to have been a kind of a meteor that exploded so in talking about how he tried to solve that mystery he mentioned in passing that he speaks such fluent russian that he could go to a bar and like talk to people and get like intel from them about where those where to look for the meteor and i was like holy russian is hard i've been studying uh this here's a confession um i have been doing duolingo russian since 2014. wow how's

Starting point is 02:36:36 that coming terrible it's really really hard it has crazy verb structures um it was almost designed to terrorize the students of language um but so when he said i can i can talk to people in bars uh i was like that was a red flag to me because that means you have like a deep investment in this country and... Now, he also says that he can speak French. He says that he can speak like four languages. In some of his documentaries he's been in, he speaks French. He speaks very bad French, in my opinion. So maybe he's not fluent in Russian.

Starting point is 02:37:18 Maybe that's one of his tall tales. But if he is fluent in Russian, this is a guy with like serious Russian connections because you don't accidentally wind up speaking Russian. So I did a little bit of searching around. It turns out there's public records in the state of Washington where he's from that he founded a company in 1991 with these two Russian business partners in this city that's like an industrial it's kind of like ohio of of russia and um it was called siberia pacific and it was still an ex he'd been paying his annual dues to the state of washington every year since all this time this was a going business you know it had an address and a phone number and everything and it was just him i guess so he was a lawyer he is a lawyer

Starting point is 02:38:10 and i reached and i did some research i'm like what was he doing in russia for these years and i guess he was there for he was there so the soviet union collapsed in like well the wall came down in 89 and then various things happened in 91. yeah i, I myself went to, I was living in the Far East at the time. And in 91, there were these things called secret, I'm gonna call them secret cities, but I think I might be getting it wrong. Anyway, there were cities that you could not go to if you were a foreigner because they had nuclear plants in them. I, at the time, met some people from Vladivostok

Starting point is 02:38:41 and they were like, come to Vladivostok. So I did. And I spent some time there and i um wound up hungover i don't know why that's what happened how or why but um i woke up with a terrible hangover in vladivostok and um i like i said i like russians i like russia it's a fascinating country it's like kind of the like twin like the opposite twin of the united states like if you look at where we lie in the world in our history like we expanded West and they expanded East and we both wound up on the Pacific um there's obviously differences but there's some interesting similarities and um

Starting point is 02:39:19 so what was I talking about you woke up with a hangover i woke up with a hangover oh so i had i was interested in russia and he so i did so so he had this company oh what was he doing so in 91 a lot of these cities that had been you they were forbidden basically you couldn't go to them um they had nuclear plants in them uh the soviet union obviously was very secretive and so they they were trying to encourage investment at this time a lot of the problems of russia today were seeded at that time because the united states went in with this terrible advice so he was a lawyer who was going around russia offering advice to people who wanted to do business at the time but he had that he had a very specific knowledge of of of the legal system of russia

Starting point is 02:40:08 and he took part in a state department sponsored conference where he talked about the problems of doing business in this kind of city and i called up the guy who ran the conference and it's like what is blaine gibson like like what's his deal and this fellow said that he didn't really remember because it was a long time ago but that he was he it struck him that that blaine was different from most of the presenters and that he actually had gone out into the field and he spent a lot of time in small areas he knew the he he didn't just go to the the main towns like moscow and irkutsk but he went to the little ones too and so he had a real kind, he was impressed by his knowledge and his like real in-depth understanding of Russia,

Starting point is 02:40:48 which is fine, which is great. I totally relate to that. I think it's great that Blaine was, had such a engaged in, was such, was so engaged in such an interesting country. He had been in the State Department for a while. His father was the Supreme. Blaine. Blaine's dad was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California his father was actually kind of historic figure because he was part of the court that had ruled the detention of aliens of Japanese citizens illegal unconstitutional so he is actually and he served for many many years on the supreme court

Starting point is 02:41:26 um so he had a blaine is a really interesting guy and but then he appears in 2016 as this guy wearing the camera move it to the side like move it to the side. Like this? Move it to the right. Like that? There you go. Sorry. Go ahead. So he shows up in 2016 as this sort of wearing an Indiana Jones jacket and hat, describing himself as this kind of feckless adventurer who kind of wanders around the globe trying to solve mysteries, and this is just the mystery that he wants to solve.

Starting point is 02:42:01 And he seems like this kind of naive, innocent waif. And he's just this, like, odd bird is kind of a word. He's like, nobody knows where he lives. He won't tell anybody. He's very secretive about what his whole deal is. And he's denying that he has any connection to Russia. He's like, I tried to get involved in tourist business in the Far East.

