MH370: Mystery Solved

The parallels between the missing plane & lab leak debate are eerie

• If this Substack title looks familiar, I stole it from someone else.

If you forgot, MH370 was the Malaysian airplane that disappeared over Southeast Asia in 2014. The airplane's beacon was turned off, but the military radar tracked the Boeing 777. Most assumed it was a malfunction or hijacking. A few hypothesized that the pilot locked the co-pilot out of the cockpit and depressurized the cabin. The first clue was that the Malaysian captain was from Penang, and MH370 made a hard turn, as if to give the pilot one last look at home.

Two weeks later, a satellite company claimed to know where it was. While the airplane beacon had been turned off, the engines were still pinging the satellite maintenance schedule. But unlike Covid’s origins, you could debate MH370’s whereabouts on Facebook and Reddit. For the next decade, the remote Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia was the focus of the search. Malaysia, China, and Australia funded the estimated cost of $150 million.

The 7th arc, or last GPS ping, was the focus of the search. But almost everyone missed the second clue: there was no floating aircraft debris field. The latest search, conducted in March 2025, used the latest technology: robotic ships. The Malaysian government signed a $70M “no find, no fee” contract with Ocean Infinity. Would the Covid debate be over if lab leakers had a similar bounty?

Paris vs Independent Group

Academic lab leakers started the “Paris Group.” Think Richard Ebright et al. in a group email blaming China and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Similarly, an online IG or “Independent Group” of MH370 sleuths formed to blame Malaysia.

The mainstream narrative—driven by Boeing engineers, Inmarsat satellite analysts, IG, and the Australian government—holds that the MH370 jet flew on autopilot, ran out of fuel, and crashed into the Indian Ocean at a precise location. By blaming the corrupt Chinese or Malaysian government, Western researchers can absolve themselves of blame. But more importantly, their Bayesian calculations have produced a lucrative “high priority search area.”

via MH370 Indepenent Group

The only problem? An old wise man has solved the riddle, and the search is pointless.

Larry Vance paid more attention to the physical evidence that washed ashore near Africa than the satellite data over the Indian Ocean. The rogue MH370 pilot was at the controls until the end of the 7-hour flight. Only 20 pieces of wreckage (e.g., flaps) were recovered.

The plane sank in one piece; therefore, minimal debris was found (e.g., no seats or luggage). The flaps were worn away on the trailing edge, not the leading edge, which implies the plane didn’t strike the water hard. The engines were still running to power the flap’s hydraulics, meaning that MH370 wreckage could be located anywhere, hundreds of miles from the last GPS ping. In other words, the search is futile.

trailing edge of the flap was extended into the water during soft landing

Vance would know because the Canadian investigator examined 2,000,000 pieces of wreckage after the 1998 Swissair crash. The MD-11 came down hard in the North Atlantic Ocean because of a fire.

Similarly, the French captain joined the mile-high club when Air France 447 fell out of the Brazilian sky in 2009, leaving thousands of pieces of debris.

But only ~20 pieces of MH370 washed ashore months later, all connected to a low-speed ditching in the Southern Indian Ocean by a professional pilot.

The MH370 flaps had damage similar to that of US Airways Flight 1549, which landed on the Hudson River in New York City. Think “Miracle on the Hudson,” but in the rough Indian Ocean waters, without Captain Sully or Tom Hanks behind the controls.

The MH370 rogue pilot ditched the plane to hide it forever. The smoking gun? It was like Ralph Baric in DARPA Defuse, a pre-confession to the crime of creating Covid. The MH370 pilot had a home simulator with the planned route. Once you understand the pilot ditched the plane to sink as one piece, you realize MH370 is literally anywhere but the last GPS coordinate. He flew south to see the sun rise, making the water landing easier.

MH370 Captain Zaharie’s simulated suicide flight is in red

The parallels between the Wuhan wet market debate and the MH370 search are unreal. The 7th arc was the Wuhan wet market. While lab leakers think someone evil did it, Defuse tells us a benevolent scientist did it. While lab leakers debate Wuhan, a bunch of evidence washed ashore in North Carolina. Frédéric Bastiat called it the “seen versus the unseen” in my Bayesian hit piece.

Wuhan wet market

UK, German, and Australian media have covered Vance’s story, but not the US. This was a murder-mass suicide run by the Malaysian pilot, and the MH370 wreckage won’t be found. It’s not what people want to hear. Something bad happened, and someone bad did it. Much like the lab leakers, the internet ran with evidence-free conspiracies: fire, hijacking, malfunction, US airbase, UFOs, etc.

