➡ In this episode of the Judicial Watch podcast, former TWA pilot Captain Al Francis discusses the tragic explosion and loss of TWA Flight 800. He disputes the government’s theory that a spark ignited fuel in the center tank, stating that the plane’s design and fuel type make this unlikely. Instead, he suggests that external explosions brought down the plane, a theory supported by other experts. He also provides context about global terrorism threats at the time, including a plot to bomb multiple trans-Pacific flights, known as Operation Bojinka.
➡ A Philippine Airlines flight from Manila to Japan was bombed, injuring passengers and damaging the plane, but it didn’t crash. The bomb makers, linked to the first World Trade Center bombing, were caught after a fire in their Manila apartment revealed their plans. A suspicious boat rental on Long Island, possibly linked to a missile attack, was investigated in relation to the explosion of TWA 800, a flight from New York to Paris. The investigation involved various agencies and individuals, including the author, a TWA captain, who ensured the safety of subsequent flights.
➡ The FBI took over an aviation accident investigation, despite having no experience in the field, which was unusual and raised suspicions. The FBI’s involvement suggested the incident was being treated as a crime or act of terrorism, rather than a technical failure. The FBI’s actions during the investigation, such as pressure washing wreckage and altering debris, were against protocol and potentially illegal. This unusual behavior, along with political pressures from the upcoming presidential election, led to speculation of a cover-up orchestrated by higher authorities, possibly even the White House.
➡ After a plane crash, the Coast Guard initially asked Weeks to salvage the wreckage, but the FBI later decided to wait for the Navy. The delay upset the victims’ families and other interested parties, including the airline, engine manufacturers, and unions. A U.S. attorney prevented these parties from being present during the salvage, leaving only the NTSB and FBI. This decision was controversial, as the interested parties had expertise that could have helped identify and catalog the wreckage. The FBI also confiscated notes and conducted body searches on investigators, which was unprecedented. A captain from TWA, Terry Stacy, noticed a strange red residue on the wreckage and had it independently analyzed, finding it contained materials found in rocket fuels. The FBI arrested Stacy and the analysts, and the information about the residue was not included in the investigation. The coroner found unusual small bits of metal in the victims’ bodies and evidence of an explosion outside the aircraft, contradicting the official explanation of a fuel tank explosion.
➡ A retired United Airline captain named Dick Russell was shown a radar tape that suggested a high-speed object collided with TWA Flight 800, contradicting the official report that a fuel tank explosion caused the crash. Despite threats from mysterious men demanding the tape, Russell had made copies, which were later seen by others. Additionally, an experienced pilot and a woman at a restaurant both witnessed what appeared to be a missile striking the plane, but their testimonies were dismissed or misrepresented by the FBI. Despite these compelling accounts, the official report remains unaltered.
➡ A test was conducted in England to recreate the conditions that could have caused the center wing fuel tank of a similar model 747 to explode, like in the TWA 800 airplane crash. Despite extreme measures, the fuel wouldn’t ignite, and the damage from the forced explosion didn’t match the wreckage from the actual crash. There are calls for transparency and a re-examination of the official response to the crash, which is seen as unsatisfactory. The hope is for the truth to be revealed, not just for the public, but especially for the families of the 230 victims.
➡ The FAA has grounded airplanes in the past due to safety concerns, but never for the specific airplane in question, despite it operating under extreme conditions. There’s a need for an investigation and proper handling of this issue. Judicial Watch is thanked for their efforts in this matter. DWA Captain Al Francis expresses his gratitude for being included in the discussion.

Chris I’m chris farrell and this is Judicial Watch. Welcome to Judicial Watch everybody. The Judicial Watch podcast where we go behind the headlines to cover news and information that the old legacy mainstream media really does not want you to know about. We try to recover some lost history and explain the inexplicable. Today we’re going to cover a tragic explosion and loss of an aircraft, TWA Flight 800. And joining us to help explain what happened is a former TWA pilot. And we’re very pleased to welcome to the show Captain Al Francis. Captain Francis, welcome to Judicial Watch.

Thank you so much for having me, sir. Captain Francis, you’ve done a fantastic YouTube presentation, an hour long briefing really on your findings and observations, your experience. You lay out all the facts and we’re going to link your presentation in the show notes to this show. But I just think it’s important to kind of lay the groundwork for folks watching and listening. So you were a TWA pilot, you’re a member of the Airline Pilots association and you held a leadership position for the pilots that flew international long haul flights. Give us an idea of what your time was like as a TWA pilot.

Yes, I was with TWA from 1964 to 2000. At the time of the crash, which was July 17th, 1993, I was flying the 747 as a captain and also I happened to be the council chairman and captain representative for ALPA Council 024, which was the council that represented all the pilots that flew the international routes for twa. It was a rather unusual thing when that happened. Only a couple of weeks prior to that, I had flown that airplane back from Athens to New York with my wife and daughter on board. I was very familiar with the airplane and with the routes that were being flown by it.

That’s a remarkable thing to have actually captained that particular aircraft. I mean when you did all your pre flight checks, I recall that you flew that plane out of Athens back to New York. When you were doing all your pre flight checks to make sure the aircraft was airworthy and ready to go, did anything even remotely like a center fuel or center fuel tank wire sparking, Was that ever a part of your, your thought process as you check the aircraft out? Well, to begin with, TWA’s maintenance department was excellent. It was one of best in the industry.

