“That’s right. And how did this interview end?”
“They said they’d contact me again, and in the meantime they strongly advised me not to make any public statements to the news media, or to anyone. I agreed to this.”
“Did you see them again?”
“Yes. A week later. They had a third man with them who they introduced as Mr. Brown from the National Transportation Safety Board, though I never got his card.”
“What did you guys talk about this time?”
“The same. We went through my statements for another hour—a long time for an event that took less than two minutes. At this time they informed me that they thought the explosion may have been an accident, caused by a mechanical malfunction.”
“What kind of mechanical malfunction?”
“They didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.”
“Why not?”
“I know what I saw.”
“Right. So you’re saying that what you saw—a streak of light and the subsequent explosion of the aircraft—were related.”
“I never actually said that. How could I?”
“I appreciate your sticking to the facts. So maybe the streak of light and the aircraft exploding were a coincidence.”
“Hell of a coincidence.”
“And yet, it could be. So how’d you leave it with these guys?”
“I had questions of my own by now. I asked them about radar sightings, about other eyewitnesses, about military maneuvers out on the ocean that night—”
“What military maneuvers?”
“It was in all the media. There’s a military zone out on the ocean of several thousand square miles called W-105, which was activated that night for war games.”
“Yeah, I remember that. So, did these guys answer any of your questions?”
“No. They said they were not at liberty to discuss anything about the incident while the investigation was in progress.”
“Were they nice about blowing you off?”
“They were polite, but firm.” He added, “The fellow called Nash, however, wasn’t as polite. He was . . .”
“Condescending?” I offered. “Snotty? A prick?”
“Something like that.”
That’s my Ted. Only Ted Nash could try to make an Annapolis graduate and combat veteran fighter pilot feel inadequate. I asked Captain Spruck, “How did they leave it?”
“They again advised me not to make any public statements, and they said they’d be in touch.”
“Were they?”
“No.”
“I’ll bet if you’d made a public statement, they’d have been on your doorstep real soon.”
He replied, “They understood that in my position—an officer in the active reserves—I’d do what the government asked.”
I nodded, then asked him, “So you left it that way? I mean, in your own mind?”
“Well . . . I assumed the investigation would move forward and that if they needed me, they’d call. There were so many other eyewitnesses . . . and then they started to dredge up the aircraft and put it together at Calverton . . . I figured that they were getting closer . . . FBI agents were interviewing everyone around here about suspicious characters, people who’d taken boats out of the marinas that night, background checks of the plane’s passengers . . . I followed all this on the news . . . it was a massive investigation . . . so, I waited.” He added, “I’m still waiting.”
I informed him, “The case is closed. You won’t hear from anyone ever again.”
He replied, “I’ve heard from your wife. And now you.”
“No, you haven’t.”
He nodded, then said to me, “I’ve been tempted over the years to call Nash or Griffith.”
I replied, “Ted Nash is dead.”
This took him by surprise, but he didn’t respond.
I added, “And if I were you, I wouldn’t call Liam Griffith.”
He nodded.
I stood and said, “I’m going outside. You can join me or leave.”
I went out through the screen door and onto the catwalk. I stood at the railing with my back to the door. It’s always a good idea to give a friendly witness a short break and a chance to reflect on what he or she was getting into. It was a chance for me, too, to think about what I was getting into.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The breeze had picked up and the temperature was dropping.
I heard the screen door open behind me and without turning I asked Captain Spruck, “Do you think it was a military war games exercise that went very wrong?”
“No.”
“I thought that was one of the stronger conspiracy cover-up theories at the time.”
He stood beside me and replied, “It is absolutely impossible to cover up an accident of that magnitude. Hundreds of seamen and airmen would have to be involved with a cover-up of an accidental or mis-aimed missile launch.”
I didn’t reply, and he went on, “The average sailor talks too much when he’s sober. When he’s drunk, he’ll tell everyone at the bar his sailing orders, fleet strength and capabilities, and anything else he knows. Where do you think the expression ‘Loose lips sink ships’ comes from?”
“Okay. So, if I said Arab terrorists, how would you feel about that?”
“If I couldn’t even see where the missile came from, how am I going to know the race or religion of the people who fired it?”
“Good point. How about if I said some group that wanted to harm the United States?”
“Then I’d say there was an El Al 747 right behind the TWA 747, and the El Al flight was running late and may have been the intended target.”
“Really? I don’t remember that.”
“It was in all the papers. Another theory.”
“Right. We got lots of theories.”
Captain Spruck asked me, “Do you want to hear about the explosion?”
“I do, but I’m not as interested in the explosion as I am in the streak of light. Let me ask you this—five years have passed since you saw what you saw. You’ve read and heard a lot of stuff in those five years. Right? Has anything caused you to reconsider your original statements? You know, like you think you may have made a mistake, or what you saw could be explained differently, and now you’re kind of married to your original statements, and you don’t want to recant or retract because it would make you look a little less than smart. You understand?”
