A science writer and author is making claims that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was actually hijacked in March by Russians to Kazakhstan
Jeff Wise, who wrote “Extreme Fear: The Science Of Your Mind In Danger,” posited his theory on a possible hijacking this week. He’s also a member of The Independent Group, which is an organization of technical and aviation experts. Wise was also featured on PBS’ NOVA in October, speaking on the missing Malaysia Airlines plane. He’s also done work for Slate magazine about the missing plane.
Wise claims that the hijackers took the plane to Kazakhstan. “The idea that MH370 might have wound up in Kazakhstan is not new. In the days after MH370’s disappearance, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak personally appealed to Kazakhstan’s president, the Soviet-era strongman Nursultan Nazarbayev, to allow Malaysia to set up a search operation in the country. Kazakhstan never responded. After Inmarsat concluded that the plane had gone south, the matter was dropped,” he wrote on his website.
“If Russia has the savvy to plan an insanely complex special operation, they also have a track record of implementing such schemes. A week before MH370 vanished, Russia began infiltrating special forces into the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, eventually annexing it. The operation was designed to look like an internal uprising, but the personnel and equipment belonged to elite Russian military units,” he continues.
Wise describes the theory as “The Spoof” because the alleged hijackers needed to “spoof,” or falsify satellite data, from Flight 370, which was heading from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board on March 8.
“Kazakhstan lacks the means and technical savvy to carry out a sophisticated hijack, the same is not true of Russia. Russia is (arguably) the only country that stands apart from the West and yet is as technically advanced in the aerospace industry as the United States,” Wise says.
Wise says that in the weeks before the disappearance of MH370, there was “increasingly critical language from European and American officials” over the Kremlin’s alleged moves in eastern Ukraine, with President Obama signing an executive order March 6–about a day before Flight 370 disappeared–that placed sanctions on officials involved in the Ukraine incursion.
His theories directly contrast with the opinions of a number of experts–including the Australian and Malaysian governments’ accounts of the crash. Currently, Australian and Malaysian vessels are currently searching a swath of the southern Indian Ocean hundreds of miles west of Perth, Australia.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau issued its last update on the search on Dec. 3, saying that more than 185,000 square kilometers have been surveyed. More than 8,000 square kilometers of the seafloor have been searched so far.
Australia is also working on new drift modeling to determine if and when wreckage from the missing plane will come on shore. Initial analysis found that the first Flight 370 debris would appear on Indonesian shores after about 123 days.
“We are currently working … to see if we can get an updated drift model for a much wider area where there might be possibilities of debris washing ashore,” search coordinator Peter Foley told Reuters more than a week ago.
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