We were based, our maintenance base was at Kansas City at Mid Continent International Airport and I had a great deal of trust with all of our mechanics, whether they be on international or domestic. The thing that has got to be Understood is that airplane flew around from basically about 1970. It flew all over the world in all sorts of areas, including very, very hot areas, Cairo, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, many, many places. And the airplane, the basic concept that a small amount of fuel in the center fuel tank could be ignited by a spark of unknown origin was just unbelievable to anybody that knew anything about not only the 747, but basic the way things work on airplanes, right? The, the fuel that goes into commercial airplanes is called Jet A and that fuel is extremely non flammable.

It’s amazing. You can have a pool of it laying on the ground and throw lighted matches into that pool and they’ll go out as if they were thrown into water. The only way you can actually get Jet A to ignite and be a fuel is to compress it to a tremendous degree and spray it in a very fine spray into the combustion chamber and then use what’s called an igniter, which is like a spark plug on steroids, to put a spark into it and finally get it going. Once a jet engine is going, you don’t. There’s no more ignition.

It just operates until you take the fuel away from it. But that situation again, the Flight 800 was the Flight that followed the flight in from Athens. And a matter of fact, I knew all the crew that had brought that in from Athens that day. It was on the ground for several hours and then departed. The temperature was in the mid-90s at Kennedy that day. But the thing that’s so important for people to understand, and this is why the whole concept that the government came up with is really ridiculous, is that there’s a thing called positive fuel tank ventilation on the 747 and that’s the case on virtually all commercial airliners, that once you get up in the air, it’s like a huge vacuum that sucks all the vapor out of the tank.

The airplane was about 13 minutes after departure. It had been airborne at speeds up to 300 knots, very fast. And that tank, and as well as all the other tanks, any, any explosive vapor, if there was there, would have been vacuumed out of there at that time. So our maintenance department did an evaluation of it, which I indicate is in my presentation. And they, they indicated that the airplane was brought down by an explosion or explosions exterior to the airplane. Right? That was also what NTSB GO team leader Hank Hughes felt. And if he had been allowed to put a conclusion into the initial report, which was held in, in Baltimore, Maryland, he would have, he told me, and he stated he testified that he would have said that it would.

The airplane was brought down by explosion or explosions exterior to the aircraft, not something that occurred inside the center section fuel tank. That’s an excellent explanation. And the reason I asked that sort of foundational question about. I’m just imagining you in Athens doing your walk around the aircraft, checking everything as you’re required to do, is that there is no other instance anywhere in the world for decades before and after of a 747 exploding in the way that that TWA Flight 800 did. And so, you know, the planes, various carriers, various countries all around the world, all kinds of weather conditions, all kinds of circumstances, never before, never after anything like what happened to TWA 800.

And that’s what’s really extraordinary and inexplicable about it. Yeah. And the thing, the only time they had a 747 explode in flight was actually a TWA 747, which was sold to the Iranian Air Force. And they were going into Madrid, Spain, and were in and around serious thunderstorms. And the airplane was struck by lightning, which went in through the fuel tank vent line, I think, on the right wing, and actually did cause an explosion that brought the airplane down. Because of that, they installed a system that would sense any basically light at that entrance, and if it saw it, put a material that would actually go into the tank and prevent any explosion or any fire, etc.

That was in place on all TWA 747s at the time. And one of the things that we did when you did a walk around and on the 747, we had a flight engineer who actually did the walk around on the airplane on the ground as part of a flight crew. But I would walk around occasionally myself just to maintain familiarity with everything on the outside. And there was an indicator that you would look up at the wing tip on both sides, and if that indicator showed orange in color, you knew that that particular sensor had gone off and the inerted material had gone into the tank.

Right. And when they recovered the wreckage on that, on both sides of the wings that they recovered, there was no indication that that inerting system had gone off. So the idea that this flame followed out, you know, all the way out to the, the wingtips when the airplane exploded was absolutely facetious. It did not happen. Captain Francis, in your presentation, on your YouTube presentation, you discuss, you provide some historical context for what was going on in the world in the early to mid-90s with respect to various acts of terrorism. And you sort of just paint a picture or provide a backdrop that explains this was not simply an event that happened in a vacuum or in an otherwise all quiet and peaceful world.

One of the things you mentioned, which I think is interesting, is a plot that was developed to knock down planes flying out of the Pacific called Operation Bojinka. And it was specifically aimed at targeting aircraft on those long haul Trans Pacific flights. Do you want to touch on Bojinka for a second? Yeah, sure. Bojinka is, I believe, a Croatian word that means a loud bang or an explosion. And that particular plan that was being developed by terrorists was that they were going to, on the same day they were going to set off explosion, they were going to put bombs on the airplanes of 12 different airliners that were transiting various positions in the Far east to the west coast of the United States.

So potentially they were going to bring down 12 airplanes, all big airplanes, 747s, et cetera. The death toll would have been horrific. Unfortunately, what happened was this particular scheme. They decided that they would build a bomb and they would put it as a test case onto a 747 Philippine Airlines 747 that was en route from Manila to Japan. And this bomb indeed went off. It went off underneath the seat of a rather unusual fat Japanese young man and killed him. It damaged people or injured people next to him and blew a hole in the side of the airplane, but it did not bring the airplane down.

So the builder of this bomb decided that they would have to build something much larger. And they had an apartment in Manila and they were working on this when they had a fire in this apartment. This alerted the police, they had to run away. The individuals which I name in my presentation and the police found all this bomb making stuff and they began investing it, of course, brought in our FBI, CIA and so forth. Figured out who this fellow was. And he eventually was involved in the initial, the first World Trade center bombing, which you’ll remember went off and they attempted to explode a bomb in the north building and it was supposed to collapse into the other building, but that failed.

