The facts in the disappearance of flight MH370

I'm going to do another of these posts where I've watched a stupid Netflix documentary and it's left me profoundly unsatisfied. This time it was MH370: The Plane That Disappeared, on Malaysia Airlines flight 370, the Boeing 777 that vanished in 2014 on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and inexplicably ended up crashing in the Indian Ocean.

What's annoying about the three-part documentary series is that it does such a bad job of presenting the actual facts of the case. What's downright irresponsible, in fact unethical, is that they give huge amounts of screen time to fantasists hawking ridiculous conspiracy theories. So, just to register my protests, I want to go over what we actually know about the MH370 incident, and then say a few words about the so-called "theories" presented on the show.

**

Let's start with the facts. Sadly, the official report released by the Malaysian government doesn't seem to be online any more, or at least I couldn't access it. So I'll be doing this based on secondary sources, with the help of Wikipedia.

Here's a useful map from Wikimedia Commons, which shows the known flight path of MH370.

Here are the facts of the matter.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, a Boeing 777 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, took off at 12:41 MYT (UTC+8). At 01:19, the flight was approaching the border between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace, and Kuala Lumpur air traffic control instructed them to get in touch with Ho Chi Minh ATC. The captain of MH370 acknowledged the message.

However, MH370 never got in touch with Vietnamese air traffic control. Instead, as it passed navigational waypoint IGARI, the plane's transponder stopped transmitting.

A short digression is in order, as aviation people apparently say "radar" to mean two different things, which is confusing for a layperson, and terribly confusing for someone who knows a little about military aviation. What I believe most of us think of as radar, i.e. an electronic transmitter that detects objects based on their radar reflection, is apparently known in aviatiom as primary radar. When popular accounts of MH370 say that the aircraft "disappeared from radar", they mean secondary radar, which isn't actually a radar system at all in the sense I understand it, but rather a system similar to military IFF, which communicates with transponders on aircraft. When MH370's transponder stopped transmitting, air traffic control could no longer see it on secondary radar.

Military radar data would later show that the plane then made a sharp (at least for a passenger plane) turn left, onto a southwesterly heading. The official investigation would later determine that the turn could not have been done by autopilot, and therefore must have been made by hand. So either some frankly unbelievable sequence of events occurred on board, or someone deliberately turned the aircraft using the flight controls.

After flying to a point very near the island of Penang, the aircraft made a right turn and flew up the Strait of Malacca, along an established air route, passing several waypoints, until it flew out of the range of Malaysian military radar at 02:22. Thai military radar also detected an aircraft believed to be MH370, and as it passed Penang at 01:52 MYT, the first officer's cellphone briefly registered with a nearby cell tower.

After the plane's transponder stopped transmitting, the satellite communication system on the aircraft rebooted and established contact with an Inmarsat satellite. Using the satellite communication data, it was later determined that MH370 kept flying west, and then turned south, into the southern Indian Ocean. As the aircraft had limited fuel, there were no possible landing sites in the vicinity, and pieces of debris confirmed as coming from that specific Boeing 777 were later found, it seems that flight MH370 eventually crashed into the ocean. Because the specific crash site is not known and the conditions and size of the area make searching extremely difficult, the wreck has not been found as of this writing.

As I understand it, while the initial hard turn off the plane's expected flight path must have been made by hand, the subsequent turns could have been flown by autopilot, but in that case, someone must have programmed the autopilot to do so. Again, it seems almost impossible to conceive of any other explanation. Based on the evidence that exists, it is a fact that MH370 flew into the Indian Ocean and crashed there. It seems very difficult to believe that it was not flown there intentionally by someone.

**

Unfortunately, the Netflix program does not make these basic facts at all clear, and indeed omits some of them. It's probably not a coincidence that some of the absolutely bizarre conspiracy theories peddled on the show require this omission of facts.

Something that genuinely annoys me is when people ask rhetorical questions that they absolutely should be asking as real questions. A particularly egregious example on the Netflix show is the French reporter, who points out that MH370 "supposedly" flew right over Malaysia, in fact almost directly over a Malaysian airbase. She then asks, rhetorically, whether it's supposed to be possible that no-one would have noticed this and attempted to intercept the plane.

In my capacity as a military historian, let me assure you that the answer to any question that starts "could a military organization be so incompetent" is yes. This is almost certainly true of all human organizations, but the ones I've studied happen to be military. In this case, as can be read online (ironically, in French!), the air base MH370 overflew was not in operation at night. Even if someone had wanted to intercept the unknown radar contact, it would have taken two hours to get a plane in the air. Is this believable? In my opinion, absolutely. It also explains much of the delay in publishing the radar data, as no nation will want to advertise the fact that they don't, or even worse, can't effectively police their own airspace.

If you still think it's unbelievable that an unidentified aircraft could fly through air defenses without being intercepted, well, by coincidence I gave a lecture on the Soviet Union and the Cold War earlier this year, where I discussed the extraordinary flight of Mathias Rust.

