MH-370: Who was the Captain?

A criminal investigative analysis, part 2: Zaharie Ahmad Shah

Zaharie Ahmad Shah, taken February 1, 2013. Source: Facebook

Introduction

This is a continuation of my exploration into the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH-370 on March 8, 2014. In the first installment, I examined the details of the timeline as provided in the official report, by the Malaysian ICAO Annex 13 Safety Investigation Team for MH370. The second article discussed the use of satellite and other data to try and plot the probable trajectory of the plane after it apparently vanished from radar for the final time. Both are linked at the bottom. This piece will focus on what is known about the captain of the aircraft, Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

Trying to unlock the personal life and character of someone who has been gone for more than a decade is normally beset with many difficulties. Memories fade or change based on more recent events. In the case of Shah, it is worse because his legacy is directly associated with an unprecedented tragedy.

The tendency is to reimagine the import of specific character traits or previous encounters based on the tragedy. Even people that were well-acquainted with Shah have undoubtedly reconsidered things they thought they knew in the context of the MH-370 incident. Conducting an objective analysis, therefore, is quite difficult.

Nonetheless, the effort is necessary because no one knows what happened or, perhaps more importantly, why it happened. What follows is a foray into the many details I was able to uncover about Captain Shah (but not all of them… just yet. See at the bottom). I try to avoid excluding anything possibly significant and will offer my evaluation of the credibility on those that come from questionable sources or present controversial narratives.

Typically, we should be suspicious of “anonymous” sources. The same applies here. One key factor for consideration, however, is that when it comes to providing details about an individual’s personal life, especially one whom the public may regard as a villain, many will feel hesitant to speak openly. We must evaluate such statements in the broader context, and treat with caution those we cannot readily corroborate.

Finally, many have suggested that the governments involved have not been forthcoming about what actually happened. Some even believe that the final report itself misrepresents the facts of the matter. None of my essays in this series discounts those people’s ideas. As far as I am concerned, no theory is a “conspiracy theory” at this point because we simply lack sufficient evidence to reach any definitive conclusions.

Rather, I am interested in approaching the question of what happened by exploring every proposed possibility by driving down every line of evidence. We must know what the “official story” says to properly evaluate counter-narratives. For the former, we rely on the reports and what government officials have done and said. On the latter, I am in communication with some who have offered differing accounts based on a variety of approaches of research. As those discussions develop, I will provide as fair and thorough a recounting of their ideas as I am doing with the official accounts.

Related to that, I encourage anyone working on this subject to please reach out to me (or comment on any of the MH-370 pieces) about whether I missed anything, have made any factual errors on the evidence I am discussing, or who wishes to illuminate me to your own ideas.

On a quick note, the Annex 13 report will be hyperlinked by page only below; all other sources will be hyperlinked (underlined) or will include a hyperlinked name followed by page, paragraph, or section numbers where appropriate.

With all that said, let’s begin.

Personal life

The final report divided its analysis of Shah’s personal circumstances (Shah is abbreviated in the report as “PIC”, Pilot in Command) into the following topics: financial, psychological and social events, and behavioral events (pp. 36 - 38). The investigative team’s conclusions will be incorporated into my own organization herein, as the final report provides relatively scant detail.

Zaharie Ahmad Shah was 53 years-old at the time of the incident. Born in a village in Penang, Malaysia, Shah was one of nine children. He earned his pilot’s license in the Philippines. Not a whole lot else seems to be publicly known about him before he joined Malaysian Airlines in 1981. Given his long career, that amassed over 18,000 flight hours before the incident, this report will instead focus on more recent years.

Numerous sources indicate that Shah held a good reputation at the airline. The report stated his “ability and professional approach… was evident [by his] rapid fleet promotion within 3 years as a professional pilot” (p. 37). A colleague told the New York Times that Shah was “a very nice guy, passionate about aviation, and among the community of pilots, one of the most respected.” On YouTube, Shah posted five “how to” types of videos, none of which exhibited any unusual behavior or hinted at some nefarious plan.

No reporting indicates that Shah had any particular problems with his company or associates. (There is one complication here in that Shah is supposed to have been a frequent, and loud, critic of the Malaysian government, which owned a significant portion of the airline. This is handled separately as ‘political background’). Those who claimed to have known or worked with him routinely employ the word “professional” to describe his conduct. He received no disciplinary letters in his file and rose through the ranks relatively quickly. Nevertheless, several people did say that his attitude in the time leading up to his disappearance suggested some underlying problem.

