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The Hunt for MH370
45 Plays5 years ago
Josh (mostly) and M (vaguely) review Ean Higgin's "The Hunt for MH370," a new(ish) book published by Pan Macmillan (and provided to the podcast for review purposes). Is this a "Case Closed" when it comes to the fate of MH370? Is this the end of the podcast as we know it? Listen in to find out.
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Transcript
Introduction to the MH370 Mystery
00:00:00
Speaker
Back in our fourth episode, we started our discussion of the fate of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 with the following. The final recorded words by anyone on board Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 were simply, Goodnight Malaysian 370.
The Flight Path and Disappearance
00:00:19
Speaker
Moments later, the flight turned off its scheduled route and veered 15 degrees to the right, never to be seen or heard from again. It's now been three months since the flight disappeared, and despite a flurry of activity off the coast of Australia, when it was thought the Black Box recorder had been located at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, we seem no closer now than we were then to knowing what happened to the passengers and crew of Flight MH370.
Review of 'The Hunt for MH370'
00:00:48
Speaker
This week we finally closed the book on the topic by reviewing Ian Higgins' The Hunt for MH370. And with that, it's case closed. This podcast is coming to an end. After all, we did say that once the mystery of MH370 was solved, we would put this podcast to rest.
00:01:06
Speaker
I'd like to thank the following people. I'm the one who's actually read the book, and it's not exactly case closed after all. There are still questions, lingering conspiracies, and people dressed like Indiana Jones to consider. So this isn't there? No, it's just the end of the beginning. What does that even mean? I don't know, but one idea I do have is to play that oldie timey theme.
00:01:32
Speaker
The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Dr. M.R. Extenteth, and featuring Josh Addison as the interlocutor.
Meet the Hosts: Josh Addison & Dr. M.R. Extenteth
00:01:44
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison. Sitting next to me is Dr. N. Dinteth. And we're going back, back, back, back through the mists of time to talk about a thing that we actually have talked about lots and lots and lots and lots of times
MH370 as a Podcast Icon
00:02:00
Speaker
over the years. We're first talked about in our fourth episode.
00:02:02
Speaker
It's kind of the mascot of our podcast. It is a little bit. It's a depressing mascot in which a lot of people supposedly died.
Exploring MH370 Conspiracy Theories
00:02:09
Speaker
I think supposedly because there are people who think the plane didn't crash and there are people who think the plane never existed and presumably there are people out there who think that nothing exists at all and this podcast is just a figment of your imagination and if so...
00:02:24
Speaker
Well done. Well done. We are, of course, talking about MH370. Something you're completely aware of because you listen to the intros in this very podcast. Precisely. And if you didn't...
00:02:35
Speaker
I don't know how you're listening to podcasts. Well, actually, a lot of people do skip the first 30 seconds of a podcast. Yeah, because it's usually boring theme tune and like so maybe you do maybe skip ahead and go I have no idea what they're talking about what you do now. Unless of course, you skip to this particular point at which point we are talking about the fate of Malaysian Airlines flight MH 360 370.
00:03:01
Speaker
Well, that one as well. Now, if you've skipped the first 45 seconds of a podcast... This is going to go on at Infinitum, I can see. Yes, it is. So can I cover the fact that I haven't done any research in this episode? As revenge. As revenge, no, precisely. You're not doing any research last week. Exactly, exactly. Now, if you've just joined
Information Challenges & FOI Requests
00:03:20
Speaker
us...
00:03:20
Speaker
I may have to murder you. We'll see how that goes. If you guys join us, Josh is going to murder me on the podcast as Guide to the Conspiracy. And if you have just joined us, you'll never know why. Precisely. Because that's okay. A while ago, Em, you had a couple of books supplied to you for reviewing purposes. Oh, no. One book supplied to us for reviewing purposes. The others are Amazon,
00:03:46
Speaker
Kindle books which are going to read at some particular point. Here we go. So I got assigned in this book the hunt for MH370. Given to us by the
Analyzing Ian Higgins' Book
00:03:54
Speaker
publisher. So we should probably say something about that. So your publisher, I don't know, it's Pan Macmillan, is that like Pelgrave Macmillan? Are they your publisher as well? Kind of, well I mean basically all publishers are kind of the same these days, they're all owned by the same people.
