theories the most puzzling, they are often held by people who are not crazy at all. that s right. often the people who want to do us harm and have violence on their mind, they aren t actually crazy in any political sense. there are networks of people who have terrible views of the united states that are based not on reality but how information is spreading in the networks and that is a serious challenge in the coming decades. certainly in the most recent case is the airplane mystery, people are fascinated by mysteries but those involved, those directly involved, the families, are sort of inundated with conspiracy theories and generating their own partly because fueled by all of the confusion, the misleading leads. we had another one today where the search zone was moved. if i were a family member, you
a thai satellite has detected about 300 objects floating in the ocean in the search area for flight 370. it is 120 miles away from where a french satellite spotted 122 objects over the weekend. for now, the families of the missing passengers are left waiting. today, authorities suspended searches for the second time this week citing severe weather. according to the head of the american navy surveillance team, the search zone is plagued by severe turbulence, severe icing and basically zero visibility. joining me now is nbc s tom costel costello. how confident should we be we are on to a real lead given the number of objects sighted in just the past few days? i think fa that s why people are thinking this may be something. back to the weather, you saw the
images from perth, australia, the plane coming in. perth is right about here and they ve got pretty good weather, as you can see, blue skies. the trouble is the search zone is down in this area here. this is about, as we said many times, 1,600 miles, like flying from new york to denver. so new york s weather is not going to be denver s weather. right? and they have had horrendous weather conditions. they ve had very low visibility. they ve had icing, high winds, and also, you know, the water is nothing but white tops. imagine looking for any debris in an ocean of nothing but white tops and you ve got waves of 10, 20, 30 feet high and gusting winds and icing conditions. it s treacherous. it s dangerous. so they pulled those teams back today, back to perth, australia. they re hoping to get out tomorrow, but weather may again impede that and then on sunday more bad weather is coming. that s the situation. it s that time of year in that part of the world. all right. now let s talk about th
on the winds in this region worldwide. the sailors use this route, but you look at the weather pattern. clouds in the area, thunderstorms possible, but scattered in the region. rain fall minimal, but the concern is gusty winds. as high as 55 to 60 kilometers per hour. so tropical storm force winds in this region over the next couple of days. just switching the routers and showing you where the storm system is, where the satellite pings were and the search system coming down from the southern arc. you see the storm system, the only weather maker in this part of the world, happens to be located on the northern fringe of the search zone. so it s beginning to exit, but it will make it treacherous for the officials out there to see what they can spot below. so many people waiting on the information from those planes.
necessarily what the pilots flying the surveillance aircraft this evening are going to see over the southern indian ocean at the moment. so, john, what i m curious about here, it seems it was just a few days ago, this search really focused on that southern arc, in this area we re now looking at. now we ve had this breakthrough. can you explain what happened? was it just a lucky break? well, look, there s a number of systems that are operating in australia s surveillance space. there s the radar network, and the pine gap satellite system. the operational radar network is a system that uses ion spheric radar detection over the horizon. that spans most of the eastern indian ocean to australia s north. covering this zone and beyond depending on the ion spherics. but the thing is, traditionally