The Daily Mail reported that Shah’s wife and daughter stated that he “had been distracted and withdrawn in the weeks before the aircraft’s disappearance – and refused pleas to attend some marriage counselling sessions.” Aishah Zaharie, Shah’s 28 year-old daughter, allegedly added “He wasn’t the father I knew. He seemed disturbed and lost in a world of his own.”

It is unclear if the wife’s or daughter’s statements actually happened. Just two days after the Daily Mail’s report, Aishah reportedly posted on Facebook “Dear Daily Mail, you should consider making movies since you are so good at making up stories and scripts out of thin air... May god have mercy on your souls. You can bet your a** I will not forgive you.”

The Facebook post either no longer exists (if it ever did) or is not publicly available. Whether the Daily Mail interview or the Facebook post are accurately reported is hard to discern. But it is worth noting that the Daily Mail has a reputation for yellow journalism.

The only confirmed statement to media by Shah’s immediate family around the time of the disappearance, in March 2014, was by his son Ahmad Seth. He was 26 years-old at the time. He declared “I've read everything online. But I've ignored all the speculation. I know my father better.” This, of course, does not add much to the analysis.

The Annex 13 report claimed that investigators uncovered no personal turmoil (p. 36):

There were no significant changes in his lifestyle, interpersonal conflict or family stresses… There were no behavioural signs of social isolation, change in habits or interest, self-neglect, drug or alcohol abuse of the PIC…

On studying the PIC’s behavioural pattern on the CCTV recordings on the day of the flight and prior 3 flights there were no significant behavioural changes observed. On all the CCTV recordings the appearance was similar, i.e. well-groomed and attired. The gait, posture, facial expressions and mannerism were his normal characteristics.

The report’s assessment notwithstanding, three days before the Daily Mail article the New Zealand Herald, which holds a far better reputation, published excerpts of an interview with a friend of Captain Shah who asked to remain anonymous. That individual allegedly claimed that Shah was suffering serious relationship problems, stating “He's one of the finest pilots around and I'm no medical expert, but with all that was happening in his life Zaharie was probably in no state of mind to be flying.”

Other friends characterized Shah as “lonely and sad” in the weeks or months preceding the incident in statements to other media.

William Langewiesche wrote a detailed piece in the Atlantic in 2019. He claims to have interviewed many people close to Shah. Although this excerpt from his essay is long, it is worth recounting in its entirety:

The truth, as I discovered after speaking in Kuala Lumpur with people who knew him or knew about him, is that Zaharie was often lonely and sad. His wife had moved out, and was living in the family’s second house. By his own admission to friends, he spent a lot of time pacing empty rooms waiting for the days between flights to go by. He was also a romantic.

He is known to have established a wistful relationship with a married woman and her three children, one of whom was disabled, and to have obsessed over two young internet models, whom he encountered on social media, and for whom he left Facebook comments that apparently did not elicit responses. Some were shyly sexual. He mentioned in one comment, for example, that one of the girls, who was wearing a robe in a posted photo, looked like she had just emerged from a shower.

Zaharie seems to have become somewhat disconnected from his earlier, well-established life. He was in touch with his children, but they were grown and gone. The detachment and solitude that can accompany the use of social media—and Zaharie used social media a lot—probably did not help. There is a strong suspicion among investigators in the aviation and intelligence communities that he was clinically depressed. [Paragraph breaks added by me].

Another “lifelong” friend seemed to hold a more tempered view, telling Langewiesche:

Zaharie's marriage was bad. In the past he slept with some of the flight attendants. And so what? We all do. You're flying all over the world with these beautiful girls in the back. But his wife knew.

Asuad Khan, Shah’s brother-in-law, gave a different viewpoint to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Four Corners program:

[Shah was a] happy, generous and kind man. If you are talking about life insurance he didn't have one. Trust me, check. He didn't have one. He didn't believe in it so why would he want to (commit) suicide? Because if you say that he wanted to (commit) suicide in the Indian Ocean, I say prove it. He was not suicidal.

He likes to repair a lot of things by himself at home. On that day [of MH-370’s vanishing], my sister [Shah’s wife] told me he was repairing the door for the bathroom if I'm not mistaken. All sorts of questions, (including about) his mental state. But he was a sane man. I don't think he was a crazy man.