00:04:07
Speaker
So that was my homework when I'd been very grudgingly reading it through it over the past few weeks. Josh does believe that reading gives people cancer. Just all the cancer. But then when we were looking for things last week, I kind of said to him, hey, I've almost finished this book, meaning I was about a third of the way through the book. But I knew that if I said that, then I would have no choice but to read through the entire book and get it ready for this episode.
00:04:34
Speaker
And you did. And I did. Well done. I mean, as far as you know, I mean, I could have just made this up entirely. It's true. At which point when I tell the publisher we've reviewed the book, and it turns out you've made up entire sections of the book,
Investigative Technology and Methods
00:04:47
Speaker
the question will be whether the publisher goes, no, or whether they go, any presses good press. It's so hard to tell with the publishing industry these days as to which way things will go. Precisely.
00:05:01
Speaker
So, this book, The Huntry Mage 370, subtitled The Mystery That Cover Up The Truth, the blurb on the back says, The Huntry Mage 370 is a riveting page turner written with the drama and intrigue of a thriller, piece by tantalizing P.C. and Higgins unpuzzles this most baffling of miracy mysteries, even better, asking Morrissey's.
00:05:22
Speaker
Even worse. Don't, please don't bring Morris into it. I can't stand the matter. Asking dangerous questions and revealing shocking truths that quote from Dick Smith. I assume of the electronics. I'm not sure. Dick Smith is an Australian author, so I'm assuming it is. It is Big Dick. The actual Dick Smith. To our non-antipity and listeners, there is a person in Australia called Dick Smith, despite the fact that a Dick Smith sounds like some sort of maker of artisanal dildos, perhaps, or
00:05:49
Speaker
I might remind you we also have a liquor outlet called King of Liquor. And there's also King Dix. Yep. Or possibly a surgeon who sort of specialises in like penis enlargement surgery. Like, this is Dr Johnson. We called him the Dixmith. Anyway. Why hello there. I can streamline almost any kind of appendage.
00:06:13
Speaker
This probably doesn't actually matter at all for the purposes of this review, but Dick Smith is a real human being and a fairly notable one. And is willing to lend his name to Blurr on books. Now, I do not.
00:06:24
Speaker
The book is described as being a page turning thriller. Now, you know me, I've read all the Dan Brown, so I know a page turning conspiracy thriller when I don't read it. Is it a page turning thriller? I would have to say no, to be perfectly honest. Riveting page turning thriller is not the words I use to describe it. I'm not saying it's not bad.
00:06:50
Speaker
I'm not saying it tries to be a thriller and fails, I think it's trying to be a completely different kind of thing, so I'm not quite sure what they're thinking about with that blurb. What it is, is basically a fairly detailed history of the hunt for MH370. Going from the initial events of it, of the plane going missing, right through the entire process of exactly who was doing what and how and when and why in attempting to find the airplane. And then as the book goes on, it sort of starts to
00:07:16
Speaker
get a bit more conspiratorial as Mr Higgins goes into his dealings with the ATSB, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, and things do get a little bit cover-up-y, but we'll get into that. So I think it's fair to say
00:07:32
Speaker
There are two ways we can take the narrative of where the story of MH370 has got, which is either people claim there's a cock up in the investigation, which is now being covered up, making it a conspiracy.
00:07:48
Speaker
Or was a conspiracy from the very beginning to hide exactly what happened there. Which side of the coin does Mr Higgins? He definitely seems to go for the the the cock up being covered up by a conspiracy. So I mean, Martin, let's start at the start. So he controversial, but I will allow it.
