Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which has been missing for two months, is being searched for feverishly Malaysian and Australian officials in the Indian Ocean, but there’s been no sign of it.
CNN, which has been covering the missing plane nearly nonstop since it went missing in early March, posted an odd poll this week, suggesting that “space aliens, time travelers or beings from another dimension” took the plane. About 3 percent of the respondents said it was “very likely” and 6 percent said it was “somewhat likely” that the plane was taken in such a manner.
About 79 percent said it was “not likely at all” and 10 percent said it was “not too likely.” Another 1 percent said they didn’t have an opinion.
A screenshot of the poll, which was apparently taken down, was published on blogger Perez Hilton’s website.
“The real story, though, is how low CNN sank to indulge any wackadoo theory that might be good for TV ratings or internet clicks!!” Hilton writes. “We expected better from you!!! What happened to raising the bar on public discourse?”
Here’s the latest AP report: Malaysian plane’s likely flight path gets 2nd look
SYDNEY (AP) — An international panel of experts will re-examine all data gathered in the nearly two-month hunt for the missing Malaysia jet to ensure search crews who have been scouring a desolate patch of ocean for the plane have been looking in the right place, officials said Monday.
Senior officials from Malaysia, Australia and China met in the Australian capital to hash out the details of the next steps in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which will center on an expanded patch of seafloor in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia. The area became the focus of the hunt after a team of analysts calculated the plane’s likeliest flight path based on satellite and radar data.
Starting Wednesday, that data will be re-analyzed and combined with all information gathered thus far in the search, which hasn’t turned up a single piece of debris despite crews scouring more than 4.6 million square kilometers (1.8 million square miles) of ocean.
“We’ve got to this stage of the process where it’s very sensible to go back and have a look at all of the data that has been gathered, all of the analysis that has been done and make sure there’s no flaws in it, the assumptions are right, the analysis is right and the deductions and conclusions are right,” Angus Houston, head of the search operation, told reporters in Canberra.
Investigators have been stymied by a lack of hard data since the plane vanished on March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. A weekslong search for surface debris was called off last week after officials determined any wreckage that may have been floating has likely sunk.
“Unfortunately, all of that effort has found nothing,” Australian Transport Minister Warren Truss said. “We’ve been confident on the basis of the information provided that the search area was the right one, but in practice, that confidence has not been converted into us discovering any trace of the aircraft.”
Houston has warned that the underwater search may drag on for up to a year.
Houston and Truss met with Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein and Chinese Transport Minister Yang Chuantang in Canberra on Monday to map out the next steps of the underwater search, which will focus on a 60,000 square kilometer (23,000 square mile) patch of seafloor. Officials are contacting governments and private contractors to find out whether they have specialized equipment that can dive deeper than the Bluefin 21, an unmanned sub that has spent weeks scouring the seafloor in an area where sounds consistent with a plane’s black box were detected in early April.