It did not work. This is where the famous blind sheik who lived in, in New Jersey was, was involved in that. He was investigated, arrested and prosecuted. But the other people that were involved in that were eventually brought back from Pakistan where they were and were prosecuted. And the one individual who I mentioned is serving a life sentence in maximum security prison in Colorado. So it has long been a goal or objective of various terrorist organizations to take down planes. And of course we’ve seen a 911 using planes as a weapon to target and attack buildings.

So there’s nothing really new or novel about this except if you back up to July of 1996. On a hot summer’s evening, TWA 800 is getting prepped and ready to launch with 230 souls on board to head to Paris. And that very same day you point out that out on Long Island a rather unusual boat rental took place. A 30 foot fishing boat was rented by really an unknown character using a stolen credit card. Fill in some blanks there for us. Tell us what was going on out on the great South Bay of Long Island. Well, again, this is a situation that never came out in the investigation.

But this individual who was described as, by the tone of his voice and his appearance to be someone from the Middle east, rented a, about a 35 foot fishing boat after showing that he was capable of doing it from a rental agency at a place out on Long Island. And he was supposedly going to go to another marina a little bit farther out, pick up a couple of friends and they were going to go out for a day of fishing. They were supposed to be back of course by sunset with the boat. The next morning the people showed up at the marina and the boat was not there.

They immediately advised the Coast Guard and the police and a search went out and the boat was found at another marina much closer to where TW800 went down. And it was described as being so clean as far as the condition of the boat that not a single fingerprint was found on the boat. It had been sanitized. They then discovered that the driver’s license which had been used as identification was false. It was a fake. And the credit card that was used to rent it was stolen. That boat was big enough to absolutely use what is called a rail fired missile.

Those are a little bit bigger than what are called MANPADs. Those are the shoulder fired missiles and are capable of going up well in excess of 15 to 16,000ft. TW800 exploded at about 13,000ft. So a missile coming from that boat, if that was indeed the case, was absolutely capable of bringing the airplane down. But there’s a lot more to it as I describe in my presentation. And of course Jack Cashel wrote an excellent book about it and Jack and I have worked together. He’s been at some of my presentations, et cetera. Very knowledgeable individual. I’m sure you have interviewed Jack and you know him.

He. We do, we do. He is a very tenacious individual. He doesn’t Let go. He’s a little bulldog and once that he gets his teeth into you, he’s not going to let go. And I’m very happy to see that he has been there throughout this time. I watched your interview with Jack and he points out that he didn’t get involved in this until much, much later, after the probable cause report had come out in 2001. Right, of course, I was there five years, four years earlier, from the very beginning. Let me ask you a question about your involvement.

I know that you flew to New York immediately, I guess, the next day. What, what was your role? How did they rope you into this? Or maybe they pushed you out of it, I’m not sure. Give us an idea of. Obviously you had an interest representing all the international kind of long haul pilots and you yourself were a TWA captain and, you know, qualified on that airframe, a 747. I would imagine they’d want to bring you in and have you helped kind of deconstruct or reconstruct what was going on. What was your role? Well, basically, as you said, I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the time and we were watching the evening news and were shocked to see that a TWA 747 had crashed shortly after takeoff from Kennedy.

And apparently there were no survivors. So I got up at 5 o’ clock the next morning and took the first flight I could through St. Louis to New York and got there and went to our chief pilot’s office, Hugh Chozell, a real gentleman and an individual that worked very hard to make everything come out right. But Hugh, as well as another captain named Terry Stacy, who you will see gets involved in a very nasty way. Right, right. Were there and I went to our security department, I went over to our, the, the terminal, went down to where the baggage is stacked and loaded, et cetera.

And we had procedures, very, very good procedures for security, including walking dogs, sniffing dogs over all of the luggage, that they’re better than going through an X ray machine to detect explosives. And I went through all of this. Then I went to assure the crew that was taking the flight out that night, 800 flew the next night too, that everything had been done to make sure that there was nothing on board. Because our initial thought obviously that it was a bomb similar to what bought down the Pan Am 103 at locker V, Scotland some years before.

Right. And that was the initial thought by everybody, it was a bomb. There had been a threat, as you mentioned before, in the days just prior to 800 going down, several Arabic language newspapers in one in Lebanon, one in London had published a report by a record group that no one knew of before. They had never heard of it before, that is, stated that they were responsible for the Khobar Towers explosion in Saudi Arabia and also an explosion, bomb explosion at a nightclub in Frankfurt which was frequented by a lot of our military personnel from the air base and the army base in that vicinity.

And they claimed responsible responsibility for both those incidents and said that soon there would be a new incident occur that would amaze and astound the world with his audacity. And the date that they claimed that that was going to happen was on the 18th, I believe, of July, which was the 17th of July on the east coast of United States. Right, right. So they were claiming that they were going to do something really bad on the night of the 17th, the morning of the 18th in Europe. And sure enough, it happened. Now, after you got involved in doing a safety check, security wise, to make sure the next flight going out, the next TWA 800 on its way to Paris the next evening, that they had confidence that the equipment and the procedures were all up to speed.

Did the FBI interview you or was the NTSB interested in consulting with you or. Well, what happened? That was a very interesting thing. You have to understand how the NTSB works, or at least should work. When there is an accident, an aviation accident, a railroad accident, a boating accident, whatever. There’s a thing called a Go team, and these Go teams are stationed all over the country and indeed all over the world that can, in a very short period of time, arrive at the scene of the accident and take over the investigation from the first responders, which obviously are there initially.