00:08:09
Speaker
He goes into, in some cases I would say too much detail really, in some cases it seems a little bit like he's just, he's done all the research, damn it, and he's going to put in all these details he's found. It sort of starts off with, you know, on that fateful day, here's what would have happened, the pilot would have come in, he would have done that, he would have done this, the passengers would have started boarding, this person sat in this seat, that person sat in this seat and said, okay, yes, no, I get it, you've read the passenger manifested, I don't see how that's
00:08:36
Speaker
stuff we need to know is just sort of establishing his credentials there. At one point, the one thing that jumped out to me is at one point, he's talking about one of the investigators who apparently liked to wear a fedora. And he says, he used to wear a hat of the kind worn by Harrison Ford when he was portraying the character of Dr. Henry Walton, Indiana Jones. It's like, why did you not just say Indiana Jones?
00:09:02
Speaker
Everybody knows who Indiana Jones is. Why did you give his full name other than the fact that you happened to know the full thing and you wanted to get as much detail in as possible? Also, that's one of those things you kind of feel the author's gone. Let me just go to Wikipedia. Dr. Henry Walton, Indiana Jones. Maybe it's a reference to the famous Australian soap opera, The Waltons. Probably not.
00:09:26
Speaker
So, in some cases it felt like a little bit much detail, but most of the time he does a really good job of presenting quite technical sort of information to a non-technical audience. There's a lot of, you know, the actual methods that they use to, well first of all there's sort of the
00:09:49
Speaker
the technology behind airplanes and the radar tracking of them and checking in on what your traffic control towers do and all that sort of stuff and the routes they fly and so on. And then once it becomes obvious the plane's missing and the search effort is in full swing, there's lots of quite clear stuff really that they were doing as well as the plane has these transponders that give it location in which notoriously notably were turned off.
00:10:14
Speaker
But then there were sort of, you know, these other sort of handshake signals and they think, well, actually, if we, even though this isn't made to track position, if we do sort of measure the ping time in between, that gives us some sort of a idea of how far it was from the station and then looking at sort of, you know, underwater sonography stuff, the things that they use to detect earthquakes under the sea and so on. Could those microphones possibly be studied to see if they picked up the impact of a plane hitting the water and so on and so on and so on?
00:10:41
Speaker
And he goes through all of this, he'll sort of, you know, mention a technology, sometimes he'll say, look, this is just too complicated, you know, it would go for pages and pages of equations to actually explain how the whole thing works. But most of the time it's, here is this technology, here's what it means in layman's terms.
00:10:56
Speaker
Here's this term which is going to come up, a lot of things like the seventh arc comes up a lot, which is sort of an arc around the earth where the radar positioning says they're most likely to be, various acronyms, various terminology and so on, and he'll explain what they mean.
00:11:15
Speaker
And so that makes up sort of, I don't know, at least half the book probably, the actual, the technical details of the hunting and the wheres and the whys. And this is where things start to get a little bit tricky. Before you get there, so you're saying he's quite good at explaining the technical stuff. Is that because of his background? Well, quite possibly. I mean, this man, he is a journalist. He works for the Australian newspaper. Called The Australian. Called The Australian.
00:11:44
Speaker
And he's been covering this thing a lot. He's been dealing with government agencies a lot from the sounds of things and is used to getting the run around with his freedoms of information acts and so on. But he's talked to a lot of people who also know what they're talking about. In particular, there's, let me just check the references in the book itself.
00:12:03
Speaker
which I'll write at the back, not where I thought they were. There we go. MH370 Mystery Solved by Larry Vance. So MH370 Mystery Solved is a bit more of a bombastic title, but that was a book that came out before this one, where Mr. Vance, who's a Canadian, I think, air crash investigator, puts forward the case that yes, no, it had to have been crashed by Ahmed, under Sir Ahmed Zawi, he's the other guy. Ahmed Zahari.
00:12:29
Speaker
the captain of the flight, which appears to be the consensus these days. But it wasn't so much the consensus at the time, which is kind of where all the conspiracy cover-up stuff. Right. Take me through the conspiracies. Right. Well, he...
