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.
In the picture with the white jeep, at the steering wheel — isn’t that Bette Midler? 🙂
@buyerninety
I think in this case ‘same spot, same area, same beach’ can be taken as equivalents regarding the enormous width of coast lines where debris was found from Tanzania to South Africa.
Geographically spoken on that enormous scale those two pieces were found on the ‘same spot’ IMO.
@Jeff Wise
The facebook comment mentions also two journalists who were with Blain Gibson on this walk.
It would be interesting to hear/read their story of the event.
Were they with him all the time during that walk? What is their story?
Being journalists they must have reported the event.
Is it possible to contact them or find their story another way?
@Oleksandr
Greetings. Your theory – I only found one mention (in a Wiki page)
of an aircraft where the front tyre exploded in flight. Some
transport carrier, no details were given unfortunately, not
even a reference URL.
I’m with @ventus45. I live at the beach, and walk on it almost every day. It doesn’t look right. Trash does tend to deposit at the wet/dry boundary, but generally within the wet area. This piece is way too far onto the dry.
As a secondary matter, anyone with even a passing understanding of statistics knows something is rotten in the state of Denmark here. Gibson finding all these pieces is like shooting 18 in a round of golf. Technically, possible. But not really.
@Oleksandr, I would like to think everyone can defend his/her own theories, no matter how absurd you may think it is. If my memory serves me right, you were/are working on a mechanical failure theory, even though many believe it’s not viable. Coming back just to spit venom at Jeff, makes no sense to me at all. Sometimes I really wonder if this is a blog for pre-schoolers who have not yet learned to reign in their emotions or have respect for what others are saying even if you do not agree.
@Oleksandr
Nice that you could pop in to see us all. Your original and insightful contributions, together with your acid wit, are sorely missed.
There is a certain character of people who eventually will join the recurring efforts to go up the Ararat to find the Arc. May God give them fortune the next time… It is right there, Ararat, overlooking Jerevan. I wonder where he got his funding for that.
So he’s clearly experienced in searching for things that no one wants to find really. Or that at least will take a little while to find. (It all reminds me of a joke about a Dane, a Swede and a Norwegian who were going to be executed during the Reign of Terror, but I won’t tell that one here.)
I think it is right to put a magnifying glass at a guy like that. Somewhere there ought to be someone else who could be relied on to do it in his stead. Although I realise it might not be like that in reality. Who will have tentacles all around Africa in distant places? The church. Is it necessarily a bad thing? No, but he’ll probably be reporting to several principals.
Jeff,
I am a fellow classmate of Blaine Gibson and was recently informed about a derogatory article you recently wrote about him. I wondered who the heck is this “Jeff Wise”? I spent most of the morning reading various articles about you, some positive and some negative. My conclusion:
Blaine is and has always been a do’er. He has built a career based on helping others and developed the experience and persistence to “get things done”…
You, on the other hand, appear to be one of those “wanna-a-be intellectuals”, writing silly articles for grocery store magazine racks from your tiny New York apartment. Your livelihood DEPENDS on writing little derogatory blogs about Blaine and others! People like you are a “dime a dozen”… your only followers are other negative “armchair referees”!
YOU are the ideal example of why people think the media is worthlesss! Criticizing others is a waste of time. Get out in the world and DO your own work. Write about YOUR work… Stop making a living off riding off other’s coattails.
@Kathleen, Thanks for your note. Your criticism of me as a wannabe intellectual doesn’t really speak to the issue at hand, however. Can you tell us more about Blaine, where you two went to school together, and so forth?
@Kathleen
If you had instead, “spent most of the morning” reading this blog, you would realize it is not about Jeff Wise and a very inappropriate place for your personal attack, especially one of that magnitude. If you did in fact research him you would have found an email address which would have kept your pandering in the context it deserves, which is most definitely not here.
@Hudson
“As a secondary matter, anyone with even a passing understanding of statistics knows something is rotten in the state of Denmark here. Gibson finding all these pieces is like shooting 18 in a round of golf. Technically, possible. But not really.”
So being the statistically challenged person that I am, I wrote a quick and dirty Monte Carlo simulation of an Easter egg hunt with 20 children and 10,000 egg finding opportunities in which each child had an equal probability (1 in 20) of finding an egg at each egg finding opportunity.