And in that case, that Go team got there with. With Hank Hughes as the lead investigator to that, and they, they arrived early the next morning, like 4 to 5 o’ clock in the morning, and were there. I didn’t arrive in New York until mid to late afternoon. So they were already on scene working the site at the time. Right. They started doing all the normal procedures, which again I lay out in my presentation, and were absolutely astounded shortly thereafter when an individual by the name of James Kallstrom, who is the lead FBI agent in the New York area, arrived at the scene and told them that the FBI was taking over their investigation, although the FBI obviously had no experience in aviation accident investigations.

Yeah, this is quite extraordinary that the FBI comes in and Bigfoots, for lack of a better term, they Bigfoot the NTSB and the FBI. I mean, what the hell do they know about aircraft accidents and safety and, you know, examining an accident. I mean, the presumption is it’s either a crime or terrorism if the FBI is involved. Not. Not failure of an aircraft system. Correct. Well, again, they were looking at it as a bombing. They were looking at another Pan Am 103. Right. But the point is they could be there assisting the NTSB but not take over the investigation.

Exactly. Because there are specific procedures, protocols that are in place every time you have an aircraft investigation. And Kallstrom came in and James Kallstrom was originally a Marine and he had the vocabulary to match and a very forceful individual to say the least. And they basically came in and the rest of his team followed suit and they intimidated the hell out of the NTSB investigators. Basically telling them that if they did anything that the FBI disagreed with, they were not only going to be removed from the investigation, but they might be prosecuted for interfering with a criminal investigation.

Was. Was in process. Hank Hughes and all the rest of them that I talked to after the fact said that they were just astounded. They were appalled that this was going on. And it got worse and worse and worse, which again I discuss and you saw in my presentation, it was unprecedented before or since that the FBI would get involved the way they did. And this, although Kallstrom implemented this, this was way above his pay grade. This, this had to come from someplace much, much higher. And I believe that it came from the White House itself, from the Clinton White House, because as you point out, this event happens about, I don’t know, 115 days before the 1996 presidential election.

And perhaps persons in the White House weren’t too thrilled with the majority of aviation terror attack that close to an election, also just days before the beginning of the 96 Olympics down in Atlanta. So there were a lot of other sort of public relations and political and election related pressures all coming to bear. It wasn’t simply the loss of 230 lives in one aircraft. There were other sort of ripple effect factors, I think, that were pressing on how this investigation was going to be conducted. Well, I think there was an individual by the name of Sandy Berger, and he is an interesting guy.

He was the assistant National Security Advisor to President Clinton. A lot of people are not aware of the fact that either the National Security advisor himself or herself and their assistant, there’s two of them have to be physically there at the White House or wherever the President may be worldwide to provide guidance, national security guidance. And Sandy Berger that particular night was there. And the Clintons both Bill and Hillary Clinton had been at a fundraising thing at a women’s group there in Washington. And they arrived back at the White house at approximately 8:30 at night, which was less than an hour after TW800 had gone down.

Sandy Berger met the limousine and took them up to the living quarters on the second floor of the White House, and they never came down for the rest of the night. This was a serious thing, you think. They would come down to the briefing offices, et cetera, and they did not. Sandy Berger, later on was the guy that you might remember, was at the National Archives and was discovered stuffing papers into his underwear and his socks and then disposing under a dumpster outside the National Archives. And he ended up being convicted of that particular crime. No one has ever been able to determine what papers that he took, which is, you know, another story altogether.

But Bill Clinton was very, very concerned, and Hillary even more so, I believe, of the bad press that would come because Clinton had his own peccadillo City, had dealt with in his first term. And as you say, a US Flag carrier being shot down within sight of the south shore of Long island, killing 230 people was not something that he wanted on his plate at that, given at a time. Right. And he, he was also very concerned that a relatively small incident could come back and bite him in the tail. And again, I think, I personally think because of her personality and everything, that, that Hillary was a big input in this as well.

We got to cover this thing up. And a cover up is like the genie in the bottle. Once the genie comes out, you can’t stuff it back in again. Right. And you see that, you see that at the point where the FBI enters the investigation, like you said, probably at the direction of the White House or at least the Attorney General, because there’s things the FBI does that has nothing to do with how the NTSB would conduct an investigation. So you have FBI agents in the hangar during the reconstruction. They’re pressure washing wreckage, knocking off debris and other elements, whether it’s chemical substance or burn marks or algae or whatever.

They’re pressure washing recovered wreckage. They’re tampering with and even hammering out chunks of fuselage to make it to change the shape of the, the exploded pieces of debris. And then they’re even tagging and moving various, changing the tags, identifying where pieces of debris were recovered and moving them around. And so all the things I’ve just discussed, that doesn’t sound like a very accurate or truthful representation of the condition of the aircraft. Well, again, as I’ve said before, there is protocol that you have. And when you have wreckage that is underwater, what they do is they send out divers.

The divers have a thing that is on their wrist which is basically a GPS unit that gives the exact position and time and so forth, and takes a picture of the wreckage on the bottom. That then with a grease pencil, the diver will mark on the piece the number that corresponds with what he has just taken a picture in with his GPS thing that is then brought to the surface, put on a barge, brought back to the dock, and everything is taken off the barge, taken into the truck, which goes out in this case, to a big aircraft hangar in Calverton, Long island, where they reassembled the wreckage.

And what the NTSB guys were witnessing, as you said, was the FBI, as this stuff was coming in, some of the pieces, they were using a pressure washer, which took the grease pencil markings away and actually cleaned up anything that might have been on the surface of this particular stuff. And we’re taking them to unmarked vans, which the NTSB people protested, and they said, we’re taking it to Washington to our laboratories for testing, and this will be all returned. Well, the problem was all of these things, these markings were taken off the various pieces of wreckage and were not logged in.

