Some interesting, though far fetched ideas in here. Incredibly let down by complete lack of basic pre-print checks and copy editor - I counted more than 15 typos or errors which is terrible even for an Amazon printed book. This is ironic given he talked in the book about seeing Blaine Gibson as credible because he was a competent speller, which “means a lot when you’re dealing with people on the internet”.
The book does pull together information on the case fairly well but always with a sense of distrust of all government agencies involved and what’s more a sense of righteousness over very complex scientific matters. This is intriguing from someone who is a science journalist and not a scientist.
I became intrigued by MH370 though not as much as Jeff. I’m not an expert but an avid amateur sleuth on this case, having read many of the formal reports on the tragedy. I always find alternative views and theories interesting and give them due consideration but Jeff focuses too much on tid bit pieces of information and often the lack of something to justify his, in my view fanciful, theory of a Russian backed northward hijacking landing in Kazakhstan.
For example, he dismissed without verification Salua’s military radar as being off so not able to notice the plane on a northern journey just because the Andaman’s was turned off. No sign by any nation, ATC or force is to me the biggest sign making a northern journey not credible.
Perhaps most of all, he overlooks or unjustly explains away considerable evidence that points to the Ockham’s razor explanation. The amount of leaps, cover ups and remarkably unlikely technical and surreptitious activities that need to have occurred for his theory are many more than the Ockham’s explanation. Though obviously Ockham’s doesn’t preclude a very unlikely situation from occurring (as in my view occurred in terms of a southern suicide scenario with useless ATC/Malaysia Airlines). As he posits but in bad writing form, he failed to explain or justify the core of his argument - he argued at length that he believes the Inmarsat metadata handshakes were falsified in some way (his sole basis for a northward journey proposition) but his only basis for this is that the Russian on board plugged in a black box device to the electronics bay under the business class hatch minutes into the flight (not bothering to explain how that would go unseen so early in a flight when people are awake) that spoofed the metadata in a way that gave readings suggestive of a southern journey while it actually flew north. Russia’s approach to MH17 was to blow it up in plain sight with a missile launcher - while I see how that was aimed at distracting from Russias’s Ukraine activities it just isn’t credible that a group of Russians and Ukrainians together pulled this off in such a completely perfect way. He admitted in the book that even if it was possible to come up with a piece of tech that could spoof the satellite readings, one would have to know in advance how Inmarsat would delve into the metadata to pick apart and backwards engineer the plane’s journey - something which Inmarsat had never done and didn’t know would work until they tried. In effect, he back fills a theory with knowledge and information that could only have been known after the event.
From the above you’ll probably gather that I’m in the pilot suicide or hypoxia journey south until the plane dived into oblivion with some discrepancies in final moments which meant it was off course vs the search zone. This book gave me confidence that I could write a book of equal length with my own arguments but better written with no typos - maybe I should do that.