Fatima Pardi, a friend of Shah’s, disclosed that he had sent her a WhatsApp message two days before MH-370’s disappearance. Media speculated about whether the two were involved in romantic relations, to which she responded:

That last conversation was just between me and him. I don't want to talk about it. I'm afraid what I say will be misunderstood. It was a personal matter, a private issue. This is not a lovey-dovey story. He was a friend of mine. We were friends. He told me he saw potential in me and that he would help me build a better future for myself and my children.

I don't believe that he loved me. I believe that he loved my children. Whatever my children said “We want this, we want that,” he would buy for them. I said to him he should stop doing that because I don’t pamper my children. He would say, “She’s just a kid.” So what could I conclude? That he loves children.

Pardi confirmed that the two were involved in politics, which many believe played a significant role in the disappearance. I will return to that issue below. Aside from that final WhatsApp message, Pardi noted that the two had communicated less frequently beginning in January 2014. She stated the reason was the consequence of a “personal matter,” but did not say about what, between whom, or whether it involved her directly.

Shah’s brother-in-law Khan averred that even if Pardi was Shah’s mistress, it would not have mattered much. He noted, “We’re Muslim, right, so why worry? You can marry four (women), so who cares?”

Still, Shah’s supposed behavior toward women has raised red flags for some. Australian journalist Paul Toohey claimed to have identified at least 90 Facebook comments Shah made on the accounts of young women, with most seemingly targeted at twin-sister models Lan Qi Hui and Lan Qi Min.

Lan Qi Min told media that she did not know Shah at all, and that he was one commenter among her more than 100,000 social media followers. Journalist Jeff Wise tried to locate Shah’s alleged comments, searching the Lans’ social media back through 2013, but he could not find more than a few.

Whether Shah had marriage troubles because of his relationship with Pardi or his online comments to social media models remains as total speculation. Family members have denied that there was serious trouble or that whatever troubles might have existed would have led Shah to purposely crash the plane.

Moreover, the evidence is limited about Shah’s mental state in the time leading up to the incident. Investigators apparently dug up nothing suggesting Shah suffered from any depression or negative mindset, though some say they were not looking too hard or even covered up what negatives they uncovered. Friends or colleagues offered mixed views.

Considering the weight of the speakers, I would be inclined to believe coworkers above all else because they do not have the familial inclinations to protect him, and their own lives would be on the line sitting in the flight deck with him. Unfortunately, the media outlets do not identify them, so we cannot know if those who made statements ever actually flew with Shah, how well they might have known or got along with him, or how frequently or recently they encountered him.

Family statements are just as challenging to evaluate. For one, family members have strong motivations to protect their own well-being following an incident. With little evidence directly implicating Shah, they certainly do not want to add to his detractors, which could make themselves targets.

Oftentimes, families also simply cannot accept when a loved one does something egregiously criminal. Even if the evidence strongly pointed at Shah, I suspect it would be very difficult to come to terms with it, and they may be disinclined to do so publicly regardless.

Hardest of all, it is very possible that they know nothing more than the rest of us. I can only imagine the nightmare it must be for family members who are left to wonder if their father/brother/husband/son committed one of the most heinous crimes of the century, all while mourning his loss. Let us not forget that, as of right now, they too have lost an innocent loved one.

While I have complete sympathy for them, our compassion cannot prevent us from working to deduce what happened. We may speculate as to Shah’s role—as I myself did at length already—but we should strive to remember that we are only speculating. Nevertheless, intelligent speculation is a necessary element of investigation. To unlock a mystery, it is critical to consider all the possibilities.

Finances and Health

Often parallel to personal motivations are financial ones. But Shah did not seem to possess any. He was one of the most senior pilots in the nation at the country’s leading airline. All accounts indicate he owned at least two houses and three cars. No one has proffered any credible evidence suggesting he had a gambling or drug problem. The final report noted no unusual activity, such as suspicious payments or withdrawals before or after the incident. Like his brother-in-law said, Shah does not appear to have recently taken out any life insurances (p. 36).

Shah may have been depressed, but he did not see a doctor or take medication for it, at least insofar as the investigation could find. He regularly made medical visits related to a back injury suffered seven years before MH-370’s disappearance, but nothing indicated that that was disrupting his life. No other documentary evidence provides conclusive proof, or even strong indication, of undiagnosed mental or physical maladies.

Therefore, the evidence about Shah’s character so far offers little toward a motive. While we know Shah certainly had the means to commit the crime (if indeed this was a crime), there is little compelling information from his personal life that would explain why he would have done so.