After running the script a number of times, it appeared that children tended to accumulate the same number of eggs (~500) with some, to be expected, variation.
When I ran the script with only one child looking for eggs at each egg finding opportunity, that child was the only one who found any eggs. The rest of the children found no eggs.
@Kathleen:
I agree completely with Jeff’s and Susie’s responses. If you were honest you would address Jeff privately with something like that. Your admiration for a “Do-er” is out of place here and only reveals that it is not the results that you honor, but your schoolmate. That doesn’t really qualify you for ridiculing anyone who has put so much effort into this as Jeff has. The record of this blog speaks for itself, if you took the trouble to study it.
@buyerninety:
“…(according to UK tabloid ‘The
Daily Telegraph’) Chinese NOK provided to The Daily Telegraph, who then
translated that into English and then printed it, with that phrase)…”
Thanks for that. This is interesting information as the Telegraph has long been mooted to be an organ of the state propaganda machine(MI5 Political Division).
I find it curious that despite the surprise surrounding the pilots last words ‘Alright, Goodnight’, no one has given a credible explanation of why the change was made.
The NOK were given the transcript of the pilots communications by Iskandar Sarudin, the Malaysian Ambassador to China, on 12 March 2014, in Beijing. There was puzzlement in press when the change to the pilots words were announced in KL on 1st April, but no attempt from them to find out why. This is a typical press comment from UK state TV…
“The BBC’s transport correspondent Richard Westcott says the new version of the last words is more formal and more in keeping with the way a pilot might usually speak to air traffic control than the wording previously reported.
It is not clear why it has changed or why it has taken the authorities this long to determine this, he says.”
I don’t think the excuse of a mistranslation holds water, as the following google translation shows the Chinese version of the phrases is completely different…
All right good night = 好吧晚安
Good night Malaysian 370 = 晚安馬來西亞人370
Finally we have the phrase, “MH370 remaining in flight altitude 350”, repeated twice and admitted to be superfluous. Could this be an indication the pilots were under duress and wanted to warn ATC long before IGARI?
They changed it back to what was said when they thought it to be Shah.
Before that they believed it was someone else. And it is. It is not Shah. It is a mixture of Shah and another voice. Shah is not involved.
I’m not sure if there was a pickup of it being said twice. One before “Shah”.
Anyway they should know that Shah doesn’t rush. There is no need. He would be sitting calmly on an hours of long flight. It doesn’t fit his personality and the situation he was in. Shah was not there.
@Boris:
And then there’s the relation between the FL that Z allegedly requested prior to take-off and these supefluos repetitions. Sounds like there’s a connection. Could it be that he wanted them to change their mind? Was there really any other planes around that motivated that ATC kept him at 350 (or whichever it was; perhaps that was earlier?). (I recall it as if he rquested 350 instead of 300 but I might have confused things.)
@JW: When I last posted, you suggested I use a permanent email address so you would not have to approve each of my posts individually; this I do from now. Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for letting me post/participate. (I am reachable under this email.)
@Kathleen: I find JW’s surprise at BG’s luck understandable in principle. Can you give us more specific details on your acquaintance with BG? Please try to see things from ‘neutral’ eyes – it seems quite curious that a private individual should spend considerable amounts of time (apparently, months) and money travelling the world and living in Africa. Being essentially the only person in the world claiming to find debris, and finding this in such a timely manner, is again very curious and, in fairness, can be seen as suspicious to an outsider. No offence intended. Thus, you would be most helpful to give more details on how you know BG.
@DennisW Whilst your argument is right in principle (if BG is the only guy actually going there, he will be the only one finding anything) and whilst I have sympathy for the view that it’s laudable that BG actually goes there and looks for stuff instead of trying to solve this mystery from a computer, your statistical analysis suffers the defect of not calculating how probable it is to find a piece of debris on a shoreline of thousands of kilometers.
