peter bergin, joining us from washington. peter, we have seen these theories pop up before in other aviation disasters. how do these square with reality once the facts are actually known? well, often, they don t, wolf. of course. you recall twa 800, which fell out of the sky in the atlanta shortly after leaving jfk airport. a another people saying they saw missiles going up hitting the plane, turned out to be unreliable eye-witnesses. peter sallinger, jfk s press secretary said a navy ship, and because of his position, some took that seriously. and after the longest investigation that the national transportation safety board has ever done, after four years, concluded it was a spark in the central fuel tank that caused the explosion. and we have seen this also in cases like egyptair, where ntsb came to the conclusion that the plane had been brought down in the atlantic by a pilot
alert here in the united states. 747s don t blow up in fireballs seen for 40 miles. the missile theory is not new. back at the time, a journalist said he had evidence that it was friendly fire from the navy gunners. what do you make of that? peter sallinger spent some time in the u.s. senate. over in france, apparently three sheets to the wind, waving a piece of paper say thing is a report from french intelligence that says the uss normandy shot down this plane, which was absolute total bunk. it was the rantings of some nut on the internet and it was debunked. the technology has changed a lot since then. do you think it would make sense for the ntsd, the fbi to bring together a team and at least run the same tests using the new technology to see if they see anything different? i don t see anything wrong with that. the day i had my closing press
thousand agents on this investigation. we took the missile theory, the possibility of missile brought down the plane very, very seriously. you know, at that time in 96, we were at a very high state of alert here in the united states. 747s don t blow up in fireballs seen for 40 miles. the missile theory is not new. back at the time, a journalist said he had evidence that it was friendly fire from the navy gunners. what do you make of that? peter sallinger spent some time in the u.s. senate. over in france, apparently three sheets to the wind, waving a piece of paper saying this is a report from french intelligence that says the uss normandy shot down this plane, which was absolute total bunk. it was the rantings of some nut on the internet and it was debunked. the technology has changed a lot since then. do you think it would make sense for the ntsd, the fbi to bring together a team and at least run