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My hometown newspaper, the Falmouth Enterprise, is one of the last independent community news institutions. Usually it covers town meetings, local zoning issues, births, deaths, the weather and, most importantly, fishing. When I was a kid, I delivered the Enterprise. I've had my photos and letters published in it. It recorded my marriage and the deaths of my father and mother. It is a window on the community that's more than a little bit personal.

There's a standing joke around town about how badly the Enterprise screws up facts, but I've checked with other Woods Hole people who deal with larger media, like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and the consensus is the big guys screw it up at least as often as the Enterprise. [Check my recent experience with the Chicago Tribune.]

Occasionally the Enterprise has an article of greater than local import. (Here's one example.) Now the Enterprise has published an article of huge potential significance! It gains further credence from its consistency with a recent conversation I had with a well-placed aircraft industry insider, and from the integrity of the world-renowned Woods Hole scientific community.

The article below was published on Page 3 of The Falmouth Enterprise, February 23, 2007, and is reprinted with the newspaper's permission:

Woods Hole Resident Hopes To Expose Government Cover-Up of Flight 800

By MARK A. BROWN
More than a decade after TWA Flight 800 exploded south of Long Island, New York, a Woods Hole man believes his persistence is finally yielding some evidence that the US government may have covered up the true cause of the tragedy.
Thomas F. Stalcup of High Street, Woods Hole, runs Upward Innovations Inc., which makes wireless data transceivers for weather stations. In April 1999, he founded Flight 800 Independent Research Organization and remains its chairman.
Dr. Stalcup, who holds a doctorate in physics, said federal agencies and departments are finally responding to legal pressure and releasing information about the plane’s breakup. The Boeing 747 jet, heading east shortly after takeoff from New York City en route to Paris, disintegrated about eight miles offshore on July 17, 1996.
In its final report, the National Transportation Safety Board blamed the nighttime explosion on an electrical spark from a frayed pump wire inside a fuel tank. Dr. Stalcup and others maintain that a missile fired during a US military exercise struck the plane. He cites more than 60 eyewitness accounts, which he has carefully scoured, that describe a bright, flare-like object flying upward from the water and changing direction toward the jet.
He filed suit in US District Court last July against the NTSB seeking the release of the records, including debris field maps, salvage logs, divers’ logs, and radar and sonar data.
Late last year, some of those records began arriving, including a CD of radar data from the NTSB. Earlier this month he received phone calls from the US Coast Guard and the Federal Aviation Administration to arrange supply of further data.
The radar data, Dr. Stalcup said, shows an object approaching from the north and colliding with the left side of the plane as it flew east. That same data show debris exiting the right side of the plane, he said.
That agrees with a US Navy salvage report that aircraft debris was found on the sea floor south of the flight path, he said. “The hair stood up on the back of my neck when I saw wreckage had been recovered in that area,” Dr. Stalcup said. Based on the radar readings, he said, “the Navy recovered it exactly where it should have been.”
Dr. Stalcup said the NTSB originally maintained that the closest naval vessel was 180 miles away at the time of the explosion, yet he now has data he said that proves US Navy submarines were conducting exercises 40 miles from where the fuselage hit the water. A P-3 Orion submarine hunter aircraft was three miles away, he said.
Dr. Stalcup is not the first to dispute the events that led to the tragedy.
Investigative journalist James Sanders, in his 1997 book, The Downing of TWA Flight 800, made a case for a Navy missile hitting the plane. On its website, the Associated Retired Aviation Professionals presents evidence suggesting a shoulder-fired missile could have brought down the TWA Flight 800.
However Dr. Stalcup doubts that was the case. “The plane was too high,” he said, deflecting the possibility of a rogue terrorist attack. The jet’s last recorded altitude was about 13,200 feet above the water, according to an NTSB report.
Dr. Stalcup is hoping renewed media attention to the incident will reveal the truth to the public. The Discovery Channel interviewed him for Best Evidence, a documentary that aired in January, which he lauded for exposing the radar and debris field evidence.
Cable News Network also recently aired a documentary on the crash, “No Survivors,” but Dr. Stalcup took its producers to task for not pressing government agencies and officials or verifying the information they provided. “It’s a classic example of the media not doing its job,” he said. “If CNN isn’t holding their feet to the fire, the government will do whatever they want.”
What began as a curiosity for Dr. Stalcup became an obsession after his efforts to obtain information from government agencies and departments were met with resistance. Twice he requested data and records related to the crash and recovery of debris under the Freedom of Information Act, but the National Transportation Safety Board declined them. Two subsequent appeals were ignored, he said.
“I was just an interested citizen” at the time of the tragedy, which occurred while he was a graduate student working toward his doctorate at Florida State University. “What the government was telling the public didn’t make sense.”
Now that information is coming forth, Dr. Stalcup said, “I want to keep the momentum going.”

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