00:12:44
Speaker
Actually, I should say he goes through sort of interspersed throughout the book at various points. He goes through five of the sort of leading theories about what happened to H370. He doesn't at any point go into the wackier. There was no plane. They never crashed. The people were kidnapped or who knows what. None of that stuff. It's only the more sort of, I guess, respectable theories.
00:13:08
Speaker
Starting with the theory that it was Captain Zahari, it was a murder-suicide, he deliberately hijacked and crashed his own plane to kill everyone on board. He produces some kind of fictional account. He does. He writes it. He does sort of a dramatization. A dramatization thriller part of the review might make it be coming out. Possibly a bit, yeah. So he does, you know, he says, you know, these are fictional accounts of what might have happened if this were the thing that actually were the scenario that were true. He sort of talked about
00:13:37
Speaker
The idea that Captain Sahari did hijack and crash the plane but bailed out beforehand and had arranged to go off with someone else and start a new life elsewhere.
00:13:52
Speaker
We've covered most of this. The idea that there was a catastrophic fire on board, he imagines a scenario where sort of there's a fire in the cockpit, the pilots reach for their gas masks, a cord is accidentally pulled out flooding the cockpit with oxygen, which makes the fire rage out of control and so on and so forth, causing the crash.
00:14:11
Speaker
the idea that it could have been a thwarted terrorist hijacking. I'll ask Flight 93 in 9-11 whether the passengers fought back, so maybe that's the idea. And finally, the idea that some sort of failure caused rapid decompression throughout the plane, causing everybody to lose consciousness in the plane to drift into the sea. And that is the theory that was sort of adopted by the ATSB when they were first conducting the search.
00:14:38
Speaker
Yeah, because a lot of the initial story about what happened to Flight MH370 in the months after the event either focused on the fire on board or the hypoxia hypothesis, because people were looking at what transponder material we had and what reports we had going back to home base and looking at that data going, can we see an engineering problem here?
00:15:06
Speaker
that explains why the flight went away, and there were certain flags that made people wait. Well, maybe that's the sign of a fire. Maybe it's not. And so a lot of theorising went into trying to explain the event with respect to what you might call natural causes there, or an act of God, as opposed to a deliberate attack upon the passengers by the pilot or someone in the cabin at the time.
00:15:35
Speaker
Yes, and in each of those five scenarios he goes through, Higgins afterwards sort of basically says this is stuff that could happen and indeed has happened before. He lists cases of hijacking. He mentions the DB Cooper case when he's talking about the idea of a person hijacking a plane. Another thing we're talking about on this podcast. Yep, and did bailing out afterwards. He talks about planes that have indeed crashed due to catastrophic fires. He obviously talks about Flight 93 when talking about terrorist hijackings.
00:16:01
Speaker
He talks about real flights where there has been rapid decompression and the way it affects the brain and people very, very quickly, including the pilots. Does the plane lose the ability to perform competently and so on and so forth? So these things were all going around. Now, the ATSB, I sort of
00:16:20
Speaker
Higgins doesn't appear to have much sympathy for them at all given given his dealings with them as we'll see but I do have a bit of sympathy for them to begin with because it does seem they were a little bit a little bit sort of hamstrung in what they could and couldn't say in that they were very much
00:16:35
Speaker
All we want to do is find the plane. It's not our job to investigate why it crashed. It's not our job to say if someone might have been responsible for it or if it was an accident or whatever. We don't want to be saying any of that sort of stuff. But the problem is that matters, because if it was deliberate, then that has much different implications about which way the plane may have gone afterwards and how it would have entered the water and so on and so forth. So they didn't want to say,
00:17:02
Speaker
whether or not it could have been a deliberate crash or what. They just wanted to say, we just want to find the plane. While at the same time sort of saying, you know, if perhaps it had been deliberately crashed into the ocean, then this may be, and if it hadn't, then that and so on. So they were.