They had not. They just basically went away. Right. And you had to trust the FBI was going to bring them back. But again, how did the FBI know where they came from? Because of the fact all of these markings had been washed off. This was absolutely against any protocol and was was illegal. They shouldn’t have done it, but they did. You point out when it finally got to the hangar, there were people using small sledgehammers to hit and deform the wreckage to make it look like they wanted it to look with the scenario that they had developed.

Dr. Tom Stalkup talks specifically about an area on the fuselage that would have clearly shown an impact. And instead they were furiously hammering on it to straighten and flatten it out. So it didn’t show any indication of an outside force acting upon the fuselage of the aircraft. So I think that speaks volumes as well. One of the things you point out that I think is also very disturbing is the NTSB had ordered up a salvage barge from a company called Weeks. Salvage Barge could have been dispatched virtually immediately and gotten to work trying to recover not just portions of the aircraft, but the bodies of those killed.

And instead the FBI came in and said, no, don’t use the weak salvage barge. Instead, we’re going to wait a few days Till the Navy shows up. What’s your. What’s your understanding of that? Well, again, the. The Weeks barge was there. It was in the process of going down, I believe, to a base in Virginia. They had been up in the Massachusetts or main area doing something there, and they had many professional salvage divers on board. The Coast Guard, of course, was aware of everything in that area. And initially they asked Weeks to come to the site of the crash and begin salvage operations.

And Weeks agreed, headed in that direction. And when the FBI heard that the Coast Guard had requested that, they immediately rescinded that and said, no, we’re going to wait for the Navy, which had two different salvage ships, Naval salvage ships. One of them was called the Grapple, and it was closest, but it took almost a week for that to show up. Well, obviously, the beginning thing is when you have bodies on the floor of the ocean, sea creatures, crabs and fish and everything else are going to desecrate the bodies. And the families of the victims were frantic to have these people brought up as quickly as possible, and that was no longer possible.

Also, there is a thing called the interested parties. When you have any sort of an aviation accident, a bunch of different groups, besides the airline itself get involved. The engine manufacturers, the aircraft manufacturer, the company that is operating the airplane, the unions, a whole bunch of different people get involved, and they’re called the interested parties. And because of their particular expertise are part of the salvage operation. They can. They know what something is. It might be just a chunk of metal to a salvage barge group. They know what it is, and they can make sure that it is properly cataloged.

Arguably, you. You would have been one of the designated interested parties, or at least a representative of that because. Absolutely. Because of your leadership position with the pilots association and the unit. Yes, we had. ALPA has system teams that are specialized in various components of the airplane, the engines, the hydraulic system, the wiring, all kinds of various things, and they are there assisting the NTSB investigators as this aircraft is being reconstructed. There was a woman named Valerie Caproni. She was the U.S. attorney for the New York District, and she came out with a ruling that prevented any members of the interested parties, all the unions and the aircraft manufacturer, et cetera, et cetera, from being present on these barges and all kinds of stuff was being brought up.

They even had what they call scallop trawlers that have these nets that go down and drag along the bottom, and all kinds of parts were coming up from these scallop trawlers. And no longer was anybody but the NTSB and the FBI allowed on these barges that were bringing this stuff up. Why was that the case? What possibly could be the reason for that? I mean, that is completely nonsensical because based on what you just described, it would be entirely reasonable to have representatives from Boeing to have, you know, aircraft specialists from twa, a captain like yourself, other.

Other people with specialized knowledge and experience. It would only make sense to have them present to explain and to lay out. That’s that piece of gear. This shouldn’t be here. This is just to. Just to go through the process of recovery. Why would you be frozen out? It doesn’t make sense. No, it doesn’t. And something else that was even more serious was that again, we had all our teams, the ALPA teams who were there, they were there sometimes 8, 10 hours a day working in the hangar under very stressful conditions. And at the end of that period of time, the FBI conducted body searches on these people.

They were not allowed to take anything in the way of notes, no films from the cameras or anything that they had. They were not allowed to take anything out of the hangar under threat of arrest and prosecution. So we had them at a local Holiday Inn there at Calverton, and we would bring our people to the hotel. They would be allowed to go and take a shower, clean up, have a bite to eat, and then we would do a debriefing of them for maybe another couple of hours to try to get them to remember what had they been doing that day, what had they been working on? Because, again, no notes were allowed to be taken out.

All of this was confiscated by the FBI, which was unprecedented, absolutely unprecedented. They were made to feel like criminals rather than accident investigators. This now goes to a interesting development with regard to a journalist. He’s a former detective and now a journalist, investigative journalist at the time, James Sanders, and his wife, who’s a retired flight attendant, and then his connection with a TWA captain you had mentioned briefly in passing, Captain Tracy, can you talk us through what happened in that. That situation? Well, again, Terry Stacy was, on each type of aircraft, there is a captain, a management captain, who oversees that particular airplane, whether it be the Lockheed 1011, the 727, 747, whatever.

There is always a captain who heads up that. And Terry Stacey was that captain for twa. Right. So he was out there virtually every day as they were doing this reconstruction, destruction. And he began realizing that things were not going according to Hoyle. They were just different. And one of the things that was very interesting was that there was right along the section where the front third of the airplane broke off after the explosion, along the wall and the seat backs in that area, there was a strange red residue that nobody could explain what it was.