Let’s do this: Let’s assume 10000 pieces of debris. Let’s assume the relevant coastline of West Africa to be 4000 – 5000 kilometers. (I haven’t looked at a map, this is pure conjecture. We can do that at a later time). So assuming all debris is at shore now, you get 2 pieces per kilometer. Assuming Mr BG walks 10 km of shoreline each time he goes searching, on average he might find 20 pieces per ‘walk’. If you change the parameters f.ex. such that we only assume 1000 pieces, he would still find 2 pieces per ‘walk’. I have a hunch that the relevant shoreline might be less than 5000 km, so that would raise his chances.
So under the assumptions of this back-of-the-envelope calculation, BG’s finds work out.
buyerninety,
I beg you for some patience. There is a number of new aspects and discoveries, but I will post a technical note only when I have the whole picture. I am reluctant to discuss fragments at this point for the reason you may guess.
Interesting the aaah’s are stated before the 3 digit number of 370 but not before 350. Would that be a normal cadence break after Malaysia….before flight number…saying aaa…370? It is a startling contrast with no aaah’s appearing when saying the flight level…350. For me it seemed to appear a pause to remember the flight number, Would that be a fairly relevant pause, is it at times difficult to remember after multiple flights?
The recording playback sound as a bunch of select audios were blended together of various Shah and perhaps other people speaking.
@MH
It definitely is. Like a busy office from a movie.
Why were the 2 Ukrainian passengers along with the 2 Iranians on the list of 4 suspects in the immediate aftermath of the disappearance MH370?
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-cctv-footage-clue-to-mystery-pair-who-boarded-missing-airliner-with-stolen-passports-30077662.html
Previously, I suggested that perhaps the Ukrainians had booked multiple tickets with overlapping or inconsistent itinaries, and this may have been flagged by the ticket booking system.
I also suggested that perhaps the Ukrainians didn’t enter Malaysia with their Ukrainian passports, and didn’t have entry visas.
Another possibility is that perhaps the biometric information for the entry and exit visas didn’t match or don’t exist.
Did the 2 Iranians enter Malaysia using Iranian or Stolen European passports?
In the following article, the Malaysian police say that in the case of the 2 Iranians, they both arrived in Malaysia and presented the stolen passports for entry into the country, and their biometric information was recorded, and it had matched the biometric information of the exit visas issued to the 2 men.
http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/missing-malaysia-airlines-plane-19-year-old-iranian-heading-to-germany-to-meet-mother
However, they had both left Iran legitimately using their original Iranian passports.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/10/travel/malaysia-airlines-stolen-passports/
Q: so which passport did they use to enter Malaysia? the Iranian or European? If they used the Iranian passports, then who entered Malaysia using the stolen European passports?
The Malaysian visa database system was frequently subjected to ‘suspicious’ shutdowns, was vulnerable to hacking, or subotage.
The local criminals were working with an international syndicate.
http://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2016/06/02/msian-identified-as-mastermind-behind-myimms-sabotage/
http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/malaysia-sacks-15-officers-over-sabotage-of-immigration-system
Why were the Ukrainians initially suspected?
@All
An interesting read.
http://www98.griffith.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/handle/10072/55736/88214_1.pdf
Perhaps we should capture a few local crabs and birds and fit them with wifi enabled cameras with gps and set up a monitoring station at the resort.
@All
Following Mike Ch. on St Brandon Island.
Seems like a large anomaly at:
S -16.523 E 59.718 Depth 64m
I don’t profess to know how to interpret Google Earth but did mange to
navigate around some other objects like a big ship hull and some other
interesting bits.
Just in passing
@ JeffW
All the one time shooters are out and about.
Don’t worry, the serious and and more dedicated are still here.
Cheers Tom L
http://www.seventharc.net/2016/12/11/mh370-debris-within-6-months/
Mike Chillit thinks maybe half a MH370 left wing is on an uninhabited island (St Brandon).
@Trond
Interesting observations re: Shah. And also from an earlier blog.
In other words the simulator is a red herring or ‘fog’
@Tom, Thanks. Also to @Johan and @Susie Crowe. Your good vibes make all the difference.
@Havelock Hammond: Welcome!
@TBill
I hope you keep a sceptic view.
He states: ‘About half of MH370’s left wing washed up on St.Brandon Island..’
And on an other picture from orbit he concludes the object seen is ‘plane debris clearly made of composite..’.