“I understand. I am not being stubborn or egotistical, Mr. Corey, but I know what I saw. Within sixteen hours, Miss Mayfield was in my living room asking me what I saw. At that point, I had heard not one other eyewitness account of this incident—nothing that could have colored my perception of what I saw.”
“But there were news reports by that time about people seeing a streak of light.”
“Yes, but immediately after the incident, I called on my cell phone to this Coast Guard station and reported everything I’d seen, including the streak of light. At that point, for all I knew, I was the only person on the planet who saw what I saw.”
“Good point.”
“I made this point with the FBI people, who kept asking me about my perceptions being colored by subsequent news coverage. How the hell could my immediate report to the Coast Guard be colored by subsequent reports?” He added, “My call to the Coast Guard station is on file, though I was never allowed to see what the duty officer wrote.”
He probably wrote, “Nut job,” I thought, but then subsequent calls and events caused him to black that out of his log.
Captain Spruck continued, “Plus, I’m only one of two witnesses, to the best of my knowledge, who has actually seen a surface-to-air missile, live and in color, up close and personal.”
This guy was perfect. Too perfect? I asked Captain Spruck, “Who’s the other guy who’s seen a real, live, up-close missile?”
He replied, “A man who was an electronic warfare technician. He’s made public statements that coincide with my private statements.”
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“You know this guy?”
“No. I only read his statements in the news. He was frustrated by the direction the investigation was heading and by the fact that his eyewitness account was dismissed, so he went public.”
“What’s this guy’s name?”
“Your wife can tell you. Or you can look it up.”
“Right.”
Captain Spruck informed me, “I didn’t need this. There was nothing in this for me to say anything about that streak of light. I could have just called the Coast Guard to report what I thought was an air crash and given them the location—which was the first thing I did. But then I described the streak of light, and the duty officer started getting a little strange on me. I gave him my name, address, and phone numbers. He thanked me and hung up. At noon, the next day, your wife showed up at my door.” He editorialized, “She’s very nice, by the way. You’re a lucky man.”
“Oh, I thank God every day.”
“You should.”
“Right. Okay, so you have some issues here about how your eyewitness account was not taken as gospel in the final report. You feel you were not believed, or that the FBI concluded that you were mistaken or confused about what you saw.”
He replied, “They were confused. What I saw, Mr. Corey, to get right down to it, was a surface-to-air missile that apparently destroyed its target—a commercial Boeing 747—and nothing that’s happened since then can shake my account of what I saw or cause me to regret coming forward.”
“You must have some regrets. You just said, ‘I didn’t need this.’”
“I . . . this has been very difficult . . . I did my duty and continue to do it, whenever asked.” He looked at me and asked, “If this case is closed, why are you here?”
“I’m just trying to make the wife happy on my day off.” Of course, by now, I realized that Mr. John Corey himself was not happy with the official version of events, thanks to Ms. Mayfield and Captain Spruck.
Captain Spruck informed me, “The other people I had been sailing with went back to the yacht club for the barbeque—about fifteen of them, joined by spouses and family. About twelve of these people, out on the back lawn of the club or sitting on the veranda, all saw this streak of light simultaneously. This was not a mass hallucination.”
“You know, Captain, I don’t think anyone doubts that the two hundred people who saw that streak of light actually saw it. The question is, What was it? And did it have anything to do with the explosion and crash of the 747?”
“I told you what it was.”
I said to him, “Okay, then, back to the streak of light. The last time we saw it, it had momentarily disappeared. Correct?”
“That’s correct. And that’s consistent with a missile in close proximity to a target if the target is between the observer and the missile. Follow?”
“Yeah. The plane was in front of the missile.”
“Correct. Or the propellant was expended and the missile was now ballistic. But to back up a few seconds, before I saw the missile change course, and before it disappeared, I again noticed the 747.” He continued, “My instincts . . . my training and my experience told me that this missile was on a course that would bring it into contact with the aircraft.” He took a deep breath and said, “To be honest with you, my blood ran cold, and my heart skipped a beat.”
“And you were back over North Vietnam.”
He nodded and said, “But just for a moment . . . then, I refocused on the aircraft and divided my attention between the aircraft and the streak of light. The light disappeared, as I said, then two seconds later, I saw a flash of light coming from the aircraft, around the midsection, somewhere near the wings, then a second later, I saw a very large explosion that separated the aircraft into at least two parts.”
“How would you explain that sequence of events?”
He replied, “Well, if the sequence of events began with a center fuel tank explosion, then the first explosion would have been the missile strike that detonated the fuel vapors in the center fuel tank, and that explosion then ignited one of the full wing tanks—the left one according to the accident investigators—which was the cause of the catastrophic explosion.”
I asked him, “Did you come to those conclusions immediately?”