Starting point is 02:42:24 Because everyone does that. because everyone does that because everyone does that i mean which is i listen it's just it's he's there this is a guy who if you're a journalist you're the hair on the back of your neck oh yeah starts to go yeah it's blaring so how much do you want to because we again we talked off camera about some stuff but i know you want to stay with things that you have hard evidence for but how much do you want to go into some of the background that you think you've uncovered on that i don't want to get into that um i have to think carefully about it um he's not entirely who he seems to be and i don't want to i don't want to sort of paint any pictures or anything suffice to say this this this denial of his connections to russia are inaccurate i think he i he i mean i understand

Starting point is 02:43:16 why he wants to move away from associations with russia especially in the wake of my you know potential you know dot connecting about the spoof theory um it is interesting that in the in the if you watch the netflix documentary um the plane that disappeared he says oh some people say i'm a spy for russia some people say i'm a spy for china and i just i watch that i'm like blaine nobody is saying you're a spy for china these aren't just baseless things that are coming from every direction he's inserting but he's like kind of creating this like straw man oh people are making all kinds of crazy accusations about me and it really was i i said to the producers i'm in this documentary a lot and i and i talked to them a lot i told them a a lot of what appeared on screen, but they never gave me – I had no control.

Starting point is 02:44:10 I never knew what they were going to air, and I had no say into how they presented things. So I would have loved if they would have asked him some hard questions and put it on the screen. But I think their goal, if you watch it, is they want to make every theory seem equally well-informed. Yeah, they want to make it open-ended so it's mysterious and that's that's a part as a downside of the entertainment side of what you have to do in in documentary culture today but yeah i i think i'll just say from some of the stuff we talked about off camera sinister is is definitely a word that comes to mind with him i also look at him you know

Starting point is 02:44:46 i've had spooks sitting here in this seat so sometimes i try to think like how yeah how they think and stuff he does have a a a very useful spooky profile meaning he could also be used by other places because of what it looks like because guys like you are going to find it right you're going to find weird connections to russian people are going to be like oh great this is going to look like a russian connection right so that that thought goes into my head too but that's the thing with espionage everything is it is a potential honeypot of like you know honeypot's not the word but everything is a potential trap of reverse psychology on reverse psychology on reverse psychology and you can go crazy trying to read it but there's no doubt that at the core at the center of this story that blaine has inserted himself into by finding some of these pieces right you can't deny the espionage

Starting point is 02:45:40 nature that exists potentially around him yeah when you're standing on quicksand um it can be very hard to know what is true and what is not and what i the only thing you can really do is to try to establish whether this person is in their what they're telling you is internally consistent and so if they are telling one story on Tuesday and a different story on Wednesday about the same thing you know that something's up they are not a reliable source and you you have to wonder like why are they in being inconsistent yes I mean if you're if somebody's on the stand in a trial right the lawyer wants to do the same thing you know you are you lying then are you lying now yeah yeah it's it's certain it's and that's that's probably like the biggest part of your job

Starting point is 02:46:30 when you're working multifaceted stories from all different types of people around the case you're trying to see if things line up because that's how you get it multi-sourced exactly so but yeah the the other the other bizarre thing that bothers me about this case that I'm not sure I've ever seen like a great explanation for, I don't know if you looked into it, is the whole cell phone thing with the passengers. So I forget what it was. Maybe you can look it up, Alessi, but I want to say it was like two days later or something like that. Yeah. They were getting full rings. Like families of passenger members were getting full rings and then in the holding room or whatever you want to call it where they had all the families of the passengers at the location where they were making all these announcements. At one point, the phone of the father who was on the plane was ringing on his kid's phone and they're like oh my god should i answer it how is there a good

Starting point is 02:47:27 explanation for these things so that was the number one question that i got after the show aired people were writing to my blog and uh to the podcast when we started saying what's up with the cell phones and unfortunately the cell phone data has never been made public um the one thing we do know about the cell phones was that um there was one cell phone ping between ma370 and a ground station near the island of penang we talked about how the plane had reversed course and was seen on military radar going up the malacca strait the island of Penang. We talked about how the plane had reversed course and was seen on military radar going up the Malacca Strait. The island of Penang is under its path. It actually, the island of Penang is where it turned

Starting point is 02:48:13 as it went up the strait. It's actually coincidentally, or maybe not coincidentally, depending on who you ask, the hometown of Zaharieh Amachah. And so one theory was that- He was trying to wave his hometown goodbye. Yeah, he tilted the plane to the right and saw the... I mean, maybe. But so the co-pilot's cell phone connected with a tower.