00:17:19
Speaker
Their hands were tied a little bit in what they couldn't say to begin with, but eventually it reaches the point where they've gone through all these techniques that Mr Higgins does a very good job of explaining how it all works and trying to figure out, you know, the ocean is vast and resources are finite. We have to constrain our search to a particular area of the ocean. What is the most likely area of the ocean for us to find wreckage of this planet? And by the time it had sort of
00:17:49
Speaker
that they were getting to this stage, I don't think anyone believed, well, I don't think anyone conducting the search believed that they were finding anything other than wreckage and bodies. There are some of the family members it goes into who, you know, until bodies are found will refuse to believe that their loved ones are dead and so on and so forth. But it did very much seem to be a search for wreckage at this point. So they're like, okay, where do we search? Give me the analysis, give us the probabilities and so on and so forth. And they have to make the decision.
00:18:16
Speaker
Is it more likely that it was a controlled, i.e. deliberate, ditching into the water, or was it an uncontrolled ditching, which would be more likely to be some sort of a deep dive into the ocean? And the way Higgins
00:18:31
Speaker
portrays it, they go for the theory that it was an uncontrolled dive into the ocean, and one of the main considerations seems to be that that basically gives them a smaller search area. If you were to assume that, did we just lose a light? We've already lost one before, so now it's getting dim in here. It's actually quite good. It adds to the atmosphere, I think, as the mystery thickens. You need to put some kind of
00:18:55
Speaker
low-thrumming bass sound, the notion of increasing urgency as we get closer and closer to the actual conspiracy. We should be doing that in every episode. We should actually, yes. We should try to find the brown notes. That would probably backfire on us much more than our listeners. Well, no, because we would just put it over the phone. We would never hear the brown notes. You would hear the brown note. Maybe you're hearing the brown note right now. Indeed.
00:19:19
Speaker
Anyway, so the point is, if you were to assume that the flight was, it was a controlled ditching, then that gives you much more variables and therefore would require a much larger search area. And in the interests of basically keeping the budget, keeping to their budget, it would seem, at least that's the way it's sort of put across in the book, they make the assumption that no, it was an uncontrolled ditching, and we're going to search this area, which is the most likely area for of the ocean. Four podcast listeners, Josh has just drawn a very small circle.
00:19:49
Speaker
with his hands. Not to scale, I should say, to a video, since the area was actually much larger. That would make it really easy to search. Yeah, it would have been over instantly. And so that's it. So they've made their decision. And at that point, they kind of have to stick with it. And so from fairly early on, people were saying, no,
00:20:08
Speaker
for various reasons were saying no, it couldn't have been the scenario that it was the pilots deliberately flying off courses, the only one that makes sense and therefore you shouldn't be searching there, you should be searching here. And indeed, some people were saying, some of the suggestions they were getting from people were not far outside of the area they were searching, but they were like, no, this is what we've chosen, this is what we're going to do. And as it
00:20:33
Speaker
So this is where things sort of start to become a bit more conspiratorial, because as the search goes on, as the evidence mounts up and it starts to look more and more and more like it was indeed a controlled ditching, a deliberate act by the captain, that kind of starts to look more and more like they're searching in the wrong place. But they've committed a hell of a lot in terms of time and money and resources into it, and I guess there are reputations on the line a little bit.
00:21:00
Speaker
and so it really starts to feel like they start digging in their heels and so this is where sort of the relationship between in particular Mr Higgins and the ATSB starts to become a little bit fraught. Frought in what way? Well I mean he
00:21:15
Speaker
He sort of talks about the process he tends to have. He asks for a bit of information. His strategy was ask for information. If they don't give it, put in a Freedom of Information request. If that comes back, no, we've elected to suppress the information for whatever reason. Then publish. This information was suppressed by and give the name of the specific individual who issued that order.
