Deep Dive MH370 #25: Breakthrough Part 2

To watch Deep Dive MH370 on YouTube, click the image above. To listen to the audio version on Apple Music, Spotify, or Amazon Music, click here.

For a concise, easy-to-read overview of the material in this podcast I recommend my 2019 book The Taking of MH370, available on Amazon.

As promised, we’ve got some important new evidence to share with you. In fact it’s a double dose today.

First, we will tell you where the debris from the plane floated from.

Second, we will tell why search officials need to completely rethink their approach to the satellite data.

This episode is running on March 7, 2024. In the U.S., that’s 10 years to the day of when MH370 took off and disappeared. 

We’ve got a lot to get through today, so let’s jump in.

PART I.

Let’s start with the topic that we set you up for last week, with the idea of using Lepas barnacles as a clock for timing the age of things. We learned that researchers in the Maldives had found that Lepas in the tropical Indian Ocean can grow 35 millimeters long in 105 days. 

What we didn’t know was whether they would get that big and stop, meaning that we couldn’t use the flaperon barnacles as a clock, or if they did routinely grown bigger than that, in which case we could use barnacles as a clock.

This is what our first big reveal is about. It turns out that we found a Rosetta Stone – a piece of evidence that puts all of these questions in context. 

In May, 2013, an Australian boater named Stephen Knight sailed his twin-engine, 26-foot long motorboat, “an Xtreme Crowd,” from Perth up the western coast of Australia to the Exmouth peninsula for a fishing vacation. 

Knight was camping on an uninhabited island when a sudden storm ripped the boat from its anchorage, capsized it, and swept it out to sea. Eight months later, Knight received word that the boat had washed ashore on Mayotte, a French island near Madagascar. The boat had been carried westward by the prevailing currents, and pictures forwarded from Mayotte showed that it had picked up a healthy community of gooseneck barnacles of the species Lepas anatifera. The pictures were low-resolution but it was possible to see that they covered the entirety of the submerged portion of the boat.

Only one of the images was high-res enough to show the barnacles in detail. It also showed the starboard-side registration numbers. Stephen Knight reached out to Kevin Horsley, the former general manager of LeisureCat, and he gave us the exact dimensions of the registration numbers. (Massive thank you to Stephen and Kevin).

Using those numbers, I did a homebrew image analysis to figure out the geometry of the boat. With my results I built a model in my living room to see if I could get an image that matched the picture of the registration numbers.

I think it worked out pretty well. 

The long and short of it is that, according to my analysis, the longest barnacles are over 40 millimeters, which is significantly larger than the largest barnacles on the flaperon, and what’s more, there are a number of barnacles even in this very small sample that are longer than the longest barnacle on the flaperon. Which means that Lepas barnacles do continue to grow after they get to 36 millimeters, which means that at this size they can still be used as a clock. Now, we could argue back and forth about growth rates, but the main thing to understand is that the Lepas growing on the flaperon were smaller and hence younger than the Lepas growing on an object that had been in the water eight months, which is half the amount of time that had elapsed between the plane disappearing and the flaperon washing up on La Réunion.

This suggests that there was a “debris gap” of about a year.

Now, if it was only the flaperon barnacles that were pointing in this direction, then that might be seen as weak tea. Understandably. But it isn’t just the flaperon that points to a one-year debris gap. The totality of the debris evidence does not match what we would expect to see if the material all entered the water when the plane crashed into the ocean on March 8, 2024.

Let’s review:

— As we discussed with Jim Carlton in Episode 20, the French authorities who examined the flaperon after it was retrieved from La Réunion were baffled to find that though the piece floated high in the water, it was completely covered in barnacles that only grow underwater. This paradox remains unresolved.

— The Australian officials charged with finding the plane tried to refine their drift models by putting replicas in the ocean and observing how their motion through the water was affected by wind and waves, as we discussed in Episode 19. When they fed this new data into their model they found that the flaperon only reached the vicinity of Réunion in the right time frame if it floated high in the water — which, as we’ve just seen, was impossible.

— In December, 2015, the “Roy piece,” a section of engine cowling, washed up in Mossel Bay in South Africa, hundreds of miles farther south than the models predicted it could have reached in its time afloat. That’s “something that is simply too hard for any present-day model to convincingly explain,” David Griffin, the principal research scientist at the Australian government’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, told Victor Iannello in 2017 and confirmed to me this week.

— Only a handful of the debris items that washed ashore have Lepas growing on them; most were bare, which implied that they had previously been washed ashore. At any rate, none of the pieces that do have Lepas have barnacles as big as those seen on Knight’s boat. A fragment of the cabin interior found on Mauritius was “heavily colonised by the Lepas anatifera barnacle,” according to an official report, but of the nearly 400 specimens recovered, the largest were just 20 millimeters long, implying an age of only “45 to 50 days.” 

Search officials never attempted a visual analysis of the barnacles photographed on the Roy piece (which subsequently washed back out to sea and was later rediscovered after being stripped clean) but my own bootleg image analysis suggests they are smaller than those found on the flaperon. I invite readers with the requisite Photoshopping skills to have a go at the problem themselves.

I think all you’d have to do is to morph the image with barnacles into the image with the measuring tape.

— Finally, it’s puzzling that when biologists examined the “No Step” piece retrieved by Blaine Alan Gibson they discovered that the only marine organisms older than a few months belonged to species that don’t live out in the open ocean but close to shore. We also discussed this in Episode 20.