It wasn’t an adhesive material. It wasn’t anything that would normally be seen on the airplane. And everybody was aware of that. So they asked the FBI to have this tested. And the FBI said, this isn’t necessary. We’re not going to do anything in this area. So Terry Stacy cut a couple of small swatches, very small swatches of this material that had the unusual staining on it. And he knew Sanders and his wife, and he gave a sample of that to him to have it independently analyzed. And they did that. And it came back that it was not adhesive or anything like that, but it did contain materials that were included in rocket fuels, solid rocket fuels.

When the FBI found out that this was going on, they very publicly arrested Terry and the Sanders, CNN and some of the other agencies were there to watch this investigation and arrest. And they were. Finally, Terry Sanders, in order to save his retirement, agreed to admit to a lesser charge. But the Sanders were actually imprisoned, both of them. And this material, all of the information concerning the material was not included in the investigation. There were all kinds of things that occurred, including the doctor who was the coroner for Suffolk county, who had done all the initial investigations and the, the autopsies for the dead as they came out.

He was intimidated greatly too. And one of the things that he pointed out was that when they took the X rays of these people, their bodies were filled with small bits of metal, small bits of metal that were not part of the fuselage of the airplane. He said, testified that they lit up like a Christmas tree. He’d never seen anything like it before. And the eyes, the eyeballs of some of the victims that were on the forward left hand side were actually scorched and they were looking forward or sideways. And the tank that exploded, the center section tank, which did explode, but not from a spark of unknown origin, they were looking completely the wrong direction.

They were looking out to the left where obviously an explosion had occurred outside the aircraft. And that’s what caused the damage to their eyes. I also noted that you made a point of citing the medical examiner or the coroner’s investigation that those bodies had suffered from a super violent sort of side displacement of the aircraft, meaning to the left front, something had occurred that caused the aircraft to sort of lurch in an incredibly violent manner that literally snapped the necks and the spines of the people in that Portion of the aircraft. Yes, indeed. And there’s radar evidence that has come out that shows material exiting the right hand side of the airplane at a speed of in excess of Mach 2 or Mach 3, which obviously was being forced out by an explosion on the other side.

You have to understand that the center section tank had about 70 gallons of again, jet a fuel in it. When that burns, even when it explodes, it’s called a low velocity explosion. That’s what a petroleum explosion is. It looks spectacular, but it is not like an explosive, high explosive explosion which would be caused by, you know, a rocket or artillery shell or whatever. That’s a completely different type of explosion. And what occurs when that happens is much more focused. And again, something blew out the right side of the airplane. And there’s all kinds of evidence of that from radar tracks that shows that happening just prior to the nose being detached from the airplane and the rest of it continuing on.

Doctor, Dr. Tom Stalkup very wisely points out that radar plots don’t worry about a promotion. Radar plots don’t worry about getting their retirement. Radar plots can’t be threatened and intimidated. They just are what they are. It’s scientific data that’s proven. And so when he talks about that Mach 4 debris plume that, that ejection of material out of the right side of the plane, he says it’s objective. It’s, you know, it shows up on radar. It’s so profound. And so something, something ejected and forced material out of the plane at an incredible rate. And that type of an explosion has nothing to do with a petroleum fire or a petroleum explosion that they want you to believe started in a center fuel tank again.

And none of this information was included in the NTSB final report. All of this should come into play after the fact, considerably after the fact. I was contacted by a retired United Airline captain by the name of Dick Russell. And dick was a 747 captain for United. He was an instructor for them and everything. And the night after the TW800 went down, he was called by a friend of his who was at what is called the tracon, that’s the local area radar facility for all of the New York area. And he said, dick, I want you, I have something that I want to show you, but I can’t tell you what it is.

I want you to come up to New York and we’ll talk. So Dick got on an airplane and flew up to New York and went to this gentleman’s home and he showed him a tape that they had. Obviously the tracons are maintaining these tapes. They’re supposed to be maintained for a minimum of six months, I believe. But he had a copy of this tape, which was taken by the. Again by the FBI and removed from the facility, which was against the law. But he had made a copy of this and he showed it to Dick, which showed a high speed trace, non radar trace.

All airplanes that are flying around, airlines and even a lot of light planes have what’s called a transponder on board. And that indicates who it is, the tail name, or in the case of airliners, flight number, the altitude and the speed of. So the controllers, when they’re looking down, they don’t just see a dot going along, they know who that dot is. Right, Right. You also have a thing called skin pain. Sometimes birds or aircraft or other things that don’t have a transponder. And in this case, there was a very high speed skin paint that proceeded on and merged with TWA Hunter’s transponder trace.

And at that time, both of them went away. That’s obviously when something hit the airplane that was given to Dick Russell. And he went down and wrote an article for the local paper and went to a thing called A Quiet Birdman, which is an Aviation association meeting, and described all of this and what had happened the day after that came out. He lived in northern Florida around Daytona Beach. And there was a knock at the door. And he went to the door and he said two guys were standing there. He said it was like something out of a movie.

They’re both standing there in the Florida heat in long black overcoats with aviator sunglasses on and everything. And they confronted him and said, we know you have this tape. If you do not give it to us immediately, we will arrest you and take you away. So Dick, of course, said, sure, I’ve got it and I’ll give it to you right now. And he gave it to him. But these guys weren’t smart enough to realize that he had made copies. And I have seen that myself. That’s great. That’s fantastic. And that particular thing was another issue that a lot of people got involved in what is called araf, the association of Retired Aviation Professionals, which was started up by a retired Navy commander, William Donaldson.