Starting point is 02:48:38 Now, how that happened is, again, one of these mysteries within the mystery. Because a plane, you wouldn't think, if a plane is a 36 000 feet or whatever that would be possible for a cell phone to connect with the tower and yet it did and so that is well for one thing it proves that the plane that was seen on military radar which doesn't come with a tag associated with it so people speculated well maybe it wasn't really ms370 well this the co-pilot cell phone was on that plane so it had to be but as far as the person

Starting point is 02:49:07 it's a story of a woman said oh my dad's calling what should i do well you tell me your dead dad is calling you on your cell phone what would you do how do you even ask why are you even why why are you asking somebody what to do why don't you just answer it you know what i mean why would you ask that question maybe the logically you're 100 right then again the this was a shit show of a scene and you got all these people locked in a room they're going crazy they think their loved ones are dead but they're not sure no one's telling them where the plane is and you free you know how you like i know it's a human behavior like we said earlier you can't explain human behavior anything is plausible we only have this story third hand it's hearsay um all of these stories they're they're

Starting point is 02:49:56 all kind of third hand i just we just i just people ask me about all the time and all i can say is i don't know i don't know if there's any substance to these things or not i have no data i can't really speculate unfortunately okay fair enough mean, because at the middle of this, and I always try to remember this too, and sometimes I'm guilty of it too, we get lost in it, but you have 239 people who died. You have 239 families who have no closure for their relatives being gone. They're never going to see them and you know we can get so caught up in trying to solve the case sometimes and a part of it is you know it's this giant mystery there's a part of it that's fun i can't deny that but you know i can't even imagine being any of those people

Starting point is 02:50:37 who you know you saw people who lost their families on there like their're they're i think like wife and kids or husband and kids and it's like you know that 10 years on that pain doesn't go away well this is why accident investigations are done at all is because it's as sucky as it is for the loved ones, at least we could try to prevent it from happening again. And in late 2014, CBS called me into their studio and they were like, okay, we want to tell you, we want to ask you what we can learn from MA370 so that doesn't happen again and i said nothing because we don't know what happened to this plane we can't you can't get on a plane and say with 100 certainty

Starting point is 02:51:35 that i won't vanish into thin air because it has happened and it remains unexplained well can there be a new type of system for example with the transponder not having a three-minute overlap of nothingness in between countries or something like that? Can't we fix something in the system there? MH370 could not happen today. The exact thing that happened to MH370 could not happen today. So we did learn something from it. Well, yeah. Like, for instance, I mentioned that they made the GPS embedded, like, free.

Starting point is 02:52:05 But the thing is, here's the thing. If there's basically two possibilities of what happened on this plane. One is pilot suicide. Have we done anything to prevent that? No. Some people have said, well, why don't we do this thing? There's a whole genre of people talking about this thing called the boeing uninterruptible autopilot which is a way that from the ground you could take over a plane and there's nothing the pilots could do about it for one thing the pilots union is never going to

Starting point is 02:52:33 let that happen secondly nor should they because instead of a pilot committing suicide you can now have a dude on the ground with the uninterruptible autopilot controls killing the plane himself just to say they would know that it's possible or not though what's possible meaning who's to say that that they would that the pilots union would be able to stop that without even you know assuming that it's like up to them whether or not that exists but in reality maybe on the ground it does exist and they're just not told about it okay so let's imagine that there's this technology and it's it's very easy to imagine this happening so now you have a plane that can be flown from the cockpit but can also be flown from the ground yeah and in fact there's a there's a switch on the ground where i can flip the switch and now i can fly this plane there's nothing you can do about it override you now a pilot is

Starting point is 02:53:19 disincentivized by crashing this plane because he'll die too, right? The guy in the ground has no distance. No, none. And the fact that, and plus, every system can be hackable. So if you're installing a system on the plane, that means this plane can be taken over from outside somewhere else. That means theoretically, anybody who's smarter than you can crash any plane he wants.