These are ridiculous statements IMO.
No way you can conclude this from orbit photos. Let alone positively identifying them without physical examination.
It’s just bogus IMO.
Also his time frames and locations don’t fit any actualy found debris at all.
They are much too short and too far to the north compared with the earliest find; the flaperon on Reunion.
His buoy example takes 4 months the flaperon took 15.
This buoy starts at the 7th arc around 23S and ends around 10S.
The flaperon ended around 22S.
If you project his buoy trajectory with its end point on Reunion the staring point would be around ~32S.
IMO for this the case he puts together is only usefull to further prove the crash area can not be where he tries to prove it was and is only helpfull to further underline this area is more probably around ~32S.
@SusieC, The ATC recordings cannot be trusted because they have been edited. Here is an interesting article http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/missing-jet/missing-jet-recordings/may-have-been-edited-experts-n94941
New to the Post
My worries re MH370
At ‘Igari’ intersection aircraft Military radar has MH370 at altitude level ‘350’ but continues between ‘350 and 250’ all through Malay Thai Border regions. Witnesses and police reports, they have the plane more like ‘100’ up to ‘150’with their reports earlier views on the East coast and West Penang(2)for this region.The loud bang is more engine or sound barrier problem.
Pilots or autopilot activation exercising emergency limits to reach’100’somewhere before or about 1730 UTC Seems factual.
The other is fuel about half burnt by the time it reached Betax. some 6067kgs per hour plus 5600 kgs to 1707 uts about 22587kgs in total. Where it turned my guess higher than after Mekar turn the login on of Left Bus at 1825 UTS even VOCX. So if we pick the best three turns take 26513 kgs fuel and divide n/m’s should do it.
@ Dennis.
Did your model of easter eggs take into account: the probability of an easter egg hunter finding the easter egg playground, the drift of the eggs onto the egg hunting grounds, the likelihood of uninvited children wandering onto the field and removing eggs (whether they want them or not)?
@ Ge Rijn.
You wrote: “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”.
Agreed
@PatM
None of the above, but it is pretty convincing that no eggs were found by the children who were not looking for eggs.
I did not model the possibility of planted eggs either.
@PatM
The discussion has diverted to the ludicrous when it comes to probability. There is absolutely no connection to any statistical basis. Statements like one in a million are bandied about. Comparisons to 18 holes in one in a round of golf are tossed out there carelessly.
It is like the person who has a fear of flying booking a seat on a flight the day after a plane crash thinking that the probability of plane crashes two days in succession is extremely small. Funny shit, actually.
@Dennis
I would suppose we would need to know if the airline they were going to fly was Malaysian or not 🙂
My view is that plane crash probabilities are conditional and not independent events.
@PatM
“My view is that plane crash probabilities are conditional and not independent events.”
Conditioned on what? Enlighten us here so we can put a layer of prevention in place. I don’t expect an answer, BTW.
I noticed our host has removed the reference to his incredulity that a wave could have deposited the debris despite the fact that Gibson’s companion is squatting in wet sand. Disgraceful.
@DennisW re Easter Frolic
“…it is pretty convincing that no eggs were found by the children who were not looking for eggs.”
In the real world, people have found “eggs” when they weren’t looking for them. A little girl looked for something to fan a fire, a man wanted something to dry clothes on and Liam Lotter wanted the most cumbersome holiday momento ever (weird!).
This egg hunt has been going on nearly a year and a half, and 2 pieces found in 30 minutes(!) does make one wonder:
Just who is the Easter Bunny?
@Cofee
Sad really. Do you really believe that debris is being planted? To what purpose? Most of the verified debris finds are unrelated to Gibson.
Jeff’s latest post is a travesty IMO. It is simply a lame and inappropriate attempt to reinforce his theory of the diversion.
As I commented in a recent email to people who have abandoned the JW blog, I am appalled at the state of the commentary here. The science is gone.
@DennisW per “Most of the verified debris finds are unrelated to Gibson”
Where is this shown or proven ?
@MH
I am not responding to any of your posts.
“The science is gone”
The science so far have shown there is more mystery behind the mystery. I call supernatural, divine science above human evolution in the tier science ladder.