**

Sadly, instead of concentrating on the facts and some sensible attempts to explain what happened, two of three Netflix episodes are dedicated to totally ridiculous conspiracy theories.

The first is peddled by an American journalist, who has been inexplicably elevated to the position of Will Buxton in the program. His version of events is that Russia hijacked the aircraft, flew it to Kazakhstan, and... something. Ostensibly to distract everyone from their invasion of the Crimea. The story is childish nonsense. Obviously it would make sense for the Russians to risk a catastrophic breach in their relations with China as they're embarking on a military operation in Europe. Murdering over a hundred Chinese civilians for a stupid media distraction is completely insane.

The hijack theory is foreshadowed by linking it to the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 by Russian-controlled "separatists" in Ukraine. But no link between the two is actually ever made, except that apparently the shootdown of MH17 gave the American journalist vibes.

A far more serious objection to the Russia/Kazakhstan theory is that there's simply no way the plane could have been flown there without anyone noticing. It would have had to cross vast swathes of Indian and Chinese airspace, either completely undetected by anyone, or with the inexplicable complicity of at least those nations. There's simply no excuse for taking drivel like this seriously.

However, it gets so much worse. In the first episode, we already encountered a lady from Florida who participated in a volunteer satellite imagery interpretation operation called Tomnod. Apparently it was an effort to crowdsource looking for things in publicly available satellite pictures.

As this article in the Guardian makes clear, Tomnod volunteers have no training in satellite image interpretation. So when the Florida lady cheerfully explains to us that she found aircraft wreckage in some of the pictures, this is frankly nonsense. She can't tell a crashed aircraft from a wave or a flock of seagulls. This is never explained on the show, and we're simply left with this woman insisting she has "evidence" MH370 crashed in the South China Sea. Apparently she couldn't get Tomnod or indeed anyone else to take her "evidence" seriously, to their credit.

Sadly, she is taken very seriously by a French journalist, whose idiotic conspiracy theory takes up almost all of the third episode. With the help of a man who tragically lost his partner and child on the flight, she spins a moronic story that is totally implausible from start to finish, which must have been obvious to anyone with even a cursory understanding of, say, military aviation.

The French story is that MH370 was carrying some kind of super secret Chinese cargo, which the Americans were determined to stop from reaching Beijing. Supposedly, two E-3 AWACS planes intercepted MH370, jammed its communications and ordered it to divert somewhere. When the flight crew refused, the Americans shot the plane down. Everything we've been told about the plane turning west and so on is a deliberate lie to conceal this.

It's hard to know where to even start with this. AWACS planes have no radio jamming capability. If somehow they'd made enough noise to stop MH370 from communicating and mask its transponder signal, this would have been very obvious to everyone around. The AWACS planes are also completely unarmed, so then some other aircraft would have shot down the plane. This would all have been clearly visible on Malaysian and Vietnamese radar screens.

Also, by the way, all the debris from the shootdown inexplicably vanished, with none of it washing up anywhere on the nearby coasts. When small amounts of debris are recovered from the actual crash, that "proves" it didn't really happen. When a made-up crash produces no debris whatsoever, somehow this isn't a problem.

This "theory" also requires all of the evidence to the contrary to have been faked. The Inmarsat data is just completely made up, as is the Malaysian, Vietnamese and Thai radar data, and the cellphone tower ping at Penang. Instead of saying the plane crashed or disappeared, supposedly a massive Malaysian-Vietnamese-Thai-UK deception operation was set into action, telling an almost unbelievable fake story that captures interest and imagination a decade later. Some coverup!

The hawkers of this idiocy make it amply clear on the program that they have no idea what they're talking about. They don't seem to know what an AWACS plane even is, let alone what electronic jamming is. They have literally zero evidence for anything. They can't tell us what cargo could even in theory have been so important that the US armed forces would deliberately shoot down a passenger airliner to stop it getting to China. The whole thing is raving madness, and none of the glaring holes in the supposed logic, none of the ludicrously false statements, are in any way challenged. It amounts to pure disinformation.

**

Speaking as a historian, the most fundamental problem with these crackpot theories is not how stupid they are. It's that they're asking us to believe in incredibly elaborate deception operations, and discount factual evidence, in favor of a "theory", or rather an entirely baseless conjecture, that even if you accept its premises, still doesn't do a better job of explaining what happened.

In history terms, none of the alternate explanations for what happened to flight MH370 have better explanatory power than the ones based on what we believe are the facts. To put it crudely, we're being asked to discard facts and official investigative findings, and we're not being offered anything better in exchange.Why should I believe that the Inmarsat data is faked, or that the Malaysian air force is lying about their radar data? What better understanding of the case do I arrive at if I do that? None whatsoever.

That's the most elementary test that all of these conjectures fail, and it's why I consider them nonsense conspiracy theories. They're disinformation: deliberate lies cooked up to sell books and media appearances, at the expense of real people who lost loved ones in the tragedy. It's beyond repulsive that Netflix collaborates with these ghouls.

