From New Dawn 203 (Mar-Apr 2024)

Aviation history’s greatest enigma unfolded on 8 March 2014. The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 with 239 passengers and crew members on board sparked the world’s largest, most intense and expensive air-sea rescue operation. It involved more than ten thousand personnel from twenty nations operating sixty surface ships and underwater vessels, plus fifty aircraft, across 46,000 square miles of ocean, at a cost of $56 million. After a three-year search, they found no trace of the vanished airplane. A US marine robotics company, Ocean Infinity, conducted a second search in 2018 without success. 

Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER taking off from Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport, in France, less than three years before the aircraft vanished over the Indian Ocean, in 2014.

Three years later, a native beachcomber stumbled upon a piece of allegedly associated debris washed ashore at Réunion, a tropical island off the east coast of Africa, five hundred miles from Madagascar. The flaperon – a type of trailing edge control surface combining the functions of both flaps and ailerons on an aircraft wing – has just one of three digits matching Flight 370’s serial number. Malaysia Airlines officials nonetheless announced without hesitation that the Réunion fragment proved their jetliner had gone down into the sea, based on a single piece of questionable evidence. Even if it did, in fact, originally belong to MH370, it was one of over three million parts with which the missing Boeing 777-200ER had been constructed. 

Why were no more ever found? A majority of them are buoyant. The heavy engines are mostly the only elements prone to sink. Aircraft do not plunge into the water like falling stones because they are essentially hollow tubes – not uniformly solid objects, but pieced together with numerous component parts, which typically break off into trails of scattered debris when coming into contact with the surface. An airplane like the Malaysian specimen would have disintegrated in a broad swath of flotsam after impacting the water, even at its landing speed of 161 miles per hour.

(Left) First Officer Fariq Hamid; (Right) Captain Zaharie Ahmed Shah.

When Trans World Airlines Flight 800 exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near East Moriches, New York, on 17 July 1996, investigators recovered enough wreckage to almost rebuild the downed Boeing 747-100. If Flight 370 had flown into the Indian Ocean, an airplane of that equivalent size and a significant number of parts would have similarly left a profuse field of wreckage recognised by the more than ten thousand professional observers almost immediately after their search-and-rescue efforts began. 

Earlier still, such an impact would have been detected the moment it occurred by at least several of the hundreds of military and corporate satellites daily and constantly monitoring every square yard of our planet, with high-definition imagery down to sharp resolution of an automobile license plate from altitudes up to 1,200 miles high. This Space Age technology is not new. It was in place years before the Malaysia airliner vanished and should have unquestionably detected and video-documented its collision with the water, had such occurred. 

Earth’s lakes and seas are likewise under round-the-clock hydrophone surveillance, as demonstrated by US Navy acoustic sensors, which detected the much smaller Titan imploding in the North Atlantic last 18 June, when the eleven-and-a-half-ton submersible began its fatal descent. The same sensors would not have missed the far greater sound made by a 383-ton Boeing 777 striking the Indian Ocean. At least four major electronic listening posts, operating twenty-four hours per day, have, in fact, all the seas of the world acoustically wired for any significant disturbance. 

In brief, if a three-year search conducted by twenty nations could not find the airliner, which also escaped the notice of Earth-scanning space satellites together with a worldwide hydrophone network, it could not have crashed anywhere on land or water. But the mystery of Flight 370 preceded its disappearance. Examination of its passenger list calls into question official narratives categorising the event as not yet entirely explicable but otherwise surely accidental. 

After MH370’s final sighting on military radar 370 kilometres west of Penang Island, the jetliner proceeded westward another 397 kilometres to India’s Nicobar Islands, where it disappeared in a flash.

Passenger Anomalies

Zhao Qiwei was a thirty-seven-year-old Chinese man returning to his home in Beijing, Flight 370’s scheduled destination. Malaysian police investigators later learned that his passport was fake, a professionally made copy of the original belonging to the real Zhao Qiwei, a resident of distant Fiji who had never travelled abroad. 