Since no debris field was left to analyze, the imagination ran wild. One aviation journalist

Jeff Wise

claimed the Russians did it; another internet personality said the US did it. Kim Dotcom offered $100,000 to anyone who could disprove that the US military did it with portals (he lost). Rootclaim offered Kim Dotcom a $100,000 bet on their 93% certainty of a pilot suicide, but Vance said he’s 100% certain.

The internet used 280 Twitter characters to push a conspiracy, but Vance wrote a 200-page book:

As I have shown in my book, MH370: Mystery Solved, the evidence to disprove a high-speed diving crash, and to support a pilot-controlled ditching, is overwhelming. All of the evidence I used to explain what happened to MH370 was available to the official investigation, yet they failed to uncover it.

The fact that such a high-profile investigation failed to uncover and disclose such basic evidence is cause for grave concern. What assurance can we have that future investigations will not suffer from equal ineffectiveness?

Some of the top air safety investigation agencies in the world were involved in the MH370 investigation. According to the authorities, the official accident investigation included experts from Malaysia, Australia, China, United Kingdom, United States, and France…

To be effective, you do not need to be the loudest voice in the room. In fact, you should be wary of the loudest voices. Do not assume that those with the most forceful opinions are delivering the most accurate assessments. Seek out and work with those who have the expertise you need to satisfy your curiosity. Then check, and then double-check. An overactive ego can hurt your ability to find and assess evidence.

The official accident investigation even referenced the IG group. You can judge a man by his enemies. Vance’s reward for his brilliance? Ad hominem attacks led him to avoid social media to prevent being “hijacked.”

The American who collected the African debris was accused of being a Russian spy: “I once made the mistake of going on Twitter. Basically, these people are cyberterrorists. And it works. It’s effective.”

The experts that wind up on podcasts and Netflix (Jeff Wise = Richard Ebright) have one thing in common: they don’t like Vance. The Australian search director dismissed Vance’s theory—not because it was flawed, but because accepting it would have made his $150 million search contract pointless.

After Ocean Infinity's last search turned up nothing, some members of the IG group reluctantly discussed Vance’s theory.

Larry Vance reminds me of Major Joseph Murphy, and everyone else reminds me of lab leakers. Lab leakers wanted to look at the crash site (Wuhan wet market) while Murphy sat in the back of the DARPA room and pieced the evidence together (e.g., immune evasion = LAV vaccine).

Lab leakers wanted to debate SARS2 lineage A/B in Wuhan, but WA1 flew back to America. Lab leakers claimed China did it, but Murphy told us America did it. Both MH370’ers and lab leakers think evil forces were behind this, but the experts did it, and the other experts helped cover it up.

Global lab leak media and US government reports referenced the “Paris Group,” but Major Joseph Murphy wasn’t mentioned. The Independent Group of online MH370 sleuths was also referenced in the official crash report, but Larry Vance wasn’t mentioned. Why? Vance didn’t “advance the search for MH370.”

The ATSB acknowledges the extensive contributions that many individuals and groups have made during the underwater search for MH370. Many contributors have provided credible, alternate and independent approaches and analysis of the limited data available. In particular, the ‘MH370 Independent Group’ comprised of scientists, researchers and individuals who have cooperated across continents to advance the search for MH370.

Or, as someone told me, “aviation interests, who oppose Vance.” Just like Major Murphy didn’t advance the search for the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So, where is MH370? Vance won’t guess and wrote in his book:

If you accept the evidence that a pilot was controlling a functional airplane, then you have to accept that the calculations are not valid. Unlike the autopilot, the pilot can (and did) take independent actions. Without the “certainty” provided by the unpiloted airplane assumptions, it is not possible to use the handshake data to predict where or when the airplane started to descend, or which direction it travelled during its descent, or its airspeed during the descent, or its rate of descent. During the flight south, the pilot could have changed altitude, or changed the power setting. That would affect fuel consumption, and maximum range. It is impossible to know how much fuel remained in the tanks after the last handshake. Therefore, it is not possible to accurately predict how long, or how far, the airplane flew after the last handshake. It is impossible to establish when the airplane entered the water.

Vance’s buddy will take a guess and thinks it’s just south of the original search area in a deep trench. An earthquake zone that will soon bury the wreckage under a layer of subsea rocks. Vance’s other buddy thinks it’s on the opposite side of the search area.

We will never know because the pilot ordered extra fuel and oxygen for the kamikaze run to nowhere. Like Baric with his No See’m biotechnology, he probably aimed to keep the world guessing about their intent. In the last chapter of Vance’s book, he speculated on the pilot’s motive: his own morbid mile-high club before plunging into the unknown, therefore leaving no trace of the crime.

“History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” – Mark Twain.