00:21:37
Speaker
is a way of trying to, at the very least, give some accountability and maybe embarrass or shame or some inconvenience. That seems like a mechanism that could backfire on you really easily. Well, it does. And I mean, there are stories of the ATSB saying, look, we're not going to work with him, talking to his publisher, talking to the Australian saying, we're not going to work with Higgins anymore. Well, we'll give other people information. We're not going to talk to him. Are they allowed to do that? Not really. And his publisher at every point was like, no, get stuffed.
00:22:03
Speaker
you can't do that. You're not actually allowed to deny someone access to information under the kind of freedom of information access request system that Australia has. So yeah, so they do get a little bit pissy at him there. So yeah, he sort of
00:22:19
Speaker
maintains that they end up kind of abusing the freedom of information because there are all sorts of regulations and so on that allow a person to say, no, we've chosen to suppress this information and we're not going to release it after your request. And he sort of says that they will happily release information that supports their theory, but they will then suppress information that would be evidence against their theory.
00:22:44
Speaker
And that does suggest some kind of, at least covering their asses, if not an actual conspiracy. So there are two things where he gets on the FOI train that he talks about a lot in the book. The first one actually isn't related to this at all, really. It's about the Chinese search vessel Dong Haizhu 101. This was, you know, lots of countries were involved in the search, lots of lots of countries offered up resources and ships and so on.
00:23:12
Speaker
This particular ship, people started noticing that for a search ship, it wasn't doing a lot of searching. It sort of went out briefly and then suffered some sort of malfunction and had to come back to port. And they went out again and then something happened with the crew member or something and they had to go back to port and they just kind of stayed there. And people were saying, why is this Chinese search vessel not doing much searching and just spending all its time docked at Fremantle in Australia? And that caused people to say,
00:23:41
Speaker
Do you think maybe it's a spy ship and the Chinese have got it there to gather intel and monitor who's coming and going and snooping on whatever it is they can snoop on and so on? And so they started putting in freedom of information requests essentially saying, can you please tell us what this ship's been doing and why it's been spending so much time in dock? And those were all reviewed, those were all suppressed, and then eventually the ship just kind of slunk off back to China.
00:24:08
Speaker
Does that might be a justified refusal under the FOIA for the sheer fact it's a foreign power? Yeah, yes. I mean, you could understand the justification, but that was certainly quite a conspiratorial little happening. But the main thing he really goes at is this claim of consensus. Is it going to be a climate change denier?
00:24:28
Speaker
They go on about consensus in a different way. There's the ATSB, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, they put together the JACC, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, which was sort of the organisation that was formed specifically to
00:24:46
Speaker
manage the search for MH370. In July of 2016, the JACC released a bulletin that was basically trying to discredit the controlled ditching hypothesis. It was them saying, you know, here's why we don't think that was a good hypothesis and why we're sticking to our guns and going with the idea that it was an uncontrolled ditching.
00:25:05
Speaker
And at one point it includes, this is indeed the consensus of the Search Strategy Working Group. Now the Search Strategy Working Group, or SSWG, was a group of international experts that were sort of acting in an advisory capacity to the ATSB. They were experts from around the world who were just giving their input.
00:25:23
Speaker
Now the next day the bulletin was very quietly amended to remove that sentence saying that that was the consensus of the SSWG and Higgins is on that like a dog with a bone he's he's he's like okay this right finally this is this this is a crack this is a crack in the armor this is them trying to hide the fact that they know that there isn't consensus that their theory the theory they're sticking to is the right theory and he sort of thinks he's finally got it's proof and so there's a fair bit of the book of him his his efforts to
00:25:53
Speaker
Basically, get them to front up to, why did you remove that? On itself, it seems quite trivial. It's one sentence in one bulletin that he's going on and on and on about, why did you remove it? Why did they say, is it really the consensus of the SSWG and so on and so on? This is kind of his inn, I guess. This is him trying to- The crack in the armor that makes him go, hmm, interesting.