The Flight Simulator

In the Deep Dive: MH370 podcast, publisher and founder of On Milwaukee Andy Tarnoff discusses Shah’s flight simulator with Jeff Wise, an aviation journalist who has studied the MH-370 incident extensively. Wise describes the flight simulator as a “major, major clue, a major piece of evidence… for people to interpret” (2:54).

Shah had set up in his basement a flight simulator that looked especially ornate. By this I mean that Shah’s arrangement included elements of a real instrument panel, multiple monitors, a yolk, and other controls.

As the host—Tarnoff—explains, it is not unusual for commercial pilots or even aviation enthusiasts to install flight simulators in their homes. Indeed, I myself have one. Shah’s differed only in the realism of its presentation and function. Nevertheless, my analysis of the various items illustrated in pictures like the one above proved that one could create a same or similar version for only a few thousand dollars, even in 2014.

What brought Shah’s simulator into the spotlight was the data recovered from it. To put it simply, forensic examiners retrieved files that showed that Shah may have at some point created a simulated flight path that evidently aligned quite closely with the presumed path of MH-370 from the Malacca Strait into the Indian Ocean. (See my first article, The Enduring Mystery of MH-370 for extensive detail about the route many believe MH-370 took that led to its eventual demise).

Several researchers published three reports on the details of the forensic examination and data recovered (referred to herein as the Iannello reports, named for one of the several authors). There are some points that render the existence of the simulator and its requisite data as inconclusive.

My conclusions about what was found are based primarily on the third of the Iannello reports because I have not yet discovered whether the actual forensic examination has been released to the public (it appears that it has not been released). The third Iannello report incorporates the other two. You can find the full third Iannello report here.

Investigators recovered data from a simulator program developed by BlackBox Simulation located on a solid state drive (SSD) disconnected from Shah’s computer’s primary hard drive. The data came from deleted .FLT files recovered from a shadow copy set, last modified on February 3, 2014.

A shadow copy set is a collection of images of various volumes that copies all of the data held on each examined volume under a single Graphic User Identification (GUID). A shadow copy set is data generated under the same user ID (or same login credentials), but could have been created over a period of time or at disconnected times. See this report for the summary and tables of the data from Shah’s SSD.

In this case, the single user identity and specific features of the data within each .FLT file strongly suggest that the same individual created all this data. The ‘features’ here refer to information from what appears to be a single simulated flight.

Each of six datapoints provided, among other details, lat-long coordinates and fuel levels. When placed together, they showed what would occur in an ongoing simulated flight. In other words, the coordinates present in each datapoint followed a prospective flight path and the fuel levels diminished from location to location accordingly.

Source: 9-News, Sydney

Given that no information suggests that others used Shah’s simulator, it is reasonable to conclude that he himself generated the data recovered from the notable files, and that that data represented a single simulated flight. As the summary Iannello report explained:

The coordinates, if all from one simulation run, suggest the departure of a B777-200LR aircraft from Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), a flight up the Malacca Strait, a turn to the south, and a termination in the Southern Indian Ocean near 45S104E.

There is no question that the flight path data recovered from the simulator raises some eyebrows given what is believed to be the actual path of the real-world flight. But contextual evidence sheds some doubt on whether this proves guilt.

In another episode of Deep Dive: MH370, Jeff Wise points out that the forensic examination uncovered flight data for more than 600 flights (9:58), utilizing several different models of aircraft, not just the Triple-7. In his blog, Wise further notes that the notable simulated flight was not Shah’s last, about which he asserts that “this is hardly the behavior of a man with a monomaniacal obsession with his upcoming demise.” Shah also made no secret of his simulator, featuring it on his YouTube channel.

There are two conflicting ways to look at this piece of the canon of evidence toward whether Shah was the villain. First, it is extremely difficult to ignore the coincidence of the flight path found on the SSD. In Wise’s blog, he states, “Given that number [more than 600 simulated flights discovered within the data dump], it would frankly be surprising if one or two of them didn’t resemble the accident flight in some way.”

This seems like quite the stretch to me. Flying MH-370 over the southern Indian Ocean in the simulator takes it nowhere near any place toward which one would expect Shah to think about flying under normal circumstances. INMARSAT and the flight-sim data put the aircraft some distance west of Perth, Australia, the nearest commercial airport.

While it is possible that Shah—or anyone—might fly random paths to nowhere particular on their simulators, to come so close to this path in such a remote area, a month before the real-world incident, simply defies any reasonable odds.