And I described that as well as in the tape. All kinds of people got involved in this and began picking apart what was going on at the NTSB and with the FBI. And it sounds like a fictional novel, but it’s all true. Yeah, there’s a major, an army major, army aviator, Major Myers who was actually up flying that night. And he had the professional experience of having been on the receiving end of surface to air missile fire in Vietnam. So he was keenly aware of what it looked like to be taking ground fire while piloting an aircraft.

And his testimony, based upon his observation that evening is that clearly a missile came from the surface of the water and rose to and struck the aircraft. Somehow he’s been discounted and I don’t understand why or how. And then there’s also the famous witness 73 that Jack Cashel talks about who had her testimony inverted, I mean, literally turned upside down and backwards. And then they lied about her. The implied, the FBI implied in this phone it up statement that she was drinking and the woman doesn’t drink at all. So, I mean, when you have testimony of two people like that, I mean, maybe you can elaborate on that.

You’ve probably met the good major and maybe even spoken to him. I’m not sure. Well, the big thing is the FBI, when they investigate anything, they fill out what’s called a form 302. And that is normally, normally recorded. The interview is recorded in this case, the FBI, when they interviewed Fritz Meyer, who called them and identified himself and told them that he had been giving. He was a major in the New York Air National Guard helicopter and he had been giving a check ride to another pilot at the time of the crash. And they were headed almost directly toward where the missile or missiles, he thought there probably was two that came off the water and rose up and struck the airplane.

And then they were witness to the big petroleum explosion. And they immediately flew in that direction and suddenly were aware that they were being surrounded by objects passing all around them, which were actually bodies of people that had been ejected with the explosion. And they avoided. Thankfully those turned around and came back. And the next day he called the FBI. They didn’t indicate any interest in what he had to say, even though he had identified himself and what he was doing. And he finally went to a trailer that they had somewhere on Long island, demanded to give an interview.

Well, this guy comes out, doesn’t even bother to write anything down for the Form 302 and tells them, we’ll get back to you. Of course, they never did. And Fritz Meyer, during the Vietnam War, was actually in the Navy, he was a naval pilot and he flew rescue helicopters from destroyers off the coast of North Vietnam. So those were the guys. If somebody got shot at and was able to make it away from the area, whether it be Hanoi or Hai Phong or whatever, and Headed back toward the carrier. They would go out and try to pick them up if they had to eject and get on the ground before the North Vietnamese could capture them.

And he had seen, as you said many times, surface to air missiles rise off the ground and strike airplanes. So he knew exactly what he was talking about. Right. And now he had come back and joined the Air National Guard in New York and was a pilot for that. But he was very, very well qualified. If there was anyone that was well qualified, it was Fritz Meyer and his co pilot. The witness 73, of course he referred to this is a woman that because of where she was at a restaurant where a party was going on out on Long Island.

She was the witness that saw initially something come off the water, something explode near the airplane. She saw what was referred to as the white plume, which was when this explosion occurred on the left hand side of the airplane, it shattered the top of the wing which was full of fuel. The hydraulic pressure shattered the top of the wing into very small pieces. And all of the fuel there then went into the slipstream and trailed out behind and it was seen as a white plume coming back behind. She then witnessed the petroleum explosion and the airplane nose come off, fall toward the sea, and then the airplane continue on, roll over and crash.

And she was a person that saw everything from beginning to end, the whole thing, not just part of the sequence. She contacted the FBI, the FBI then interviewed her again. No notes, no tape recording of this whole thing. And they stated later, after the fact, that she had recanted her testimony and she had been drinking Long Island Iced teas, which is a very strong alcoholic drink, and recanted what she had seen. She really didn’t see that she was probably drunk. And she had then agreed to a second interview where she recanted all of this stuff. Well, in fact, there had never been a second interview.

And the lady was a teetotaler. She didn’t drink alcoholic beverages at all. So the FBI just lied through their teeth about the whole thing. And they were two of approximately they felt they had something in the neighborhood of maybe 130 to 150 credible witnesses, I mean very credible witnesses out of about 700 people that saw something. And again, none of this testimony was included in the hearing in Baltimore initial hearing, nor in the final probable cause report. Captain Francis, there’s one last section I want to discuss with you. I think it’s very important you discuss it in your video presentation.

And the way you describe it, it’s so extraordinary that I think our viewers and listeners really should get a little taste for it. And that is there was an effort conducted to test the center wing fuel tanks and it was done in, of all places, the United Kingdom, in England, an effort to try to force or create conditions where the center wing fuel tank would explode. And what you described to me, I mean, it verges on crazy, but they really went out of their way to try to force an explosion. Can you tell our viewers and listeners about that? Yeah.

Again, why this could not have been done in the United States is beyond me. But they went to a place called Brunting Thorpe, England, on a military base there, very secure military base. They brought a center section tank from a similar model 747 that had gone out of service and had been scrapped. So they had the exact same tank and they took the tank and they mounted it on a stand above Bunsen burners, propane burners that heated up the amount of fuel they supposed was in there, approximately 70 gallons. And they heated it up to the temperature that they assumed it was.

When the explosion occurred, which was around 120 to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. The air conditioning packs were down below there. And it’s a thing called a primary cooler exhaust under there that comes out of very hot air being taken, bleed air being taken off the engines. And that would have heated this stuff up, whether that high or not, considering again, it had been up in the air for a period of time and it’s cold at 13,000ft. Right. But at any, at any reason, they heated this fuel up to that assumed temperature. And then with basically a spark plug, they tried to ignite the fuel and the fumes from the fuel, nothing happened.

