Jeff Wise: My Crazy Theory About MH370 Went Viral {Spoiler: Putin Did It)
March 6, 2015 8:15 a.m.
You know that thing in movies when the romantic lead’s mousey best friend takes off her glasses and shakes out her hair? My pet theory about MH370 had that kind of moment last week. For the better part of a year, friends and relatives crossed the street to avoid having to hear about my weird, long Malaysia Airlines hypothesis. When it came to pitching editors and producers, I couldn’t get arrested. Then, on February 23, New York ran my article “How Crazy Am I to Think I Actually Know Where That Malaysia Airlines Plane Is?” and by Tuesday the story was getting picked up around the world. Soon I was booked on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Fox, and a bunch of international networks.
In 25 years of journalism, I’ve never had a story blow up like this. In one day, page views on my personal website went up tenfold, and my Kindle Single “The Plane That Wasn’t There” went from an Amazon ranking of 10,000 to 120. The biggest surprise wasn’t how many clicks the story was getting — I knew that a lot of people are interested in MH370 — but how positive the response was. I was expecting, frankly, to get roasted alive. Months ago, when I ran an early version of a part of my theory on my blog, it sparked a Reddit thread in which the typical comment was “I’m so furious I can’t even.”
This time, I guess, people were more willing to hear what I had to say — understandably. Come this Sunday, March 8, a year will have gone by without any debris washing ashore. For four months, high-tech ships have been scanning the seabed in vain. Something seems obviously fishy. The idea that a pretty outlandish set of circumstances might have led us to this place seems less hard to swallow. “A far-out theory from one of CNN’s chief commentators on the aviation disaster, science journalist Jeff Wise, has been circulated worldwide,” wrote News Corp Australia, “and has more credibility than you might think.”
Some of the feedback was out-and-out mean. RT, the Russian news outlet, suggested that I suffered from a mental affliction called “Putin Derangement Syndrome.” More surprisingly, the Independent Group, a loosely affiliated group of like-minded tech geeks that I’d been working with since March, kicked me out: A faction was outraged that I had published a hypothesis at odds with the IG’s “official” scenario put out in September. I don’t know why a person can’t recognize the potential viability of two contradictory hypotheses, but there you have it.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/03/my-crazy-theory-about-mh370-went-viral-worldwide.html
And here's the link to Wise's original, where he argues persuasively (he persuaded me, anyway) that Vladimirr Putin had the plane hijacked to Kazakhstan.
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