To me it is not as important how the (smaller) pieces were found but that they are being found. It remains to see whether they come from the interior or not, if that is possible to discern. I doubt every piece will be accorded the same scrutiny as to its whereabouts in different parts of the IO if they turn up by the hundreds, but those found in unexpected places might of course. But since driftmodelling only appears to be able to give approximate answers (with the many unknowns and random influences) a general directional reference might be the best we can get. Hopefully its helpful.
@Trond:
That will not get DennisW in a better mood.
judging by those plastic duck buoys and their distribution it seems that ocean isn’t that chaotic as many think, e.g. there is a chance that good percent of ducks will end up on the same island even if it’s thousands of miles away
I drop into MH370 land very occasionally now but I find I have to bat for Jeff here.
I think the plane’s in the IO(somewhere), but one guy walking around East Africa picking up bits of MH370 like sea shells is pretty weird actually – to me. Remember he won’t be the only guy out there. There will be other people doing it without fanfare or publicity, and without the strike rate of one BG. We haven’t heard from them because they are still empty handed. Studying the drift modeling is a start but the task is still gigantic. How many lotteries can you win? How many kms of coast???
I don’t think it’s down there(search area) and never did, but why the funny shit at this stage?
In Australia we had many thousands of people opportunistically scouring the place for a long time for no result apart from mountains of rubbish. Then throw in the veritable army of folks who kept an eye out. Gets it in perspective. No Australian debris, all the floaties went to East Africa,half of them recovered by one guy. No one would have believed it.
@MH
“Most of the verified debris finds are unrelated to Gibson”
I think I made that statement not DennisW.
Gibson was not involved in the flaperon find, the outboard flap section and the outboard trailing edge section.
These are the only 3 peices confirmed to belong to 9M-MRO.
He was also not involved in several other important finds.
Out of 5 ‘almost certainly MH370 pieces’ he found 2.
So he was not involved in 6 out of 8 pieces that matter the most.
All other parts are ‘under evaluation’ including all other parts found by Gibson:
http://www.mh370.gov.my/phocadownload/News/Summary%20of%20Debris%20Recovered%20-%2014Oct2016.pdf
@Cofee said; “2 pieces found in 30 minutes(!)”
Curious – which sentence did you get this from? Which pieces?
@DennisW
Jeff did amend the Topic Lead-In by deleting a paragraph – however I
find he has (currently) noted doing this at the bottom of that Lead-In.
(Personally, to prevent like criticism, it might have been prefereable
to merely strikethrough the {now non-applicable} words). Therefore,
depending on timeframes, we should allow the possibility that you
re-read the Lead-In when it was being amended i.e. in a state of flux.
I mean to say with my previous post we should see Gibson’s finds in perspective regarding to their importance.
None of his finds are confirmed 9M-MRO.
Only 2 are labelled ‘almost certain MH370’.
Most of his finds cann’t even be identified as coming from a B777 or an other type of aircraft.
He can find another 14 pieces like this and make headlines with it but they will also be of no use to the investigation if they cann’t be related to MH370.
And with this you cann’t prove also where all those pieces came from, how did they get there and how it’s possible they all were found by one man alone (or where he was present during the finds).
Unless someone can prove Gibson planted debris himself and/or the origin of debris found by him can be tracked back to another aircraft that did not crash in the IO.
The fact that most of the debris found by Gibson can not be identified/related this way (coincidence?) will make this very hard to prove.
@Jeff Wise
Maybe a strange question but Gibson being so familiar with Russia, living and working there for ~10 years and speaking fluent Russian.
Did he visit the MH17 crash site back then?
Jeff Wise: For reading, I don’t like ‘hit pieces’. They are unfair, as the subject isn’t present to respond, as in an interview. They often seem to represent some sort of unspoken personal resentment. him doing it. the questioning title is really an accusation that can be nether confirmed or denied.
Since none of us has the where with all, or the will, to accompany Gibson, None of us can fairly accuse him.
I’ve been reading Gibson, and I’m not certain he has it all right. But planting MH370 debris? Where would be get it? The officials still have to examine it;
@buyerninety
@Cofee misinterpretated but did you read the facebook statement well?
“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.”