**

There are some theories of how the otherwise inexplicable flight of MH370 could have been caused by an accident. Two are dealt with quite well in this blogpost, even if I don't quite agree with its conclusions. The problem with all accident theories, in my opinion, is that the accident would have to have happened at such an incredibly convenient time, at the exact handover point between two air traffic control stations. Of course it's entirely possible that this is what happened, but it's a hell of a coincidence.

Where I disagree with the blog I linked just now is that I also find the most popular theory, that the captain of the aircraft deliberately crashed the plane into the ocean, equally difficult to believe. There's been so much nonsense talked about the captain that it's quite hard to figure out what the truth is. As far as I know, no-one has been able to explain why he would have done it, and my understanding is that the significance of the recovered flight simulator data is unclear. It certainly doesn't prove anything, and I think the blog I linked is wildly incorrect in maintaining that other explanations have been eliminated. They certainly have not been.

Even though I clearly know more about military aviation than some of the people involved in that risible television program, that's an indictment of them and Netflix, not a sign that I'm any kind of expert on anything related to this case. Still, since this is my blog, I can offer up my two cents on the whole thing.

My starting point is that someone selected the route that MH370 flew from the point where the transponder was switched off. If someone wanted to make the flight disappear, that handover point between two ATC areas has to be the best possible place to do it. This is the contention at the heart of the popular theory that the pilot did it, for which there is still no actual evidence whatsoever.

It would also be the best possible place to hijack the aircraft, especially if you wanted to fly it to some completely different destination and wanted to get a head start on the authorities. I think this theory has been unfairly discounted.

The specific objection I want to make is to the idea that hijacking can be discounted because the various authorities have checked up on all the passengers and crew, and found no-one to suspect. I maintain that with the information we have now, no-one can possibly know whether there were people on board MH370 who should not have been there.

People do stow away on planes, often in wheel wells, and it mostly ends badly for them. But only last year, someone survived an 11-hour flight from South Africa (or at least Nairobi) to Amsterdam (BBC). If someone wanted to hijack a plane, one way it could be done would be by stowing away on board.

This may sound implausibly far-fetched, but something like this has happened at least once: in 1986, a man snuck on board an airplane at Eugene, Oregon and hijacked it when it was in flight (UPI).

The same arguments that are made in favor of the pilot hypothesis also support the hijack hypothesis, for example, the choice of a flight path down the middle of the Strait of Malacca, along the border of different national airspaces. If I remember correctly, when only the military radar data was available, it was calculated that there were hundreds of airfields that the plane could have flown to after it left Malaysian radar coverage.

What if someone, one or more people, did secretly board the plane, hijack it over the South China Sea, and order the pilots to fly the route the plane flew? I'm not aware of any evidence that contradicts this. It's a somewhat far-fetched scenario, sure - but so are all of the other explanations.

By a startling coincidence, the first ever fatal crash suffered by Malaysia Airlines happened in 1977, when it was still called Malaysian Airline Systems. Flight MH653, a Boeing 737 from Penang to Kuala Lumpur, was hijacked and diverted to Singapore. The hijackers were told that the plane didn't have enough fuel to reach Singapore, and they then apparently shot the pilots, and the plane crashed. Everyone on board died. As I understand it, nobody ever really found out who was responsible, and why they did it.

In the case of MH370, if it was hijacked, I would assume the hijackers had some kind of plan, but it went badly wrong, and the plane ends up crashing into the ocean. Or there was no plan, or it was a stupid one, as seems to have been the case with MH653. I didn't know about MH653 before I started looking into this, but I think it's a powerful reminder that sometimes hijackings don't seem to make sense, and can remain unsolved.

I have no idea who could have wanted to hijack a Malaysia Airlines flight to Beijing or why, or where they might have been trying to fly the plane. I also have no idea whether something went wrong that led to the aircraft ending up in the Indian Ocean, or if that was actually the plan all along. It would be an exceptional sequence of events. However, none of the people advocating for the theory that the pilot flew the plane into the ocean deliberately can explain why he did it, or why he chose that particular flight path.

I would be willing to go so far as to say that the theory that the plane was hijacked is actually a better explanation than the pilot being responsible, for one reason only: the hijacking theory does not require any known person to suddenly behave inexplicably. Again, none of the people blaming the pilot can explain why he would have done it.

To sum up, I think the theory that what happened to MH370 was a hijacking gone wrong, or a really weird hijacking, by people who were neither part of the crew nor on the passenger manifest, cannot be discounted. I would even go so far as to say that I think it is one of the most likely explanations for what happened, but that's just a layman's opinion. At the very least I maintain that this hijacking theory is much less stupid than the one Netflix dedicated an entire damn episode to.

**

I suppose the odds are that we'll never find out what really happened to flight MH370. Maybe the wreckage will eventually be found, but I don't know if there's really the slightest chance that any meaningful information could be gleaned from it after all this time, or what other evidence could possibly emerge.