In episode 23 of Deep Dive: MH370, Wise makes a good point about the other way to view the simulator evidence. He does concede that while this data is “the most damning piece of evidence against Zahari (Shah),” it is also problematic because we are now viewing it through the lens of accusations already made. For him, this evidence is “pretty ambiguous” and is not enough to point toward Shah given that little else definitively incriminates him (30:35).

My view of this is also mixed. In criminal investigations, no coincidence can be summarily dismissed, just as no specific one should be treated as dispositive. Yet, it seems that for the alignment of the simulated flight data and reported actual flight path to be unconnected is impossible.

To put it bluntly, if the simulator data is accurate and came from one of Shah’s devices, and the path most believe MH-370 actually took is also correct, this cannot be dismissed as a coincidence. When a commenter raised this on the podcast video, Wise responded:

That's a valid perspective. A counter argument would be that a flight to the south would require various sequences of events to occur by chance that also would be astronomical.

A different commenter replied:

It’s not that astronomical. I’ve played flight sims and would do random things like land in the ocean, fly upside down…etc. if you done hundreds of flight sims, it’s not that unusual.

The problem is that neither of these answers address the issue of the absurdity of the probabilities. Wise’s counterpoint, if I understand it correctly, seems to actually bolster the first commenter’s point. For two “astronomical” occurrences to happen in such close proximity only makes it even more improbable that both could happen by accident, especially in such close temporal proximity.

The second commenter fails to take into account the vast number of variables that had to come together to result in these two proximal events.

First, the odds that such similarities between the two flight paths (simulated and real) could fortuitously occur, irrespective of the timing, are extraordinarily long. We are talking about six separate datapoints, not the happenstance of crossing a single geographic spot. The earth is very large and the area at issue was not one where real-world flights happen often.

Second, out of 600 or more simulations, for the most similar one to happen to occur very near the date of the actual event is equally unlikely.

Third, given that the creator of the simulated flight and the pilot of the incident flight were the same person, this erodes even further the notion that this was somehow a lucky strike.

Thus, when you multiply the probabilities associated with each of these together, the odds of a chance occurrence are, quite frankly, beyond astronomical. In other words, if all data is correct and otherwise untainted, the simulator is very close indeed to a smoking gun.

Wise illuminated a particular point about the simulator data in one of his essays that I agree seems plausible. He wrote:

The newly unveiled documents, however, suggest Malaysian officials have suppressed at least one key piece of incriminating information. This is not entirely surprising: There is a history in aircraft investigations of national safety boards refusing to believe that their pilots could have intentionally crashed an aircraft full of passengers…

Previous press accounts suggest that Australian and U.S. officials involved in the MH370 investigation have long been more suspicious of Zaharie [Shah] than their Malaysian counterparts. In January, Byron Bailey wrote in The Australian: “Several months after the MH370 disappearance I was told by a government source that the FBI had recovered from Zaharie’s home computer deleted information showing flight plan waypoints … my source … left me with the impression that the FBI were of the opinion that Zaharie was responsible for the crash.”

On this, Wise is 100% correct. Malaysia’s state investment arm, Khazanah Nasional, owned 69.37% of the airline at the time of MH-370’s disappearance and when another of its planes, MH-17, was shot down over Ukraine. It is certainly possible that investigators in the Malaysian government might attempt to suppress evidence that ostensibly condemns the pilot of the incident aircraft.

The argument essentially implies that the Malaysian government engaged in a cover-up to keep the mystery alive rather than definitively prove that the Malaysian Airlines pilot killed all those people. This is not unreasonable. As long as no one knows for sure what happened, none can fairly blame the airline and, therefore, its bottom line has a better chance of surviving two fatal incidents in such a short time.

My hesitancy, however, derives from a slightly more conspiratorial angle.

The Daily Beast reported in 2016 (updated in 2017) that Malaysia’s national police chief, Khalid Abu Bakar, claimed that neither his agency nor any under his command ever gave any simulator data to the FBI or anyone else. Perhaps the intimation is that the FBI (or someone or some agency) created the simulator data out of whole cloth. Others have stretched these possibilities even further. And rest assured, I will be examining them in future pieces.

As for the reliability of the simulator data, without an examiner’s report I cannot confidently conclude whether it supports one contention or another. Nonetheless, if it is as the Iannello reports explain it, it does seem pretty damning for Shah. The coincidence is extremely difficult to wave away, but it also adds more questions than answers.

