UPDATED 12/12/16: Just to underline the extraordinary implausibility of Blaine Alan Gibson’s finds, I’ve taken the extra step of putting in bold the three (3) separate occasions when Gibson hit the jackpot with a one-in-a-million stroke of luck. See if you can spot them below. My personal favorite is the one with the ATV.
On December 8, 2016, the Twitter account voice370 (@cryfortruth) Tweeted the following:
Another piece of potential debris washed up the shore and found by B.A. Gibson on the same beach where NOK Jiang found a piece yesterday. pic.twitter.com/PdXCkYX4oI
— voice370 (@cryfortruth) December 9, 2016
In a Facebook post the same day, Grace Subathirai Nathan (one of the NOK on the current debris-finding expedition to Madagascar) posted about the same find:
Another piece of debris found earlier today. This time by private citizen Blaine Alan Gibson while he was with two French journalists Pierre Chabert and Renaud Fessaguet.
He walked past the spot on the beach where next of kin Jiang Hui found a piece yesterday and nothing was there then 30 mins later on the way back the waves washed the piece on debris to the shore.
This just goes to show that debris can be there one minute and gone the next and vice versa.
She included some of the images that were also in the Tweet, among them this one:
I’ve already written in the comment section of the preceding post that I find it quite extraordinary that a purported piece of MH370 apparently washed up on the shore within half an hour of Blaine’s passing by the spot. The ocean is vast, the number of pieces of MH370 necessarily limited. The odds of finding a piece of the plane on any given stretch of sand is very small; the odds of finding something that washed ashore within the last half hour must be infinitesmal.
One would also would not expect a newly washed-ashore piece of debris to be free of biofouling, as I’ve discussed before. Something that just came out of the ocean, if free of biofouling, must have spent time ashore, gotten picked clean, then washed back out to sea, only to come ashore again within a few days. Truly miraculous.
I’ve voiced suspicions in the past about Gibson’s self-financed investigation. He said that he found his first piece of MH370 debris, so-called “No Step,” 20 minutes after starting his first beach search. Though it was found on a sand bar that is awash at high tide, it, too, was remarkably free of biofouling. Since then, he has found more than half of the pieces of suspected debris. All have have been completely innocent of marine life. His finds have excited remarkably little enthusiasm among the authorities; the Malaysians waited six months to retrieve one batch, and then only made that effort after their inaction was the subject of unflattering news stories.
Gibson is clearly an eccentric; before he found “No Step” he was bouncing around the Indian Ocean littoral, investigating crackpot theories and making himself known to the authorities and next-of-kin. In the past he has, he says, tried to find the Ark of the Covenant. A recent article in the Guardian had this bit:
Blaine Gibson, a lawyer turned investigator who arrived on Madagascar six months ago, said he has seen debris from the plane used to fan a kitchen fire by a nine-year-old girl on the island.
“It was light and it was solid and it was part of the plane,” said Gibson, 59. “When I put the word out around the village, another guy turned up with another piece he had been using as a washing board for clothes.”
Are we to believe that he walked up on a girl fanning a fire and, lo and behold, she happened to be fanning it with a piece of MH370? Instead of any of a billion suitable small, light, flat objects that exist in the world? What’s more, I am troubled by Gibson’s suggestion that the residents of this region are so materially impoverished that they would eagerly size on any scrap of material that comes their way and put it to immediate use—to incorporate into a shelter, to burn for fuel, to fan a fire with, or to use as a washboard. In fact I find this idea rather bonkers.
Some people feel that it is unacceptable to question Blaine Alan Gibson; they say that he has inspired and given hope to the next-of-kin. As I’ve said before, I feel that if we are going to solve this mystery, we have to put every piece of evidence under intense scrutiny, regardless of however someone may or may not feel emotionally about that scrutiny.
Indeed, I find the fact that Gibson and his associates try to aggressively silence questions about his finds even more arousing of suspicion.
UPDATE 12/11/16: A couple of points I’d like to add to the above:
— In September, Gibson enlisted the aid of Australian aviation journalist Geoffrey Thomas in claiming that two pieces of debris that he’d found likely came from the electronics bay, showed evidence of fire damage, and therefore supported the hypothesis that the plane had come to grief due to an accidental fire. This theory, while favored by some, is very much at odds with other evidence in the case. Australian authorities responded by saying that “contrary to speculation there is no evidence the item was exposed to heat or fire.”