00:26:19
Speaker
So sort of the last, I don't know, third of the book or so, it's no longer really about the mechanics of the Hunt from H-317, the technical details. It all becomes about the ATSBs handling off the case and his dealings with them, trying to get information out of them, and trying to establish the case that the ATSB eventually knows they're in the wrong, but isn't going to admit it and is going to stick to their guns.
00:26:44
Speaker
there's just too much money and resource and so on. And it would basically admit, it would mean admitting that they've been searching in the wrong place the whole time and would reflect badly on all involved. And that's in part because he finds there are more and more officials who are beginning to go, well, maybe the controlled ditching theory isn't the bad one after all.
00:27:05
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, as time goes by, people sort of become more and more, the officials sort of become more and more hedgy in their language. And we'll sort of say, we'll sort of start saying, you know, it was always the uncontrolled ditching theory was always a possibility, and this this is another possibility, and so on and so forth. So I, I don't know that their position has officially changed at all, but it does more than just sort of very quietly drifting into that.
00:27:32
Speaker
So they've gone from, no, that's a nonsense hypothesis to, well, you know, it should at least be considered in our calculus. So Higgins talks to a lot of the experts. He talks to Mr Vance in particular. And one big thing was that when they found that flapper on, the bit of wreckage that washed up in... You're a flapper on.
00:27:52
Speaker
watched up off the coast of Mauritius, I think it was, east of Africa. And that one piece is what a lot of people, this Mr Vance in particular, the guy who wrote the book on H370 Mysteries Old, whatever it's called,
00:28:10
Speaker
They're looking at that one piece, they say, right, well, this is proof positive that it had to have been a controlled ditching. Because if it had been a dive, this thing, there would be nothing left of this part. It would have been shattered to pieces. And the fact that there was wearing on it, which was consistent with it being buffeted, dragged through the water as the plane slowly ditches rather than diving straight down and so on and so forth. And he makes
00:28:37
Speaker
it's significant that Mauritius, I assume, is still a French territory or something, but it was the French who got their hands on this piece of wreckage. And the French did sort of have a stake in it because there were a couple of French citizens on the match 370, and that kind of being shut out of the investigation so far. So they had their bit of evidence now, and they could conduct their own damn investigation, didn't care what anyone else said. And so that was sort of, we're a lot more, a lot more international intentions that are coming into the fact that no, it does look like the most likely theory is the controlled ditching. So
00:29:08
Speaker
That's kind of where it ends. So it doesn't really end conclusively, it just ends with the ATSB is doing bad things, they're bad people and don't trust them. It can raise stuff up, yes. At no point does he claim to have, nowhere in H370 is, at no point does he claim to have proved definitively exactly what happened, but he does make a very strong case that the
00:29:31
Speaker
The most likely theory is the theory that Captain Zahari deliberately crashed his plane into the ocean, which means the ATSP got it wrong, and which means they have been sort of covering this up for a long time to preserve their own reputations, I guess.
00:29:47
Speaker
Interesting. It is. Now, tell me about remote controlled planes. Well, this is one last little thing that comes up, interestingly, when we're talking about conspiracy. He doesn't go into the wakey conspiracy theories, but he does mention a couple of people bring up the complaint, bring up the
00:30:02
Speaker
claim that Boeing planes can be controlled remotely, that Boeing has worked this technology into the aeroplanes, so that specifically in case of a terrorist hijacking, someone remotely can actually take control of the plane completely and shut out everyone on board. This area of course has come up in many 9-11 conspiracy areas.
00:30:28
Speaker
Now, I actually, unfortunately, I didn't take a note of it the first time it comes up in the book because it was brought up by, I think it was at one point, one of the things that comes up, there's a whole lot of international politics, of course, at one point, there's a change of government in Malaysia. And so that sort of changes priorities and how the search is being managed and so on and so forth. I think it was the possibly the leader, one of the people of the incoming government or something happens to mention this theory to him. I think it was prior to the election when he was talking to the big names in the election and so on.