If the simulator evidence is the only incriminating information about Shah, we are left in a relatively weak circumstantial position, as Wise rightly holds. We already know that Shah had the means to commit the crime. The simulator data only really adds to that, and frankly, just barely. One simulation hardly exhibits extensive planning, and as far as I have seen, only the one simulated flight matching the real-world path was discovered.

This is problematic because if the final report is accurate, it seems the flight path upon which Shah is supposed to have taken MH-370 would have required precision at critical points. One would have expected to find more planning than a single, simulated dry run.

On the other hand, the discovered simulated flight plan was found amongst deleted files. As a computer forensic examiner, I can confirm that it is entirely possible that more existed at some point, but could not be recovered because previous files had been overwritten.

Deleted data on a Windows-based file system is removed from the file table but left as unallocated space. It remains recoverable until that space is reallocated to something else on the file table.

The likelihood of something being overwritten increases with time as well as with the frequency of use of a system. Moreover, it is possible that older .FLT files were overwritten by Shah purposely, although not necessarily to evade detection. When a user employs the “save as” option, if he names the new file the same as an existing one, it will overwrite the existing file with the new data. Thus, Shah could have conducted multiple simulated “test” flights, but saved each new one over the last. It is also unclear whether the program Shah used does this under any circumstances.

With only the single recovered flight plan, and no further data about the forensic process, it is hard to ascribe much greater value to the simulator data than what has already been discussed.

Shah’s Political Life

A final point about Shah relates to his political activity. Fatima Pardi (discussed above) did admit that she and Shah worked on politics together. Various sources assert that Shah was a supporter of Anwar Ibrahim.

On the day of MH-370’s departure, March 7, 2014, Ibrahim stood before a court in an appellate session related to sodomy charges for which he was previously acquitted. Ibrahim and his supporters had all along denounced the charges as “trumped-up,” and argued that the March 7th appeal was conducted because Ibrahim nearly beat his opponent, Barisan Nasional, in the 2013 election.

The court reversed the acquittal, disqualified him from nomination in an upcoming election scheduled on 11 March, and imposed a five-year prison sentence, all of which only boosted the arguments about corruption (Genser and Rasiah, p. 15). Human Rights Watch and the International Commission of Jurists likewise criticized the process as politically motivated.

Purportedly, Shah was in attendance for the hearing.

One commenter on Quora provided a detailed account of how politics might have led Shah toward crashing MH-370 into the Indian Ocean. In summary, he wrote:

In my opinion, this verdict was the straw that broke the camel’s back for the captain [Shah].

He already loathes the Barisan National government, no doubt because of past actions against Anwar (a very long story) as well as actions against Malaysia Airlines (turning the airline from a high flyer into a perennial loss maker, thanks to corruption). Now Anwar is going to jail again, on charges he believed were trumped up by the Barisan Nasional government.

He just snapped. [Emphasis in the original].

Whether this is true and, if so, it played any role in MH-370’s disappearance demands a much deeper investigation. I will leave this issue for another article.

Conclusion

The evidence about Shah is murky—it is difficult to ascertain what is true amidst the cacophony of mixed messaging and sensationalized reporting. One aspect of the evidence, so far anyway, that is hard to escape is that the official report and contextual evidence strongly supports the notion that someone on the flight crew committed this act. What it does not tell us is why.

For this reason, many researchers are intent upon finding theories to explain not only why the flight disappeared, but how and where. Many have proffered ideas that do not fully comport with the official report, or that outright contradict it. I am not here to dismiss those proposals outright. The fact remains that the disappearance of a fully-loaded commercial aircraft—a very large one, at that—is a baffling mystery that demands answers. My interest in the subject arises from exactly that.

For this reason, I will continue to explore all the possibilities, including ones some have called “fringe.” The answer might rely upon Occam’s Razor: the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions is most probably correct. Still, to reach that point, every hypothesis must be unpacked to the fullest extent possible. I look forward to your comments.

* * *

I am a Certified Forensic Computer Examiner, Certified Crime Analyst, Certified Fraud Examiner, and Certified Financial Crimes Investigator with a Juris Doctor and a Master’s degree in history. I spent 10 years working in the New York State Division of Criminal Justice as Senior Analyst and Investigator. I was a firefighter before I joined law enforcement.

Today, I am the managing director of the Dharma Farm School of Translation and Philosophy and the executive director of the EALS Global Foundation.

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