— More on Gibson’s background from SeattleMet:
For the next 25 years, Gibson lived a life that could be described as unconventionally adventurous. After a short stint at Seafirst, he moved to Olympia and worked for three years in the office of Washington state senator Ray Moore. Then he joined the U.S. Department of State. But he didn’t last long there either; in the late ’80s he could see that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse and decided to capitalize on it. For 10 years he lived off and on in the newly capitalist Russia, serving as a consultant to new business owners and fattening a bank account that would later fund his globe-trotting.
When I interviewed him after the “No Step” find, he told me that he speaks fluent Russian.
— Based on the total quantity of debris found in the last year and a half, one observes that the pieces turn up quite infrequently. Yet Gibson has now twice found debris with a camera crew present. In June he found three pieces while accompanied by a crew from the France 2 TV show “Complément d’enquête.” From the same SeattleMet piece:
In the first week of June he did, in fact, go to Madagascar. And on June 6 he led a French television news crew to a thin strip of land off the island’s east coast. They rode quads along the beach, and at the north end he signaled for the party to stop. The camera crew had a good reason to follow him: He is, to this day, still the only person to find a piece of Flight 370 while actually looking for it. And he’d done enough research to have a good idea where he might find more. But come on, it was still a one-in-a-million find. There’s no way he’d actually uncover another.
Right?With the cameras trained on him, Gibson dismounted and started walking. And as he got closer to the object that had caught his eye, he could see that it was gray fiberglass. It was almost a clone of No Step. Later, he found a handful of other pieces, one of which looked exactly like the housing for a seat-back TV monitor. He couldn’t be sure, but he had a pretty good idea they came from Flight 370.
To recap, Blaine and a TV crew rode in ATVs along the beach until he signaled them to stop, got out, and pointed to a piece of MH370 debris. Holy. Shit.
— This is the piece that NOK Jiang Hui found the day before Blaine discovered his on the same beach. Again, pretty clean:
— Note: I’ve take out a paragraph in the original in which I said that the location of the debris in the sand appears to be way too far from the water to have washed up there within the last half hour. Several commenters pointed out that the piece appears to straddle the wet/dry line demarcating the high water mark, and I concede that point.
UPDATE 12/12/16: There’s a story in Der Spiegel today about a tree trunk that washed up in New Zealand. The remarkable size and density of these organisms is so striking that this entirely natural phenomenon struck those who came upon it as something fantastical and alien.
I bring this up to emphasize how extraordinary it is that all the debris recovered by Blaine Alan Gibson, and indeed all of the suspected pieces of MH370 debris save two, have been recovered in a nearly pristine state. Yes, objects which spend some time ashore can become picked clean in time. But many of the pieces of debris recovered so far have been found within hours of being deposited. As I’ve previously written in some detail, such pieces would be expected to be colonized by a variety of marine organisms. If you look at galleries of objects which have washed ashore after having spent a similar amount of time at sea, such as tsunami debris collected in the US Northwest and Hawaii, it collectively looks very, very different from MH370 debris. Don’t take my word for it; there are links to such image galleries at the end of the piece linked above.
@Gysbreght, Thanks for posting that link to your calculated airspeeds table. Could you shed a light on the speed values for 45S2? The wind speed is given as 159.7 knots, versus 12.1 knots for 45S2. This is a very unusual wind speed for 4000 feet! Is wind speed a parameter that can be modified by the user?
If Zaharie was practicing how to fly with no fuel in a typhoon, that puts everything in a very different light!
That was my theory in a previous thread. Get some old plane parts or the actual plane parts from Israel or Diego Garcia, plant them to be found.
I think he is being used by others who do the actual planting to cover up for their guilt in this disappearance. seems like he told an itinerary and suddenly something appears.
Also it seems suspicious that no debris turned up until it was discussed heavily here ….
@whomever
Good grief. How can you draw conclusions about tidal reach from a picture without knowing the slope of the beach and the height of the tides? Has science gone on vacation here?
“What I haven’t talked about in the comments section is something I just noticed: look how far away from the water the piece is! The tidal range on this beach during fair weather is probably a couple of feet at most”
Jeff -if you look at the pic you can see this was the high water mark. Look at the demarcartion of wet, slightly compacted sand on the ocean side, then dry, less compacted sand.
@DennisW- as per your own beach pix.
@jeffw
“What I haven’t talked about in the comments section is something I just noticed: look how far away from the water the piece is! The tidal range on this beach during fair weather is probably a couple of feet at most; presuming that his picture shows, as it appears to, the discovery location of the object, I find it very, very hard to imagine that it was deposited here by a wave.
In fact I would take this photo, and the story that accompanies it, as a pretty hapless attempt at planting debris.”
I am with Dennis. The photo clearly shows the boundary between wet and dry sand, typical of a wave petering out up the beach. Perfectly consistent with a very recent wave having deposited that piece and the other bits near it.