I can't imagine what it's like to have a partner, family member or other loved one disappear like this, with no explanation and not even any real certainty that they're dead. That's why I think it's all the more despicable that there are people willing to use this tragedy as fodder for childish conspiracy theories, and to make money exploiting the suffering of the people affected by it.

I think the ethics of Netflix participating in this are absolutely deplorable. To air this kind of Ancient Aliens-level garbage about the deaths of real people is disgusting commodification of human suffering for our leering consumption. I freely admit that I'm fascinated by unsolved mysteries, and in that sense I, too, am partly culpable in this. But I don't see why we can't discuss things like this without platforming profiteering liars and irresponsible conspiracy theorists. Companies like Netflix simply must do better.

Discrepancies in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann

When new headlines about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann suddenly showed up earlir this month, it occurred to us that we have Netflix now and can watch their documentary on it. We actually thought it was quite decently done. The forced American perspective was dreary but to be expected; sometimes we felt that the program spent way too long going down various rabbit holes that went nowhere, and both of these tendencies exacerbated the general feeling that there wasn't really enough material for the whole series, as it tended to get stretched a bit thin, especially toward the end. Still, I feel many of the negative reviews are far too harsh, and some don't seem to understand that the program wasn't aimed at the fandom, as one is tempted to call it, but rather the (USian) general public.

Anyway having watched it, I feel that I want to make a bit of a departure from my usual content here and talk about the Madeleine McCann case. Specifically, I want to list what I think are some of the discrepancies in the story of the night of her disappearance that I think have not been adequately explained in public, and that were mostly skated over quite quickly by Netflix as well. The point is not to imply anything regarding anyone's guilt or innocence; people do illogical and inexplicable things in everyday life, misspeak and just plain make mistakes. For all I know, there are perfectly innocent explanations to everything here. But these are the unxplained discrepancies I was left with after viewing the Netflix documentary and reading up on the case online, as well as a few general observations.

**

Madeleine McCann disappeared from Praia da Luz in Portugal on May 3rd, 2007. She was asleep in her family's rented apartment while her parents had dinner at a tapas bar just across from the building. As retired police superintendent Peter MacLeod's ebook details, there is some discrepancy over the way the parents dining at the tapas bar (the "tapas seven") checked on their children in their rooms and when they did so. For what it's worth, I find the MacLeod ebook to be quite tendentious and uncomfortably eager to jump to conclusions, and I certainly don't endorse his overall theory. But I do think the text makes some good points in its examination of the witness statements. It feels worthwhile to start by noting the overall timeline of the evening.

According to the timeline in the Guardian, Mrs. McCann and the children returned to their apartment at about 18:00, and David Payne, one of the "tapas seven", checked in on them at 18:30 at Mr. McCann's request. As I've understood it, that means 18:30 is the last time someone outside her immediate family is known to have seen Madeleine alive and well. At 19:00 (I assume these times are approximations) Mr. McCann returns, and at 20:35 they join the rest of the tapas seven at the restaurant, the children having been put to bed. The McCanns leave the patio doors, facing the restaurant, unlocked since they can only be locked from the inside.

By their own account, Mr. McCann checked in on the children at 21:05 and saw them all asleep. At about 21:30, Mrs. McCann was going to check on the children, but Mr. Oldfield, dining with them, is going to visit his apartment and offers to check theirs as well. Mr. Oldfield enters through the unlocked patio doors, sees all is well inside, but cannot confirm if he saw Madeleine in her bed or not. At 22:00 Mrs. McCann goes to their apartment, and by her own account, fails to find Madeleine inside, and raises the alarm.

As far as I know, none of the above is disputed. At approximately 21:10, Jane Tanner of the tapas seven later reports seeing a man walking down the street, away from the McCanns' apartment, carrying a sleeping child. Known as the Tanner sighting, it is assumed for years that the man she saw had abducted Madeleine McCann and was, in fact, carrying her. The later Scotland Yard investigation was able to identify the man and prove that he was, in fact, another British holidaymaker, who had picked up their child from the resort's night creche and was carrying them to their apartment. However, because this was apparently not known until 2013, it was long assumed that "Tannerman" had abducted Madeleine, and therefore that she must have vanished from the apartment between Mr. McCann's visit at 21:05 and the Tanner sighting at 21:10. This was such a strong conviction for such a long time that as of this writing, the McCanns' website still hosts the identikit drawings based on the Tanner sighting with an appeal for information, even though the person has been identified. So we now know that Madeleine could have gone missing at any time between approximately nine and ten o'clock.

I'm wondering, though, whether the time window might not be even longer. If Mr. McCann did not, in fact, see his daughter at around nine o'clock, then the time she could have vanished extends to at least around 20:30. This is not to imply any sinister motive or intentional deception on his part, but if his check was actually as cursory as Mr. Oldfield's, then Madeleine may already have been gone by then.