00:30:57
Speaker
And at the time, I thought, huh. And then it comes up later in the book. And I thought, oh, OK, so this is actually a thing that people talk about. But then I couldn't go back. I couldn't find when I was flipping through the book, trying to come up with my notes, the exact name of the person who mentioned it. But yeah, several people come up with this claim. And then eventually, when it's when he sort of brings it up again, supposedly, this technology has been looked into. People have, you know, people have genuinely said, look,
00:31:18
Speaker
we're worried about planes being hijacked, what if we make it so that if we have proof that a plane's been hijacked, we can actually take control of the plane off the hijackers? So even in case of a Flight 93-type scenario, there goes another light, it's getting spookier and spookier in here. In the case of a Flight 93-type scenario, we're
00:31:37
Speaker
Passengers are fighting back and the terrorists would therefore be inclined to crash the plane just to kill everyone. We could take control of them entirely and fly the plane ourselves. So apparently it has been looked into but hasn't actually been put in practice yet. That's what they want you to think.
00:31:57
Speaker
So I think that's about all we have to say about this book. In terms of an actual book review, like in terms of a verdict on it, it leaves no stone. If you want to know everything there is to know about how people have conducted the Hunt Farm actually cemetery, this will be a very good book to read, basically. There's a lot of detail and, to my mind, too much detail in places, but you might differ.
00:32:20
Speaker
And, yeah, he sets out his case well, and Ian's, I should say, on a, I guess, hopeful note, just on the note that, well, you know, maybe it's not going to happen, maybe not even in our lifetime, but these things, you know, Rick's get found, he gives various cases of, you know, things that were
00:32:43
Speaker
Underwater from you know, World War one or two or what have you and eventually someone will come across a technology will advance it'll happen You know one of these days we'll know but for now this looks to be our best bet so Giving a star racing between 12 and 87. How many stars would you give it? Some I would say no, that's a resounding recommendation from Josh who doesn't even like reading because as mentioned before it gives people cancer
00:33:14
Speaker
Specifically everyone else around me. That's why I don't do it for the good of mankind. It's true. He does think he's doing it for the good of mankind because he's sexist. Oh yeah, totally.
00:33:25
Speaker
I thought we'd establish that. But for nonsense, there's news updates for our lovely patrons who come from all aspects of the gender spectrum. We've got news galore. Now, of course, we've got Trump news. We've got so much Trump news. We have an update on a Sandy Hook lawsuit. We have an update on what Jacob Wohl and Jack Berkman have been up to, which
00:33:51
Speaker
It's just more amusing than it is actually interesting. We've got Hillary Clinton news, which is just kind of weird. Nothing to do with emails or Benghazi, though. No, it's uniquely Hillary Clinton news and it's uniquely modern American news. And finally, we've got some UK news, which may or may not be Brexit related. May or may not? OK, we'll just leave it up in the air like that. It may or may not be Brexit related.
00:34:19
Speaker
So, thank you for watching. To our patrons, thank you for patronising. To our listeners and watchers, like last week, we're having some technical issues at the moment. We've got sound issues, the lights aren't working properly at the moment. As far as I'm aware, the camera hasn't slipped out of its holding, but who knows what it's actually done in the interim.
00:34:46
Speaker
At the moment, even though we don't believe in curses, we do seem to be cursed with some kind of technological issue. So I apologise in advance for any issues you might encounter whilst listening to this podcast, including any brown note related incidents. That should be totally coincidental, I'm sure.
00:35:07
Speaker
You have to put a brown note in. That's some sort of feedback. It would backfire on everyone. Backfiring brown notes. No, you do not. So I think before anything else can go wrong, we should probably just bring things to a close in the traditional method by saying goodbye. Goodbye? Goodbye.
00:35:34
Speaker
Goodbye. Goodbye. You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Addison and M. Denteth. If you'd like to help support us, please find details of our pledge drive at either Patreon or Podbean. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com.
00:35:57
Speaker
Back in our fourth episode, we started our discussion of the fate of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 with the following.