@whomever again
BTW, even a casual observer would notice that the beach area the black person is squatting on is wet (you can clearly see a line of demarcation in the photo). In fact, the piece is at the extremity of the wet area as though water had carried the piece in, and deposited it there,
@JeffWise. If he is a deceiver he uses a double bluff, maybe a double counter bluff or even two. Planting a piece so proximate in time and distance to an earlier find would be the work of one insensitive to the improbabilities. Likewise, lack of marine growth would be amateurish if it had been blindingly obvious there should be some.
I would expect that as a lawyer he would be conscious of expectations of reasonableness.
@MH
I know very well the height of the tide, the tide tables, and slope of the beach where I actually walk on a regular basis. That is one of the many reasons I am still alive.
Yes, the user can specify the wind speed and direction. That’s what TBill did at my request (thanks again).
As I said in my post, the calculation of airspeed and wind is based on the Dynamic Pressure in the recovered file fragments. I think for 45S2 that is just another anomaly, as is the difference between altitude and AGL. The variations of windspeed and winddirection for the other points are also interesting.
More interesting than mr. Gibson, I should think. Have any of his recent finds been linked to MH370 yet?
Re tide heights
https://www.tide-forecast.com/locations/Sambava/tides/latest
Eastern Madagascan shores have around 4m tides
Western not so much at half a meter
Northern inbetween at 1.5m
Where did Jiang and Blaine find the pieces?
@Gysbreght
“More interesting than mr. Gibson, I should think.”
Actually, you are wrong about that. The simulator discussion is no longer interesting to the vast majority of posters.
@MuOne@tyrptych
Sorry, our posts passed each other in cyberspace. Yes, the conclusion is fairly obvious.
@David
“@JeffWise. If he is a deceiver he uses a double bluff, maybe a double counter bluff or even two. Planting a piece so proximate in time and distance to an earlier find would be the work of one insensitive to the improbabilities.”
Funny shit.
It would be interesting if it was determined how the similuator was used. This particular case of flying through a typhoon really shows ZS wasn’t planning the disappearance.
@MuOne, @tr1ptych, @DennisW, Now that you point it out, I concede that point. It is lying at the demarcation of wet and dry sand, which is where it ought to be. I still find it ridiculously improbable that this thing should have washed up at just within that tiny time frame. And the fact that Gibson’s pieces have all been free of biofouling, even when pulled fresh from the ocean, is beyond unlikely.
@MH
[deleted by JW for rudeness] @DennisW, please be civil.
@Gysbreght, If you are correct this is a very important clue indeed. When you say that “for 45S2 that is just another anomaly,” what do you mean? Do you think that the data is corrupt or something?
As for Gibson and his finds, no, nothing has been linked to MH370. They lack identifying marks but could be perhaps be linked by shape, materials, size of hex cell, etc.
@DennisW – [deleted by JW] @MH, I’d appreciate it if you and @DennisW could de-escalate.
Actually, if you look closely, the item is “beyond” the wet limit, and it appears to be “dug in” to the sand a little at the lower left corner. Moreover, there are no scrape marks in the sand near it to the left towards the black guy’s feet. Not to mention that the “dry line – wet line” is basically at 90 degrees to the tiny waves in the background, suggests that the bit of sand they are on is a “spit” or a raised “knowll” of sand, making it even less likely that it was “washed up”. Further, the apparent “height” above the current (at time of photo) water level (ie, below wave height) clearly shows that the level could not possibly have risen and fallen that amount in thirty minutes, no way. I call “placed”.
@ventus45 – excellent observation. More proof of being planted !!
@DennisW. To be clearer, a planter surely would not plant where and when this would cause suspicions, unless devious.
[rude comment deleted] Dennis, I have tolerated more ad hominem attacks by you than I have for anyone else.
@David
Yes, I understood your logic, but I think it doubtful that someone would play the game at that level. Much less an attorney without very high level guidance.
@Jeff
Ok. Message received.
@DennisW. I think we are agreeing that the place and timing do not of themselves indicate a plant. To the contrary, more likely not.
@jeffeise I think if you want really are insistent on discrediting Blaine you should delete the above photo and replace it with one with him holding it dry and free of sand, preferably inside a building, before too many people see it.
As fake stories go there is too much supporting evidence in the photo alone to discredit your theory for all but the most gullible.
Have you learnt nothing from the your Kazakhstan experience?
We get pretty mean surge from passing ships sometimes. Maybe they have those in Africa too. Ships.