Mr. MacLeod has highlighted a change in the statements made by the McCanns on their visits to the apartment that night. Initially, both Mr. and Mrs. McCann claimed to have entered the apartment via the front door, using their keys. Later, they changed their stories to say that they entered through the unlocked patio doors. This may well be an innocent mistake, but to my knowledge it hasn't been explained, and later retellings all have the McCanns entering via the patio. The patio doors were obviously open, since Mr. Oldfield had entered that way and did not, presumably, have a key to the apartment in the first place.

**

There are several discrepancies around what happened at 22:00, when Mrs. McCann reported Madeleine missing. First, there is the mystery of the window. Mr. MacLeod has collected several quotes from the McCanns' friends and relatives, who clearly seem to have been told that the window in Madeleine's room had been forced open. However, no evidence of this exists, and in video footage from immediately after the disappearance (as seen on Netflix), the shutter and window are clearly intact. It's never been established why the McCanns claimed the window had been broken open, when this is clearly not the case.

It's not even clear if the window was ever open at all. Mrs. McCann has given two completely different accounts of how she discovered that Madeleine was missing at 22:00, both quoted in Mr. MacLeod's ebook. In the statement she gave to the police on 4.5.2007, Mrs. McCann says that on entering the apartment, she immediately perceived that the door to the children's bedroom was open, and the window and shutter were also open. But in an interview she gave in 2008, she describes a completely different scene, where everything appears normal at first. Only when she notices that the bedroom door is open more widely than they had left it, does she go to check on the children, and in her words:

"I was looking at Madeleine’s bed which is here, and it was dark and I was looking and I was thinking is that, is that Madeleine or is that the bedding and I couldn't quite make her out, and it sounds really stupid now, but at the time I was just thinking I didn’t want to put the light on because I didn't want to wake them, and literally as I went back in, the curtains of the bedroom which were drawn, [demonstrates with both forearms together] that were closed, “wheesh’ like a gust of wind kind of blew them open."

This later version is the one that the Netflix reconstruction went with. But is it possible for it to be true?

There's an odd detail related to the Tanner sighting. As Mr. McCann returned from his nine o'clock check on the children, he met a fellow Briton in the Rua Dr. Francisco Gentil Martins, leading from the apartment to the tapas bar, and stopped to chat with him. Jane Tanner passed by them and reported seeing them, but they did not see her. The Portuguese police apparently questioned whether this was possible, because the street was narrow and well-lit. It also appears that way in the Netflix series, but I don't know if it's accurate in that respect. If I read the apartment layout in the police files correctly, the children's bedroom faced the Rua Dr. Agostinho da Silva, which has the same kind of street lights as the Rua Dr. Francisco Gentil Martins (at least on Google Street View!) and appears to be equally well-lit.

In his statement of 10.5.2007, Mr. McCann describes that "during the night the artificial light coming in from the outside is very weak, therefore, without a light being lit in the living room or in the kitchen, the visibility inside the bedroom is much reduced". Presumably this is because the various shutters and curtains were usually kept closed. Writing for the Guardian, Bridget O'Donnell describes the McCanns' apartment:

One morning, I saw Gerry and his wife Kate on their balcony, chatting to their friends on the path below. Privately I was glad we didn't get their apartment. It was on a corner by the road and people could see in. They were exposed.

As the apartment was on the ground floor and fairly close to the street, it would certainly have been uncomfortable to have the lights on inside without drawing the curtains or closing the shutters. Both McCanns testified that the window and shutter in the children's bedroom had been closed when they left, and this makes sense. However, if the apartment was quite dark at night, and the window in the children's bedroom looked out onto a well-lit street, should it not have been immediately obvious if it was open? In Mrs. McCann's initial statement it is. But in her later, much more detailed statement, she describes it as being dark, and only perceiving that the window was open when the curtains were moved by the wind.

The crime scene photos (pictures 7 and 8) show the window closed and the shutter down, but the curtains open. So there are now three different configurations for the window: Mrs. McCann's initial account where the window, shutter and curtains were open; her later account where the window and shutter were open, but the curtains closed; and the photograph showing the shutter and window closed, but the curtains open. There are obviously several questions. The shutter appears fairly opaque; if we believe Mrs. McCann's later account, was the difference in light level not perceptible until the wind moved the curtains? It's certainly possible. But if the window and shutter were open at 22:00, when were they closed? If the curtains were drawn, when were they opened and arranged behind the furniture as they are seen in the police photographs?

It does not appear that anyone except Mrs. McCann ever saw the window open, and it seems strange that she would have stopped to draw the curtains and close the window and shutter before reporting Madeleine missing. Of course she may have done so, but the discrepancy between her two accounts has never been explained; both cannot be true. As a historian, I tend to be skeptical when stories become more detailed the further they are from the actual event. Similarly, it has apparently never been explained why the McCanns initially claimed that the window had been forced, but later abandoned the claim. It's entirely possible that these discrepancies are the results of pure misunderstandings and the story becoming embellished with time, which is surely a universal human process. But as it stands, it's not at all clear what the configuration of the window in the bedroom was, or indeed if it matters at all: the apartment was readily accessible by the patio doors, nor has it been established whether the front door was locked.