(Left) Pouri Nour Mohammad, one of five passengers – four of them, like himself, Iranian – who boarded Flight 370 with forged or stolen passports for reasons known only to themselves. (Right) Nor Fadzillah Mat Rahim and his wife, Azrai Izet Mohammad, both

Other identity improprieties involved passengers from the Middle East. The stolen passports of an Italian (Luigi Maraldi, 37 years old) and an Austrian (Christian Kozel, 30) were used by a pair of Iranians to board the airliner. They were joined by two more Iranians using stolen travel documents – 18-year-old Pouri Nour Mohammad, and Delavar Seyed Mohammadreza, 29. While irregularities such as these are undoubtedly more common in Southeast Asia than in the United States, five passport criminals – four of them from Iran – together on the same flight, seems excessive by any comparisons. 

Stranger still, twenty other passengers worked for the same firm, Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. Their presence aboard a single airliner was in violation of standard corporate practices, which ordain that no more than three employed scientists of a developmental company may share the same aircraft, as a precaution against their accidental deaths, which would seriously damage heavily invested research projects. 

Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. was a Texas-based technology giant on the cutting-edge of applied electrical engineering, such as “chips that can be embedded as identity tags into cash, passports or even human bodies,” according to Sheppard Ambellas, founder and editor-in-chief of Intellihub News. “The chip can replace barcode tags in retail goods and can be inserted into the human body, animals, bullets, credit cards, and other items for verification purposes. The made-in-Malaysia microchip measuring 0.5 mm X 0.5 mm – the size of a decimal point – uses the radio frequency identification (RFID) chip technology.”1 

Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. had its corporate headquarters in West Austin, Texas, and was absorbed into NXP Semiconductors in 2015. The identities of its twenty employees who disappeared with Flight 370 were kept secret from the public. Why?

Other important uses include the detection and extraction of new oil deposits. These technological advances are made possible by semiconductors, composed of a solid substance with conductivity between an insulator and that of most metals. Devices made of semiconductors, notably silicon, are essential components in most electronic circuits. And Freescale Semiconductors, Inc. was the leader in this field. 

Its twenty doomed and inexplicably herded together computer scientists were joined by yet another fourteen electrical engineers and professionals in related research. Liang Xuyang was an engineer working for Huawei Technologies Company, Ltd., another multinational corporation, this one Chinese, that designs, develops, manufactures and sells telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics, and smart devices. Tian Junwei was another Huawei electrical engineer. Others aboard were Vinod Kolekar, a retired electrical engineer at one of India’s biggest conglomerates, Mahindra and Mahindra; Chang Mei, worked for Eastman Chemical Company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Selamat Mohdkhairulamri, a Malaysian aviation engineer; Li Yanlin, from China’s telecommunications company, ZTE; Nor Fadzillah Mat Rahim, a Queen’s University graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and his wife, Azrai Izet Mohammad, another electrical engineer. 

Flight 370’s sole surviving evidence from the airplane’s more than three million parts.

Four more of their fellow passengers held important positions in software and telecommunication corporations. Forty-four-year-old Gan Tao belonged to the Halliburton Company of the infamous Dick Cheney. An American multinational firm, Halliburton is the world’s second-largest oil concern and responsible for most of the biggest fracking operations anywhere. What was a man like that doing on a regular commercial airliner to China? No less perplexing was Zhang Jianwu, an official from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, a state-run propaganda organ of the Communist Party. How did he and his singular, though professionally related fellow passengers come to share the same flight to oblivion? These leads, as peculiar as they were, went nowhere toward on understanding of what actually happened. Until recently. 

Whistleblower Video Evidence

Sometime immediately after the incident, three brief visual documents purporting to show the final moments of Flight 370 began making the rounds of physicists and computer experts. Most dismissed the videos as a skilfully contrived, photoshopped hoax, while a minority of viewers were unsure. The one-minute clips were alleged to have been covertly released by an anonymous US government whistleblower just days following the airliner’s disappearance. 

Years later, another US federal employee with top-secret clearance as a scientist under contract subjected the images – still unknown outside professional circles – to intense, rigorous scrutiny with the aid of software specialists utilising state-of-the-art research programming. They not only verified beyond a shadow of a doubt that the controversial clips were unquestionably authentic but learned from the imagery what became of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. “The whole narrative around the south Indian Ocean is built on a lie,” declared the new whistleblower.2 

Ashton Forbes went public with his revelation, posted the videos on Twitter, and applied in writing to the US Congress for a hearing. “I am willing to testify in front of congress,” he wrote, “as to the authenticity of these videos and explain every aspect of them. I would also invite physics experts to validate the science on display. The videos in question are that of the true fate of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370… The dates are damning. Satellite Video Received March 12, 2014, uploaded May 19, 2014. 