Starting point is 02:53:43 That actually does not make you safer no it doesn't but you don't think that that there's not even saying now but like that there's not the possibility that technology like that will come to exist and no one will be told about it like meaning the pilots union won't be notified that hey guys guess what we're working on at darpa oh forgot yeah yeah let me let you know about that one to be installed on a to be installed widely on commercial airplanes without anybody knowing about it i mean you could say just kind of playing with this off the top of my head because i hadn't really thought about it but the the mcast that caused those 737 max crashes that it's not like that nobody knew about it obviously the regulators knew about its

Starting point is 02:54:25 existence but um pilots weren't told about it so this system would kick in and basically take control of the plane and you're like what is happening like i don't know why this is happening yeah i think about it with cars a lot too you know with with us moving to eventually self-driving cars and cars that are on a central system the one of the areas that i've really become fascinated by and written a lot of articles about is this sort of the the interface between humans and automation i think it's going to be an increasingly important i mean it's the story of aviation or the less so so i mean the evidence for first heaven turned out to be a problem of automation that kicked in and the and the pilot human pilots didn't really fully understand it it's a pro it's it's like it's not going away um but i i kind of like went down the side alley it's sort of

Starting point is 02:55:12 in passing making a point about something else that i've now forgotten what it was we were talking about the ability to control the the jet from the ground and how that type of technology the pilots would never let it like the pilots union would never let oh you're saying like maybe the pilots union kick it over it and and would it i'm saying maybe they wouldn't even know what it happens you know maybe they wouldn't and and this kind of goes down like the florence to changi route with some things but you know i will say say the amount that we, meaning me and everyone listening right now, and maybe you, but I won't speak for you,

Starting point is 02:55:51 don't know about the type of technology that is worked on underground. I'm not talking about at Google or at Apple. I'm talking about at DARPA and organizations like that around the world. It is scary to think about sometimes, like how far ahead are they? And you can go crazy with the possibilities of what they have. Something as, not to oversimplify it, but I'll use this term, something as seemingly more straightforward of a concept than say like multiverse theory would be, oh oh being able to technologically control a plane

Starting point is 02:56:25 that's in the sky right there from the ground with some technology that the person in the plane can't see right some some you know i guess a couple code you know what i mean i i understand the concept of the idea but um first of all there's no I mean, the specific theory was that this actually had been installed in MH370. There's zero evidence that it has ever been created and certainly even less evidence that it was in MH370. But more importantly, I would sort of back up a step and say, what would be the purpose of this? Because it wouldn't increase security. It would open up a vast security vulnerability oh huge yeah it's huge so anyway i feel like it's

Starting point is 02:57:13 a dead end okay fair enough do you think this case do you think that the truth of this case will always be concealed or do you think maybe we're sitting here five years from now and Jeff Wise has solved it and the government has admitted to it? I mean my goal at this point, which I don't think is unrealistic, is to simply get the authorities to tell me or just to acknowledge that this idea exists i don't think it's i don't know that it's true but i think it is that the vulnerability might exist was it exploited i don't even care that they tell me whether it was exploited or not i just want you to know how would you look at this case differently if you acknowledged that there was a vulnerability and that maybe the search area that you defined using this bfo value isn't necessarily the only possibility like you the authorities will tell you time and time again and not just the authorities but people like mike exner who agree with the authorities

Starting point is 02:58:21 and i understand their reasons they're not ungrounded but for all the people who say we know with certainty that this plan is in the southern indian ocean i just want them to get to tell me i've just explained to you a vulnerability how do you know right that this vulnerability wasn't maybe it doesn't exist maybe you know something about this box that i don't tell me what that is it's been 10 years i've been talking about this and just you can't don't don't just say this is impossible as mike exeter did in the documentary let's like really grapple with it right take it seriously that's all i'm saying take it seriously because you haven't found the plane you've spent hundreds of millions of dollars

Starting point is 02:59:00 humor me yes at this point or have you been in contact at any point recently with family members of the victims is that still a part of any of the reporting you're doing i've never um i would say never there are a handful of um relatives that i have been in communication with not in years um i feel for them i don't really i they're grieving i don't know what else to say than that they're great i can't do anything for them apart from my best efforts to solve this mystery people have people do come at me you know what it's like for people to come at you and they'll say oh how dare you these people are suffering right how could you treat this mystery so callously i'm like what are you talking about it's your job it's well the they the the family members want to know what happens to their loved ones yes your job is to investigate

Starting point is 02:59:58 things like this it's like let's try to figure out what happened. Like, you know, to get back to Blaine, you know, one of the strange things about his attitude, his sort of public position, and I've been criticized by other people in the public sphere with this same position. They're like, your theory is irresponsible. And I'm like, well, what is your theory? He's like, I don't have a theory. I'm like, well, if you don't have a theory, what are you doing? You're collecting pieces of evidence without an attempt to – I don't know. Do you think it's just going to like magically fall out of the sky if you have enough pieces of evidence? You have to have a theory.