Is it significant that the McCanns initially claimed to have entered the apartment via the front door, unlocking and locking it, and also that the window had been broken open, but later admitted to entering through the unlocked patio doors, and dropped the claim that the window was forced?

**

Another unexplained detail is Mrs. McCann's reaction to not immediately finding her daughter. Several sources report her screaming "Madeleine's gone! Someone's taken her!" as she ran back toward the restaurant. In the 2008 interview mentioned previously, she says "I knew straight away that, err, she’d been . . . taken, [you] know." This seems odd to me, and as I understand it, the initial reaction of others on the scene was that Madeleine must have wandered off by accident. Mrs. McCann has uncharitably been accused of trying to "plant a story" by insisting that her daughter had been abducted, when in fact she could not know that was the case. She is variously described as either making a cursory search of the apartment, or only looking in the parents' bedroom to check if Madeleine was in their bed. It is, of course, entirely credible for a parent to have an emotional reaction to finding their child missing in the middle of the night, but I feel that this does need to be included in a list of unexplained events.

**

Finally, the most baffling detail of all is the claim that the McCann twins, sleeping in the same room as Madeleine, had been sedated. Mr. MacLeod dedicates a full chapter to this, and here I feel that his arguments have real merit. This is an important point, because many of the theories that posit the McCanns were somehow culpable in their daughter's disappearance are based on the idea that they had sedated their children. While this may seem extreme stated in such bald terms, in fact children can apparently be effectively put to sleep with fairly harmless over-the-counter medications. The argument is superficially strengthened by the fact that both McCanns are medical doctors, and Mrs. McCann was a qualified anaesthetist. I apologize for omitting their professional titles, but distinguishing between two Dr. McCanns would make this an even more arduous text!

No physical evidence that the McCann twins were sedated exists; they were tested, but at such a late date that apparently no traces of any substance would have survived. Given how prominently the sedation story has been used to cast blame on the McCanns, it seems ironic that it apparently originates with Mrs. McCann herself. She has stated numerous times, both to the police at the time of the disappearance and publicly later, that she believes the twins and, presumably, Madeleine, had been sedated by the abductor. This is certainly borne out by the fact that all through the night of Madeleine's disappearance, the twins apparently slept soundly. They did not even wake up when they were moved to another place to sleep. In the Netflix documentary, a vacationer at the resort describes Mrs. McCann as "howling" over the disappearance of her daughter. It seems absolutely incredible that the two-year-old twins would have slept through all this, and yet this seems to be an undisputed fact, commented on by the McCanns and the Portuguese police on the scene at the time. So it seems that the twins were indeed sedated.

But how? I agree with Mr. MacLeod that it seems incredible that an intruder could have sedated the children. Any effective sedative would have to have been administered by injection, ingestion or inhalation. If the idea was to keep the children quiet and docile, surely this would have been completely defeated by waking them up to make them eat or drink a sedative, let alone trying to inject them with a hypodermic needle. Applying chloroform would have left telltale marks and an easily detectable smell, and more exotic tranquilizers are frankly very difficult to believe. Now, I'm not an expert in these things, so if there's some credible way in which an intruder could have sedated the children that I'm unaware of, then I am happy to be corrected. But I fully agree with Mr. MacLeod that it is very difficult to understand how this would have been accomplished in practice.

Further, I don't understand why the children would have been sedated. Even when applying a sedative is possible, it's at best an inexact science, and there is always some risk. One of the odd details around the disappearance is that according to the McCanns, Madeleine had asked why they hadn't come the previous night when she cried. A neighbor also testified that on that previous night, she heard a child, presumably Madeleine, crying for an hour without anyone responding. So why would an abductor have found it necessary to sedate the twins at all? They could hardly have done anything more dangerous than crying. Madeleine was only four years old; surely a determined abductor would have easily overpowered her. So what I would add to Mr. MacLeod's analysis is that I don't see what the point of sedating the children would be in the first place. Certainly it's difficult to understand why an abductor would go to the trouble of sedating the twins in any scenario.

This is how Mrs. McCann describes the twins' condition in her book.

In spite of the noise and lights and general pandemonium, they hadn’t stirred. They’d always been sound sleepers, but this seemed unnatural. Scared for them, too, I placed the palms of my hands on their backs to check for chest movement, basically, for some sign of life. Had Madeleine been given some kind of sedative to keep her quiet? Had the twins, too?