“So why now, many ask? Because only in 2023 do we have the basis to understand these videos to be real… Without all these things, the MH370 videos seem like magic. We know the location of the videos because the investigative group I started, MH370x, satellite experts used amateur historical trajectories to identify the correct satellite in the correct position to take the 3D stereoscopic video we see. 

“We can see six sets of coordinates in the satellite video which we had incorrectly thought were in the South Indian Ocean until we were able to realise the only possible location was the Nicobar Islands [located in the Indian Ocean about 800 miles east of Sri Lanka], because the plane is turning left in both videos, and due to the coordinate shifts. This means the plane is turning south and to the east. 

“The satellite and witness (Katherine Tee [she and eight other eye-witnesses – fishermen – saw the aircraft glowing orange and trailing smoke as it descended]) indicate the time is 18:40 UTC [Coordinated Universal Time, the primary standard by which the world regulates clocks; 18:40 UTC equates to 2:40 a.m., local Malaysian time], March 7th, 2014… We have definitively proved every aspect of the videos to be authentic. We know the assets, the time, the location, we have a witness… 

“There was no debris field, which is impossible for a 777 crashing into the ocean. The small amounts of debris found are consistent with the fire scenario, and some debris had burn marks. A fire suppression device from a Boeing-777 washed up in the Maldives and was not investigated, despite having visible serial numbers.

“We know that the ‘official’ narratives are a lie to cover up that this technology was deployed to either save the plane or as espionage to prevent the twenty Freescale Semiconductor scientists onboard from going to China. I suspect they are integral to the technology we see. 

“We know the plane didn’t crash into the ocean because the SOSUS system [the SOund SUrveillance System provides deep-water, long-range detection capability] didn’t hear the acoustic sound. The same system that heard the Titan sub pop, and the Navy lied about it for five days, while oxygen counters were on every major news channel. The Diego Garcia hydrophones [in the Maldives Islands, south of India] and Western Australia hydrophones also didn’t hear it [Flight 370’s alleged plunge into the sea]. 

US Navy Lieutenant Commander Edward C. Lin, suspected of “leaking” satellite videos, which document the last moments of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

“I was also able to identify the leaker of the videos as being Lieutenant Commander, Edward C. Lin. He checks every box to be the leaker. Our Government attempted to put him in prison for life as a traitor, but he is no spy. Edward C. Lin is a hero. He took a plea deal after he was convinced he damaged national security, but he never revealed this information to our enemies. He simply wanted to do the right thing and tell the world the truth of this technology and what happened to MH370. He was sentenced to nine years in prison and likely is bound by his plea deal to never speak about the videos again. We can vindicate this man as well as everyone else who was lied to or discredited… 

“I know the videos seem impossible, but they are authentic. They are not CGI [‘Computer-Generated Imagery’, a specific-technology or application of computer graphics for creating or improving images in videos]… hundreds of community VFX experts [an abbreviation for ‘visual effects’] have analysed the footage frame by frame and not a single discrepancy can be found. The list of requirements to ‘hoax’ the videos is practically impossible… 

“The reason I am requesting a public congressional hearing is because I believe the weight of the evidence can convince enough people in congress that the true events of MH370 were covered up by our own government…” 

Lieutenant Commander Lin allegedly leaked the initial military satellite video four days after it was made, followed on 5 June by a second version that was almost identical because it had originally operated at the same moment in tandem with the first, as a backup, from a slightly different perspective. One of the satellites, Forbes writes in his letter to Congress, is “a MQ-1C Gray Eagle with a thermal layer added by the leaker, and the other is a 3D ‘battlespace’ produced by the SBIRS (Space Based Infrared System), via SIGINT (Signals Intelligence), using data from Spy Satellite USA-229, which has a sister satellite next to it classified as debris. This allows for the proven 3D stereoscopic imagery we see in the satellite video.”3

In other words, there are multiple, simultaneous views of the same subject from different angles. “We have three sources of corroboration for these videos,” Forbes explains. “I would argue that we have more evidence that these videos are real than any other court case in human history.”4