With some wind and sea swell action that piece could easily come that far on the sand. The ocean isn’t flat calm all the time. I have seen objects the size of car engines get buried in sand or unearthed if you will in a matter of hours in stormy weather. This would also sand blast bio fouling on the outside of the debris very quickly. I’m no investigator or expert on planting evidence so i’ll leave that part alone however spending 35 years living and working on and next to the ocean and many sandy beaches which i beachcomb often and I do understand the ocean, tides, wave action etc very well.
@Johan
There is no tide in the Baltic. I have sailed there on several occasions.
@Gysbreght @JeffW
160 kts wind is unusual, wonder what that is all about?
@JeffW
My pro-Blaine comments are on the prior comment page. The implication is much debris out there. If you have a problem with Blaine, Mike Chillit seems to be finding reinforcing satellite evidence. We’ll have to let the passage of time define the scorecard.
@All, The Madagascartrip by NOK must have been planned well in advance. They planned the trip for a clear purpose, a finger at the MY government for not giving a shit and picking debris up and create awareness that searching for debris is important to the investigation. We had not heard from BlaineG in months before this NOK trip took place. So, if it were me and I wanted to get the necessary publicity to add more weight to NOK searching the beaches, I would have held debris pieces back and used them at extactly the right time. So actually, I do believe Gibson found the debris (at a different time), but perhaps he re-planted them to give more weight to the NOK mission. If NOK found nothing during their trip that would have diluted their reasoning for being there. And if I got screwed by the MY government, I would not hesitate to screw them right back 🙂
@DennisW, Nice pictures on your blog! And gulls well……they eat anything 🙂
@Lobsterman I agree. It is pretty much impossible to come to firm conclusions (using only this photo as information) about how/when that part arrived in that spot.
With regards to bio-fouling, my son and I have a sailboat presently in Ko Olina Marina, Oahu, Hi. I spent April/May/June out there sailing and fixing things.
About April 20 or so I removed the little dingy we stow on the foredeck and placed it in the water as I was doing some repairs and it was in the way. It was in complete pristine condition when it went in. On May 24 I pulled the dingy onto the dock and cleaned off half of the bottom as seen here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/wm3l70w5v1g7bww/Bio-Foul%201.JPG?dl=0
Much of that was hard barnacles that required a sturdy metal scraper to remove.
That amount of fouling occurred during that time (35 days). Usually we get about the same amount of fouling on the boat bottom during over such a time-period in spite of the anti-fouling paint on the boat. Sometimes there is very little.
That is the amount of bio-fouling to be expected. Not the pristine pieces
@Gysbreght. Sim points, “More interesting than mr. Gibson, I should think.”
Yes, there is meat on this bone still. Aside from work attempting to get the sim data and their interpretation clarified there are the ramifications of confirmation (sensibly) of the route from the turn south to SIO.
What are they?
Motive is not established and neither has there been a substantial case made that this sim ‘flight’ was to gain information for use in MH370 or the like, as distinct from getting a feel for such a flight.
Pending that, of itself the sim route makes no case for a search at its junction with the 7th arc.
The sand does look compact, but due to rain perhabs.
I think a cameralens with short focus distance is used. This distords shapes and distances. It’s a common phenomen. F.i. the sea looks much further away than it actualy is and straight lines (horizon, tide line etc.) show curved. Proportions of objects and persons are out of shape also by this effect.
Pictures like this are therefore not suitable for estimating shapes and distances between objects.
Nonetheless, washed ashore or not the fact he found it within 30 minutes on the same beach where another (similar..) piece was found the day before is the essence of the matter IMO
@buyerninety
Here the report/list I based my ealier post on:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/o44qnbw156afw0i/debris%20list.jpg?dl=0
Another photo of the debris and high tide mark found here:
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/malaysia-airlines-agrees-to-hand-over-sensitive-mh370-documents/news-story/1bf978e333353d0e170211dc9dcc2d41
FWIW, I see a man trying to promote awareness and maintain MH370’s currency in the media. With that might come a degree of minor ‘staging’ or embellishment – to what degree we can’t be sure of, if any at all – but the basic facts surrounding the debris finds remain the same.
So when an article quotes something along the lines of “30 minutes later, MH370 debris washed up” – I would suggest to take it with a grain of salt. It might have actually been 90 minutes. Or 3 hours. It doesn’t really matter.
It might be at odds with the idealist part of the self that would just rather the plain, unadulterated truth, but there is an element of pragmatism to that approach that justifies the means – helping to stall MH370 from receding further within the public consciousness. That would simply be a person adapting their approach to the way media works.
I would think this explanation is an order of magnitude (closer to two) more likely than the something more sinister explanation.