Dr. Kate McCann is a qualified anaesthetist, and so is Dr. Fiona Payne, a fellow member of the tapas seven. Dr. Gerry McCann is a general practicioner, and most of the rest of the tapas seven were also medical doctors. It seems amazing that this group of medical professionals would have observed that two very young children were sedated, conclude that they had been put in this condition by a malicious intruder, and not seek any kind of medical care for them. Instead, the twins were simply left to sleep it off, with occasional checks on their breathing. Again, I am not an expert on the subject, but I agree with Mr. MacLeod's analysis that it seems incredibly unlikely that two trained anaesthetists would have automatically assumed that the children had been sedated competently by an intruder and were in no danger, and therefore no medical attention was necessary. The twins were not taken to a hospital or any medical facility.

In his publication, Mr. MacLeod draws the conclusion that Mrs. McCann was not concerned about the twins because she had sedated them herself. This idea is at the heart of many of the theories that implicate the McCanns in the disappearance of their daughter, although I think that requires not so much leaping but making a hyperspace jump to a conclusion. But if it is not the case that they sedated the children themselves, then Mrs. McCann's behaviour with regard to the twins on the night of the disappearance seems very difficult to explain.

**

These are some of the questions I was left with after watching the Netflix documentary. Given some of the things I've read online, I feel I have to stress that I don't think any of these things individually or as a group are anything remotely like sufficient cause to malign the McCanns, let alone accuse them of some kind of criminal conspiracy. People misremember and misspeak; our recollections are imperfect and mutable; we make bad decisions. I consider it probable that there are more or less innocent explanations for all of these discrepancies.

One thing I wish Netflix had done was draw on a broader area of expertise. I think a gender studies perspective into how especially Kate McCann has been portrayed as a bad and uncaring mother would have been invaluable. Motherhood is such a deeply politicized and policed place where so many different ideologies intersect. My simple definition of patriarchy is that it's a system where a woman can never do anything right. Kate McCann has been portrayed as both an irrational, hysterical and overemotional mother, and a cold, sociopathic, unfeeling mother. You may think that's a spectrum where there's an acceptable golden mean of motherhood in the middle, but there isn't. The fact is that there is no "right" way to grieve over the inexplicable loss of a child. You cannot look at a parent who's lost a child and say "aha! They are not exhibiting the correct stages of grief, therefore they are faking it". Or indeed anyone who's faced a traumatic event. Yet we do this with people in the public eye constantly, especially anyone who is presented to us as a victim: we assess if they're worthy of our sympathy. And we do it with criteria that are so bad, so fundamentally discriminatory and ideological, that the process is horrible. I really think there are a lot of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that can shed a lot of light on this, but in a crime documentary, we hear from policemen and journalists, and the policemen's solution is always more resources and powers for the police. It's not a good look, and there are reasons to think that it's had very unfortunate effects on our society.

The disappearance of Madeleine McCann is obviously a fascinating case. The breathless and totally irresponsible press coverage, and the way in which public sentiment is built and then suddenly makes a dramatic turn, is a real microcosm for so many things that were happening around the same time. It's difficult to not notice that the British home secretary who oversaw the review of the case, which later turned into the ongoing Scotland Yard investigation, was Theresa May: she of the racist "hostile environment" policy and later Brexit prime minister. I think that with phenomena like Brexit and Trump, we've gone long past manufacturing consent: our mass media manufacture entire theaters of emotions for us to get caught up in. In some ways, the publicity around the McCann case was a precursor of the emotional theatrics of Brexit. We're long overdue for a proper look at what the media do in our society, and what effects it has on us all.

In the meantime, we hope against all odds that Madeleine McCann is alive and well somewhere.

2012: Nostradamus

Have we been watching 2012 "documentaries" on the History Channel? Yes.

Are we going to do a series of posts on "the 2012 phenomenon"? Yes.

So, did Nostradamus predict the events of 2012? No.

**

Seriously, he didn't. Not a single Nostradamus scholar said or wrote anything about this whole 2012 thing until it was invented a couple of years back. It's only lately that they've jumped on the 2012 bandwagon, cheerfully helped along by the (pseudo-)History channel, who keep running rubbish "documentaries" on the topic.

However, there's one thing we're thoroughly convinced Nostradamus did make several astonishing predictions about, all of which have come true: the National Hockey League.

Take, for instance, the very first quatrain of them all. Century I, quatrain 1:

Tripod seated at night in secret study
Only resting on the aerian saddle:
Tiny flame leaving the solitude
Make prosper what is not vain to believe.

It's clear that "tiny flame" refers to that diminutive Calgary legend, Theo Fleury.

He recently tried to make a comeback to the NHL, or in other words, "leave the solitude". On September 10, 2009, he was reinstated and allowed to make a return in a meeting with NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly, and league doctors. Notice that's three; Bettman, Daly and the doctors: a tripod has three legs.

They must have done some thinking and research before this meeting, but they couldn't reveal their conclusions beforehand: hence, secret study. I'll bet they didn't get much sleep, apart from what they caught on a plane trip, or, as Nostradamus would put it, "on the aerian saddle".

