Night Fall

“You know this guy?”

“No. I only read his statements in the news. He was frustrated by the direction the investigation was heading and by the fact that his eyewitness account was dismissed, so he went public.”

“What’s this guy’s name?”

“Your wife can tell you. Or you can look it up.”

“Right.”

Captain Spruck informed me, “I didn’t need this. There was nothing in this for me to say anything about that streak of light. I could have just called the Coast Guard to report what I thought was an air crash and given them the location-which was the first thing I did. But then I described the streak of light, and the duty officer started getting a little strange on me. I gave him my name, address, and phone numbers. He thanked me and hung up. At noon, the next day, your wife showed up at my door.” He editorialized, “She’s very nice, by the way. You’re a lucky man.”

“Oh, I thank God every day.”

“You should.”

“Right. Okay, so you have some issues here about how your eyewitness account was not taken as gospel in the final report. You feel you were not believed, or that the FBI concluded that you were mistaken or confused about what you saw.”

He replied,“They were confused. What I saw, Mr. Corey, to get right down to it, was a surface-to-air missile that apparently destroyed its target-a commercial Boeing 747-and nothing that’s happened since then can shake my account of what I saw or cause me to regret coming forward.”

“You must have some regrets. You just said, ‘I didn’t need this.’”

“I… this has been very difficult… I did my duty and continue to do it, whenever asked.” He looked at me and asked, “If this case is closed, why are you here?”

“I’m just trying to make the wife happy on my day off.” Of course, by now, I realized that Mr. John Corey himself was not happy with the official version of events, thanks to Ms. Mayfield and Captain Spruck.

Captain Spruck informed me, “The other people I had been sailing with went back to the yacht club for the barbeque-about fifteen of them, joined by spouses and family. About twelve of these people, out on the back lawn of the club or sitting on the veranda, all saw this streak of light simultaneously. This was not a mass hallucination.”

“You know, Captain, I don’t think anyone doubts that the two hundred people who saw that streak of light actually saw it. The question is, What was it? And did it have anything to do with the explosion and crash of the 747?”

“I told you what it was.”

I said to him, “Okay, then, back to the streak of light. The last time we saw it, it had momentarily disappeared. Correct?”

“That’s correct. And that’s consistent with a missile in close proximity to a target if the target is between the observer and the missile. Follow?”

“Yeah. The plane was in front of the missile.”

“Correct. Or the propellant was expended and the missile was now ballistic. But to back up a few seconds, before I saw the missile change course, and before it disappeared, I again noticed the 747.” He continued, “My instincts… my training and my experience told me that this missile was on a course that would bring it into contact with the aircraft.” He took a deep breath and said, “To be honest with you, my blood ran cold, and my heart skipped a beat.”

“And you were back over North Vietnam.”

He nodded and said, “But just for a moment… then, I refocused on the aircraft and divided my attention between the aircraft and the streak of light. The light disappeared, as I said, then two seconds later, I saw a flash of light coming from the aircraft, around the midsection, somewhere near the wings, then a second later, I saw a very large explosion that separated the aircraft into at least two parts.”

“How would you explain that sequence of events?”

He replied, “Well, if the sequence of events began with a center fuel tank explosion, then the first explosion would have been the missile strike that detonated the fuel vapors in the center fuel tank, and that explosion then ignited one of the full wing tanks-the left one according to the accident investigators-which was the cause of the catastrophic explosion.”

I asked him, “Did you come to those conclusions immediately?”

“No. I was focused for a time on the aircraft itself, as it came apart…” He seemed momentarily at a loss for words to describe this, then said, “The… nose section separated and dropped almost straight down into the sea. Then, without the weight of the nose section, and with the engines still ru

I let a few seconds pass, then said, “I guess you’ve seen planes shot down by surface-to-air missiles.”

“I have. Seven of them. But nothing that big.”

“Did it shake you up a bit?”

He nodded, then said, “I hope you never see a plane falling out of the sky, but if you do, it will stay with you forever.”

I nodded.

Captain Spruck glanced out at the sky and said, “From the time I saw the explosion to the time when I heard it was about thirty or forty seconds.” He looked at me and said, “Sound travels at about one mile every five seconds, so I figured I was about seven miles from the explosion-altitude and distance. Nearly everyone who saw the streak of light saw itbefore they heard the explosion, not the other way around as the official conclusion would have you believe.”

I leaned my butt against the rail, facing away from the ocean. Captain Spruck remained standing, looking out to sea like a ship’s captain, I thought, standing watch, alert, but at the same time hypnotized by the dark sea and sky. He said, as if to himself, “The fuel was burning on the water now and the sky was lit by the fires… black and white smoke billowed… I thought about setting sail toward the crash, but… that’s a long haul for a Sunfish on the ocean… and if I got that far, I wouldn’t be able to control the Sunfish around all that burning fuel.” He looked at me and said, “I knew there would be no survivors.”

I stayed quiet awhile, then I asked him, “Could you guess whatkind of missile this could have been? I mean, if it was a missile. You know, like heat-seeking? What’s the other kind?”

“Radar-guided or infrared-guided.” He asked me, “Do you want a quick lesson in surface-to-air missiles?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I can tell you what this missile was not. It was not a shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile.”

“How do you know?”

“For one thing, their range is too short to engage a target at thirteen thousand feet. Also, any heat-seeking missile would seek out the biggest heat source-the engine-and all four engines of the 747 were recovered with no significant damage. So that leaves either radar-guided or infrared. We can rule out radar-guided because a radar-guided missile sends out a strong radar signal that would be picked up by other radar-especially all that military radar out there that night-and there were no ground or air radar sightings of an object tracking toward the 747. Therewas one anomalous blip recorded from a single sweep of an air traffic control radar in Boston, but that was thought to be a glitch. It could, however, have been an actual sighting of an infrared missile whose radar signature would be nearly invisible given its small size and high speed. In other words, what we might be seeing is a third-generation infrared-guided surface-to-air missile, launched from a boat or aircraft-though a boat is more likely.”

I thought about all this, then asked, “Who has this kind of missile, and how do you get one?”

“Only the U.S., Russia, England, and France make such a sophisticated surface-to-air missile. Whereas there are probably hundreds of shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles on the black market, these long-range infrared-guided missiles are strictly accounted for and never given or sold to another country. Russia’s accounting system, however, is not that good, so it’s possible that one of these infrareds got into the wrong hands for the right money.”