“No. I was focused for a time on the aircraft itself, as it came apart . . .” He seemed momentarily at a loss for words to describe this, then said, “The . . . nose section separated and dropped almost straight down into the sea. Then, without the weight of the nose section, and with the engines still running on fuel in the fuel lines, the main section of the fuselage actually rose for a few seconds and continued along in an ascent . . . then, it rolled, wing over wing, and began a rapid descent . . .”
I let a few seconds pass, then said, “I guess you’ve seen planes shot down by surface-to-air missiles.”
“I have. Seven of them. But nothing that big.”
“Did it shake you up a bit?”
He nodded, then said, “I hope you never see a plane falling out of the sky, but if you do, it will stay with you forever.”
I nodded.
Captain Spruck glanced out at the sky and said, “From the time I saw the explosion to the time when I heard it was about thirty or forty seconds.” He looked at me and said, “Sound travels at about one mile every five seconds, so I figured I was about seven miles from the explosion—altitude and distance. Nearly everyone who saw the streak of light saw it before they heard the explosion, not the other way around as the official conclusion would have you believe.”
I leaned my butt against the rail, facing away from the ocean. Captain Spruck remained standing, looking out to sea like a ship’s captain, I thought, standing watch, alert, but at the same time hypnotized by the dark sea and sky. He said, as if to himself, “The fuel was burning on the water now and the sky was lit by the fires . . . black and white smoke billowed . . . I thought about setting sail toward the crash, but . . . that’s a long haul for a Sunfish on the ocean . . . and if I got that far, I wouldn’t be able to control the Sunfish around all that burning fuel.” He looked at me and said, “I knew there would be no survivors.”
I stayed quiet awhile, then I asked him, “Could you guess what kind of missile this could have been? I mean, if it was a missile. You know, like heat-seeking? What’s the other kind?”
“Radar-guided or infrared-guided.” He asked me, “Do you want a quick lesson in surface-to-air missiles?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I can tell you what this missile was not. It was not a shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile.”
“How do you know?”
“For one thing, their range is too short to engage a target at thirteen thousand feet. Also, any heat-seeking missile would seek out the biggest heat source—the engine—and all four engines of the 747 were recovered with no significant damage. So that leaves either radar-guided or infrared. We can rule out radar-guided because a radar-guided missile sends out a strong radar signal that would be picked up by other radar—especially all that military radar out there that night—and there were no ground or air radar sightings of an object tracking toward the 747. There was one anomalous blip recorded from a single sweep of an air traffic control radar in Boston, but that was thought to be a glitch. It could, however, have been an actual sighting of an infrared missile whose radar signature would be nearly invisible given its small size and high speed. In other words, what we might be seeing is a third-generation infrared-guided surface-to-air missile, launched from a boat or aircraft—though a boat is more likely.”
I thought about all this, then asked, “Who has this kind of missile, and how do you get one?”
“Only the U.S., Russia, England, and France make such a sophisticated surface-to-air missile. Whereas there are probably hundreds of shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles on the black market, these long-range infrared-guided missiles are strictly accounted for and never given or sold to another country. Russia’s accounting system,
however, is not that good, so it’s possible that one of these infrareds got into the wrong hands for the right money.”
I digested my first course in missiles and asked him, “Did you mention this to any of the FBI people?”
“No. I didn’t know any of this at the time. My experience with surface-to-air missiles was limited to the old Soviet SA-2 and SA-6 types that the North Viets used to shoot at me.” He added, “They were only moderately accurate, which is why I’m here.”
“Right. So, you learned about infrared-guided missiles . . . when?”
“Afterward. They aren’t a secret. Jane’s has plenty of info on them.”
“Who’s Jane?”
“Jane’s. A publishing company that puts out books on the world’s weapons. You know, like Jane’s Fighting Ships, Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, and so forth. There’s a Jane’s book on missiles and rockets.”
“Right. That Jane.” I asked, “What is obviously wrong with that scenario? So wrong that it’s been dismissed?”
“You tell me, Mr. Corey.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you what you, and everyone who’s read about this, already knows. First, there was no explosive residue found on any of the salvaged wreckage. Second, there was no distinctive tearing of metal, seats, or . . . people . . . that would indicate a warhead explosion. Third, and most convincingly, there was not a single piece of a missile found by divers or by dredge ships that swept the ocean floor. If even one piece of a missile had been found, we wouldn’t be standing here now.”
“That’s true.”
“So maybe two hundred people, yourself included, Captain, did see a red streak of light—but there was no evidence of a missile found on the wreckage or in the debris fields. What’s that all about?”
He looked at me awhile, smiled, and said, “Your wife told me you needed to come to your own conclusions—that you were counter-suggestible, cynical, and skeptical of what anyone said, except what you yourself concluded.”
“She’s a sweetheart. So, you want me to come to a conclusion about the total lack of explosive residue and missile parts?”