So they increased the temperature with the burners to where this jet a fuel was now boiling, boiling temperature, and again attempted to ignite the fuel and it would not ignite with this small spark plug. So they got what I described before, which is called a jet igniter. It’s about a foot long thing that there’s several of them in every jet engine that puts out an enormously strong, almost a lightning bolt type spark which is used to ignite the jet, a fuel. And once again the fuel would not ignite, the vapors would not ignite. So the last thing they did is they filled the remaining space in the tank with propane, which of course is very volatile, fired off, and certainly it exploded, but it exploded in such a way and the damage to the tank did not match the wreckage of the center section tank from the TWA 800 airplane.

And this is where you can have what’s called an implosion or an explosion. And if a device had gone through that center section tank, the tank would implode, it would go inward and that all of the rivets and everything on that tank would be sheared in one position. If it exploded from an explosion within the tank, you would have the rivets shear outward and the tank would go outward. And this is where the guys with the small sledgehammers that were pounding on the metal for the tank, right, they were making it look like what they, the scenario that they had developed for this explosion.

And this was what was witnessed by TWA people and NTSB people who again were threatened by the FBI who claimed it never happened, even though they saw it happen, and again threatened to remove them or arrest them for interfering with this investigation. Well, Captain Francis, I can tell you that, you know, there’s a lot of pressure and actually some movement, thankfully, to declassify a lot of long held secrets. Things about the JFK assassination, things about UFOs or UAPs as they call them now. And so there’s, there are some efforts to really get to some transparency and get some accountability on sort of long held mysteries or things that people think that there’s a cover up on.

There’s a pretty extensive list, frankly. I mean, you can. And it’s not just jfk. I mean, there’s stuff about Oklahoma City bombing, I think that needs to be released. Certainly the Las Vegas shooting back in 2017. There’s an awful lot of these tragedies that have happened that the government has produced an answer for that’s not very convincing or very satisfying. And I really believe that TWA 800 is one among several of these cases where something horrific has happened. In TWA’s case, it’s the loss of 230 souls on that flight. And the answers and the official response from the government is frankly pathetic.

And really, as you pointed out, there are some extraordinary examples that people are either lying or manipulating to come up with an approved answer. Judicial Watch just in the last week has sued the Central Intelligence Agency to compel production of records concerning TWA Flight 800. There’s that ridiculous video that the CIA made. A friend of mine, now deceased, who was a PhD rocket scientist, literally for the Office of Science and Technology at the CIA. He laughed at that. He called it a cartoon and said that the, the person who represented the CIA and tried to convince people that, you know, that that representation of what happened to the flight was preposterous, that the guy briefing was essentially a sock puppet who would say anything he was told to say.

There’s. There’s a lot of. There’s a lot of issues, and there’s a lot of unanswered questions that the public has been demanding answers for. And I’m going to give you the last word on all of this. But I just would ask that the Trump administration, you know, Director Gabbard perhaps on her way out of office, that they finally release all the documentation, all the records, and, and give TWA 800 another look and a clean review of exactly what happened. Because I think the American public, and certainly the families of those 230 people killed, they’re owed it.

I mean, you can’t have something like this happen and then just shrug and come up with some phony explanation and everyone’s just supposed to accept it. Captain, I’m going to come back to you for the final word on this. How would you like to close out? Well, again, as I said in the beginning, 230 people, including a whole bunch of teenagers from a small town in Pennsylvania who are going with their. With their French club members and their teachers to Paris. It wiped out a large portion of the teenagers in this small Pennsylvania town from the high school.

But all kinds of other people were killed that night in a very violent way. And we have a situation where it can be made right, but it’s going to require the powers that be to do the right thing. We’ve got so many things going on right now, and this happening almost 30 years ago is ancient history, but it’s not ancient history to the friends and families of the victims. I went with my wife to the funeral of the one crew member of that crew that I did not know he was brand new. He was being instructed as a brand new higher flight engineer on the flight, and his name was Oliver Crick.

And at that meeting, I mean, he was a very young man in his early 20s. And I went to that very sad funeral with my wife in a suburb of Denver, Colorado, and I told the Cricks at the time that what was being portrayed as the truth was not. And I would make it my life’s work, as long as I’m on this Earth to get the truth for them and get the real reason that their son died that night laid out before the public. And I have worked all these years since trying to get something done.

It’s frustrating because you are, as Jack Cashel told you, you instantly refer to as some sort of conspiracy theorist. I’m not basing any of the stuff that I’ve told you tonight or in my presentation on theories. I’m basing you on the facts as I know them and I know them pretty well. And I hope that President Trump, whether it’s through Tulsi Gabbard or any other member of the administration, the current head of the ntsb, are willing to allow all of this information to come out and be examined in a redone TWA 800 NTSB investigation done in a proper manner and not under the manner that it was, which is extremely political and has never been done before or since, to the best of my knowledge.

There’s also one last thing that you have to understand. If the FAA truly believed and the NTSB truly believed that these 747s which all had the same center section tank, all had the same wiring at etc were potentially flying bombs, they would have put forth an action that the FAA is perfectly capable of doing, grounding all those airplanes. They did it twice on the DC 10. They did it at least once on the 737 because of things that were quite dangerous and needed to be addressed. They have never done that with that airplane. Never. Not before, not after.

And as you said, those airplanes have flown under conditions where they were much, much hotter, the fuel was much, much hotter. They never, ever had any sort of an accident. It needs to be investigated. It needs to be adjudicated in the proper fashion. And I thank you so much at Judicial Watch for taking the time and the care to try to make that happen. DWA Captain Al Francis, thank you so much for joining us. We sincerely appreciate it. You’re quite welcome, sir, and thank you. I’m Chris Farrell Judicial Watch.
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