Fleury's comeback didn't pan out, but he was made to prosper, as his autobiography, published at the same time, did sell quite nicely. A mystery remains, though: is Nostradamus saying that it was vain to believe in his comeback, or is he saying that the allegations Fleury made in his book are "vain to believe"? We don't know. He did.

**

Even more momentous is the third quatrain.

When the litters are overturned by the whirlwind
and faces are covered by cloaks,
the new republic will be troubled by its people.
At this time the reds and the whites will rule wrongly.

Can he be any more plain? When the litters are overturned by the whirlwind; like maybe a hurricane? This clearly refers to the Carolina Hurricanes winning the Stanley Cup; their jerseys were, at the time, red and white. Seriously, he couldn't make this more explicit without just coming right out and saying that the Canes will win the Cup, and as we all know, prophets just don't do that.

The "new republic" here is Canada, which became a (quasi-)independent state later than the United States, and many Canadians were quite upset when the Oilers lost to the Canes in the final! Astonishingly, Nostradamus knew the Hurricanes were going to win the Stanley Cup over 400 years before it happened.

Again, Nostradamus is telling us something we didn't know beforehand, too: the reference to "ruling wrongly" seems to suggest that the Canes shouldn't have won the Cup! Was there some terrible officiating mistake that cost the Oilers the Cup? Should some other team have represented the Eastern Conference in the finals? Frankly, we don't know. He did.

**

In quatrains 12 and 13, Nostradamus predicted the vicissitudes that the NHL Players' Association would face in the 2000's:

12

There will soon be talk of a treacherous man, who rules a short time,
quickly raised from low to high estate.
He will suddenly turn disloyal and volatile.
This man will govern Verona.

13

Through anger and internal hatreds, the exiles
will hatch a great plot against the king.
Secretly they will place enemies as a threat,
and his own old (adherents) will find sedition against them.

The "treacherous man" is clearly Ted Saskin, who became executive director of the NHLPA after Bob Goodenow's resignation ("quickly raised from low to high estate"). He was fired after the NHLPA members found he had masterminded a campaign to hack into players' e-mail accounts. So instead of representing the players, he had "suddenly turned disloyal and volatile".

We remember Verona from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as a city riven by factional strife; not a bad description of the NHLPA at any time! Quatrain 13 details Chris Chelios's campaign to dethrone Saskin, who was forced to resign in 2007.

But wait, there's more! Quatrain 23:

In the third month, at sunrise,
the Boar and the Leopard meet on the battlefield.
The fatigued Leopard looks up to heaven
and sees an eagle playing around the sun.

In the 1995-96 season, the Florida Panthers made it to the Stanley Cup finals. To make a long story short, as is common in prophecy interpretation, the Latin name for the leopard species is panthera pardus, a panther. The Panthers were pretty fatigued by the time they got to the final, where they lost to the Colorado Avalanche. The Avs are based in Denver, Colorado, and the seal of the city of Denver has a bird and the rays of the sun on it. Coincidence? We think not.

What about the boar? Well, wild boars are mostly found in Europe. The Cup-winning goal was scored by Uwe Krupp, who's from Europe. So this time around, Nostradamus knew that the Panthers would make the finals, but lose to Colorado! Over 400 years before it happened!

**

Nostradamus also predicted some unpleasant things. Quatrain 26:

The great man will be struck down in the day by a thunderbolt.
An evil deed, foretold by the beare of a petition.
According to the prediction another falls at night time.
Conflict at Reims, London, and pestilence in Tuscany.

It's obvious to us that this quatrain refers to Matt Cooke's hit on Marc Savard. Savard was Boston's number one center, a "great man". He was blindsided by Matt Cooke, which is to say he took a hit that he didn't see coming, like a thunderbolt. You don't see those coming, either. Our Penguin Dictionary of Symbols identifies the thunderbolt in Celtic mythology with the hammer of Sucellus, the "hard hitter"; how unambiguous is that?

This hit was definitely an evil deed, and it was foretold by a petition. In fact, there have been numerous petitions to ban head shots in the NHL for years, but nothing has been done. To cap it off, the Bruins-Pens game on that day was at 3 P.M.; in the day.

Cooke wasn't penalized, and that weekend, on Hockey Night in Canada, it was predicted that more players would be injured unless the headshot rule was implemented immediately. And according to the prediction, another reckless hit left Brian Campbell injured just days later. The NHL may not have known that another player would be injured if they didn't react; Nostradamus did.

**

These examples are more or less randomly selected from just the first century of Nostradamus's prophecies. We believe that they are entirely convincing PROOF that Nostradamus was a true prophet, who could indeed foretell the future. Here is evidence enough to convince even the most hardened skeptic.

Most excitingly, it stands to reason that the remaining quatrains contain many more of hockey's secrets. More likely than not, locked away in his prophecies is this year's Stanley Cup winner! We leave the search for this answer up to you. Don't read it here first; read it there yourself. The Prophecies are available on Wikisource: the future is in your hands.