How do we make sense of this evidence? One approach is to simply ignore it. Certainly the media have, and have officials like David Griffin. When I recently asked him via email if he could explain any of these paradoxes and inconsistencies, Griffin replied that he didn’t perceive any. He was quite certain, for instance, that barnacles could thrive high above the waterline. “At sea, the flaperon flips over readily in moderate sea and wind states,” he wrote.

This is an attitude we see again and again with MH370: the mindset of, “We know what happened to the plane, and if there’s any evidence to the contrary, there must be a reasonable explanation.” I call this reasonableism. As in, all reasonable people believe in a reasonable theory of what happened, and if the data doesn’t fit, there must be reasonable explanation.

I also sometimes say that MH370 has magic fairy dust, meaning that we don’t expect it to follow the normal rules that normal things do. There are teams of researchers around the world who are using Lepas as timers for things like abandoned fishing nets, because they know from past experience that Lepas are a good gauge of how long things have been in the water. But when it comes to MH370 debris, well, there must be a reasonable explanation as to why those expectations don’t apply here. Something must have happened — and not just to one piece, but to every single one.

But if we take the evidence at face value and accept that what the Lepas are telling us here is the same as what they would tell us in any other circumstance, then we reach our big headline-worthy conclusion: that there was a year-long gap between the plane disappearing and the debris entering the ocean.

And that can only mean that the plane didn’t crash into the southern ocean at all.

PART II.

If it didn’t go in the ocean, could it have gone somewhere else?

As we discussed in Episode 13, if the plane didn’t go south, it must have gone north. This is only possible if MH370’s satcom was hacked.  

Todd Humphreys, a professor of aeronautical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, is one of the world’s experts on cybersecurity in avation. He’s been studying the spoofing of GPS signals for more than a decade. And he says that the time has come for search officials to take seriously the possibility that MH370 was hacked. “After a failed search, you have to recalibrate,” he says. “Sometimes you preclude the possibility of even looking for evidence because you have very strong priors against it. I think by this point, we’ve been pushed into a corner where we do need to revisit those priors.”

Simply put, the authorities and the conventional wisdom have proven themselves wrong. The analysis that they conducted lead them to believe that they knew where to find the plane, and they didn’t. And in fact, if you look closer you see that the whole story that they’ve been taking for granted is full of holes.

This is something that a lot of people have a hard time accepting—I get it. Because I understand how the case looks to a lot of people. If you only know a little bit about the case, it sounds pretty simple. And a lot of people in positions of authority have assured the public that the case is simple. 

But it’s a bit like pond water: to the naked eye, it just looks like water. Put it under a microscope, though, and you see that reality is completely different. There’s a whole teeming world, a ridiculous profligacy of complexity, that you never would have imagined.

I think that after 10 years we’ve arrived at a point where we can say that there’s an absolute mass of evidence pointing to Russia as the culprit, and the only way you can make the evidence go away is by closing your eyes and pretending it isn’t there.

I think one of the reasons people are so prone to fall into reasonableism is that it lets them cling to a hypothesis that is so much less scary.

If Zaharie took the plane, then it was just one of those random quirks of human behavior that will happen once in a blue moon, but there’s really nothing you can do about it, and there’s no point in worrying about it. Shut the book and move on.

If the Russians took it, however, the implications are really quite terrifying. What we’re dealing with is not only a crime of absolute brutality, but a crime carried out with such skill and sophistication that we were utterly unable to perceive it as such.

The fear isn’t that someone perpetrated a terrible crime and got away with it; the fear is that we are at war with a ruthless enemy who has completely outwitted us to the extent that they have launched a worldwide war of aggression -– a cold war, but a war nonetheless, one specifically is aimed at destroying free-market liberal democracy -– and have to this day managed to evade full accountability for it because they are smarter than we are.

Or, to put it more charitably, because there is a sizeable and influential group of reasonableists in positions of authority, from opinion page editors to the Department of Justice to the transportation safety agencies, who are completely invested in the idea that everything is normal and fine and anyone who suggests otherwise is a little bit wacky.

But everything is not normal. As should be obvious by now, Russia has spent the last ten years waging a war against democracy around the world, and against democracy in the United States in particular. Just a few days ago a Russian man was arrested for spreading lies about Joe Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine that Republicans in Congress planned to use to being impeachment proceedings against him. 

Writes Aaron Blake in the Washington Post: “In one way, it’s shocking that a key person in the GOP’s efforts to dig up dirt on the Bidens has been indicted and tells prosecutors he has extensive ties to Russian intelligence. In another way, it’s altogether familiar. This isn’t even the first time we’ve learned that a person has been indicted after the GOP cited his claims. Nor is it the first time a person has been linked to Russian intelligence after the GOP leaned on their version of events. The cast of characters Republicans have sought out to substantiate President Biden’s purported corruption over the years has come to include half a dozen convicted and accused criminals, as well as multiple people the U.S. government has linked to Russia, corruption and subverting American democracy.”

So, here is our message on the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of MH370: what happened to the plane was unusual and weird. You might be tempted to tell yourself that there certainly must be simple, reasonable explanation for it. But there is no such explanation. And if your only response is to shrug and say that there must be a reasonable explanation, you just might be putting yourself and everything you care about in serious danger.