Abduction or Theft? MH370 Conspiracy Theories

An information vacuum has nourished a cottage industry of experts and amateurs in cyberspace who continue to exhaustively pick the case apart in a bid to find out just what happened to the plane and its 239 passengers and crew.

The resulting theories range from the wild – alien abduction, MH370 and its doomed fleetmate MH17 were the same plane – to sober, science-based arguments that the plane is in the southern Indian Ocean, but not necessarily in the current search area.

What they all agree on is that some key pieces of the puzzle are missing.

"It's amazing how much information we don't have after looking at this case for all this time," said Jeff Wise, an aviation expert whose recently published Kindle book 'The Plane That Wasn't There' reached No.1 on Amazon's bestseller lists.

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL

The Boeing 777 lost contact with air traffic control shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, bound for Beijing, early on March 8, 2014, as it flew across the Gulf of Thailand close to a navigational waypoint called Igari.

Just about everything that happened thereafter is hotly debated.

Malaysia's air force said its radar tracked the plane as it turned back, re-crossed the Malay Peninsula and flew out of range off the northwest coast.

Official investigators used analysis from British firm Inmarsat of "pings" to its satellite from MH370 to plot two vast arcs – one to the north and one to the south – across which it may have flown. Combining those faint pings with data from the plane, they concluded it had turned south and flown for hours before crashing into the southern Indian Ocean.

By Tom Omulo.

Source: Reuters