When assuming that any found debris was planted we have to see the context, what such planting could provoke. Imho the only purpose could be to distract from other possible crash areas, others than the one in the SIO. If the debris was planted, that task was fullfilled with the identification of several parts as being not only from a 777 aircraft, but being exactly from 9-MRO.
I see no advantage at all for somebody to continue to plant multiple parts and aid in finding those parts. It even would increase the risk that such planting would be discovered or revealed by people involved in this planting and discovery process.
Bottom line, I miss the motive for further planted debris.
The role of Blaine might be the one of the lucky guy, or of the meticulous investigator. He might be just angry about the inactivity of the investigating body and used some knowledge of debris parts to bring this up in the media again.
Ge Rijn
I didn’t notice any detail in that list about December 2016 finds.
Words “On the same spot” do not seem to be attributable to NOK
Jiang Hui. Chinese language reporting of Blaine Gibson find as
“December 8, following the Jiang Hui found in the daily search of suspected debris, Brian Gibson also found clues in the same area.”
https://translate.google.com.au/translate?sl=zh-CN&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fmp.weixin.qq.com%2Fs%3F__biz%3DMzI0ODUxMDY1Mw%3D%3D%26mid%3D2247484182%26idx%3D1%26sn%3Dec6205c7529e6b8786d226643fde4b83%26chksm%3De99ee2c4dee96bd2&edit-text=
Twitter wording was “same beach”.
https://twitter.com/cryfortruth/status/807036503956262915
Probably whoever said ‘same spot’ meant it as an ‘off the cuff’
remark, not (meant) to be said as an exact locational reference.
@Ventus45
If you look at the picture enlarged, you can see (that some)water
drained down towards the camera (& possibly pushing the debris
slightly into the sand, although I don’t really see it as much
‘pushed in’ as you see it.)
Riake (Resort) beach, Madagascar has plenty of small creeks draining
through it – the beach conditions therefore are (in places) not in
conflict with a view where the sea is in the background whilst also
having a lower elevation at (the cameras) rear, or having waves
breaking at an apparently large angle compared with the surf
in the background.
Here’s an example (not the exact position), track up & down the beach
to see beach topography, zoom out to see Resort;
https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-16.856683,49.9558176,352m/data=!3m1!1e3
@all,
There is no time scale associated with these current debris finds by Blaine Gibson & NoK; i.e. the objects now being recovered have more than likely been in the the tidal areas in and around nearby localities for many months. Being sandblasted in the coastal surf, then ground by sand once beached within the tidal range is not a likeable experience, and any deepwater acquired fouling would rapidly disappear.
In all probability these items originaly beached some time ago. Determining their drift origin becomes problematic, and their relevance to the search is minimal – other than they may be from 9M-MRO.
To claim that they have been “planted” is IMO a step too far, and claims based on photographic evidence presented could never be proven in any jurisdiction.
Some interesting work of Mike Chillit again on the MH370 debris.
http://www.seventharc.net/2016/12/09/using-satellites-to-locate-mh370/
https://www.seventharc.net
Jeff Wise,
During the last several months you have been exhibiting very rude, offensive and unreasonable behavior towards a number of valuable contributors, who have opted to leave your blog as a result. Please stop your personal attacks against those, who stay and still share valuable thoughts worth of reading.
You must be shamed of publishing something like your last article. You are well aware that Gibson and NoK have received recommendations where to search. You are aware that they planned to go for the search for very long time. You must be shamed that instead of teaming up with Gibson against bureaucracy and unwillingness of the relevant authorities to admit the obvious, you are going against the logic to defend your own collapsing theory. In fact, I found this very suspicious. Is it because your publishers are pushing you to the very edge to publish a new book?
I have decided to be break my silence because this time you’ve crossed the line and insulted too many people.
@DennisW:
What do you call it? Backwash? waves after passing ships.
@Johan
I am not sure if there is a preferred vernacular. Wake wash is the term I hear most often.
@Keffertje:
Yes I believe we will have to experience and suspect much more of that kind. And people will after all have to pick the pieces up and bring them with them anyway. Without having brought their cameras. They can’t sit on a beach for three weeks waiting for a French laboratory to show up because they found the fuel cap of a camper.
@buyerninety
I see your point
@DennisW:
Yes some vernacular is harder to look up. Wake wash it probably is. The reason why your sailboat goes up and down when passed by huge tourist ferries or a cargo ship.
We have rules to limit wake wash in many areas (i.e. rules against speed and distance to land/skerries) but sometimes you are in for a wet surprise. In sounds and straits the effects will perhaps be somewhat reinforced.