Has the $93 million search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 been looking in the wrong place this whole time?
While some independent investigators have made that claim for months, the Australian and Malaysian officials in charge of looking for the Boeing 777 — that vanished without a trace more than a full year ago — have never wavered from their position that satellite data proves the plane is in a specific region of the remote Indian Ocean, about 1,200 miles off the coast of Perth, Australia.
But a group of volunteers who recently spent more than a week cleaning a 60-mile stretch of beach on the island of Tasmania found something that may lead investigators to believe that the missing plane is not there after all.
What the volunteers found was — nothing. They collected and sorted through more than 80,000 pieces of ocean trash, including items that had floated more than 6,000 miles from points as far away as South Africa and Madagasar.
That massive pile of garbage did not contain a single item that appeared to be from the missing Flight MH370, even though the area appears to be right in the path of where debris from the plane would have spread, if indeed the Malaysia Airlines 777 crashed in the region of the Indian Ocean where searchers have been scouring, in painstaking fashion, since last October.
The multinational search team, despite combing almost 10,000 square miles of ocean floor — much of which was never mapped before — have found no trace at all of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
And neither did the cleanup volunteers , though if the plane was anywhere in or near the search area, it appears almost unthinkable that not one piece of trash would have floated there.
“We found a roll of tape from Madagascar that’s from a vanilla bean manufacturer,” said lead cleanup volunteer Matt Dell. “We found a bit of stuff from Africa washing around. We found a drift card from Durban that’s like a fish tag. And a set of doll’s plastic shoes.”
Plastic drinking bottles washed up more than any other type of item, Dell said — but none of the 80,000-plus scraps of junk looked like it came from the missing plane.
Independent investigator and aviation expert Jeff Wise recently published his detailed theory, which holds that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 may have been the victim of a technologically sophisticated hijack operation, which was able to fake, or “spoof,” the satellite data indicating that the plane ended up in the Southern Indian Ocean.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 may actually have flown north instead of south, and landed, perhaps only briefly, at an airfield in Kazakhstan. Read the Inquisitr ‘s coverage of the “spoof” theory by clicking here and here .
[Image: Rufus Cox/Getty Images]