Starting point is 03:00:35 You have to ideally have multiple theories and then weigh them against the evidence and sort of vary your assessment of how likely they are. I don't disagree i think you know i i do think you have a decent point that there are more limits to what the possibilities are than maybe we'd first think about and and i do try not to in spite of some other theories that have been spouted on this podcast by other people i do try not to run to the things that are just leap on a leap on a leap on a leap on a leap on a leap on a leap on a leap on a leap. And you've got to challenge the theories. But it's fair to say, like, if you have one that's at least rooted in some physical data and also capabilities that could exist on, say, a Boeing 777 like this, then, yeah, it's – someone's got to bring that to the table so i i appreciate

Starting point is 03:01:26 you doing that and obviously you've been doing it for a lot of years but we we said the name of your podcast early on what's the what's the name of it it's called deep dive mh370 deep dive mh370 so you and your co-hosts are putting out an episode every week that's like 30 40 minutes going through one new layer of the case and it's open-ended. You don't know how many episodes it's gonna end up being right now. We're just slicing it into digestible chunks. We wanna make it,

Starting point is 03:01:51 we don't wanna go too deep into it. I mean, it's a lot of the same stuff I'm talking about with you today. Maybe like a little bit more detail, but it's the same. Basically the point that I'm trying to make is like we can understand so much about this case and it's great it's a wild ride it really is um but you have to take it carefully now the reason that you and i our paths crossed initially is because you had this

Starting point is 03:02:19 gentleman on i don't know if you want to talk about him maybe you feel like ashton forbes yeah yeah i mean we okay we we've talked it before, but I'm sure people have questions. So he got a lot. So what I've been trying to do is kind of bring this story to people's attention and try to explain what I think is like a productive way to look at this case. And time and again, this keeps bubbling back up. People have theories and they bring it forward and they they come and they go this one really blew up i mean this got many many millions of views and this guy was going around with this video of it looked like three ufos circling around m370 and blipping it out through an interdimensional portal

Starting point is 03:03:01 and you know there's multiple things you could say about that but the thing that really kind of blew my mind is that that doesn't match what we know about this case i mean you and i have been talking about the seven hour process of this plane vanishing it didn't blip out there's no point where the thing just went blip this happened this weird thing happened then this weird thing happened then this weird thing happened the mystery has never been that the thing blipped out to an internet dimensional thing and so people there was a whole as you i'm you're very well versed in it you know parts of this video had previously appeared in b-roll or some cloud photos or something there's various reasons to think that this whole thing was a hoax it was it was it was debunked i will i will patently say that the corridor crew and then

Starting point is 03:03:51 others after them they debunked this but even we found the creator of the clouds by the way too oh really yeah yeah so but even before that the story didn't make any sense it didn't match what happened to the plane and so i was like to me i was watching this going like what how does this information world work where this so many people are hearing this guy's work and getting just misled you know they want to have fun with it they want to have fun with cases like this right they want to have a club to be a part of they want to have some sort of like it's way deeper than we think the government's doing all of it they know the where the aliens are right and like man it's wildly interesting and i'm with you like there there's there's a part of me that wants to be like oh my god this could

Starting point is 03:04:40 be so deep but you have to not lose your sanity when you do that right and when you are presented with things that are patent facts right you can't be like well that's your opinion no no no you know for example the pilot's door does not have hinges on it that's that's just a fact right it didn't back then you know and there's just some people who don't want to hear that and and i don't want to like really hit them with a rim shot but some people who don't want to hear that. And I don't want to like really hit them with a rim shot, but some people just don't have enough going on in their life. You know, they don't. And I genuinely feel bad about that. I hope they can get away from that place. But like this is the most exciting thing to them and it becomes a part of their identity.

Starting point is 03:05:20 We see it in our politics now too with both sides of the aisle. Like it becomes who you are and you have to be this thing on the team at all times and i was a little bit caught off guard with just the veracity and the strength of how deep that went right when i had ashton on and the things people actually believed afterwards you know but it is what it is you've been caught in the middle of it like you said i i think you i think you've handled a lot of it really really well and so you know i'm looking forward to seeing the rest of your podcast and all the reporting you do on it thank you thank you so much for coming in jeff well it was my pleasure i mean we could easily do like another nine we could we could but uh could. But, you know, thank you so much.

Starting point is 03:06:07 Like I said, I mean, I'm in awe of what you do. You do it very well. And, you know, it's great to have the privilege to talk to you. Thank you so much, sir. We'll do it again sometime. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me.

Starting point is 03:06:21 Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. Before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory podcast, or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.

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