Monalisa Das| The News Minute| July 27, 2014| 7.40 pm IST
On July 17, when news broke of Malyasia Airlines flight 17 or MH17 having crashed after being hit by a missile, the world came to a standstill, once again. MH17 was headed to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam and was flying over Ukraine when it was shot down, instantly killing all 298 people on board.
Apart from the instant shock and disbelief, the other thoughts brought back grim memories of a mishap of the MH370, another Malaysia Airlines flight.
The MH370 had mysteriously disappeared over the Southern Indian Ocean on March 8 while on its way to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. 239 people on that fateful flight are now presumed dead.
The investigations about the MH17 crash are ongoing, but not much is known about MH370 as the site of crash hasn’t been known yet, nor has been there any physical evidence of the accident. Two disasters, of this great magnitude and within such a short period of time, make us wonder whether Malaysia Airlines is going through a bad phase of luck.
However, with so many loose ends to why and how these accidents took place, it leaves a lot to open interpretation.
Conspiracy theories did the rounds even when the MH370 was declared missing. From a terrorist hijack to alien abduction, nothing was left out.
However, the more recent seem ones seem to take such theories to a whole different level. Almost none of these theories seem to be backed by any logical proof or reasoning. If speculations are anything to go by, then the MH17 and MH370 are one and the same flight. According to a report by International Business Times, a rumour said to have originated in Russia states “That MH 370 and 17 are the same jets that the U.S. military arranged for a second flight filled with dead bodies to be hit by a missile while flying over eastern Ukraine”.
Russian TV holds the US responsible for the accident with Russian President Vladimir Putin having said that the mishap could have been avoided if military operations had not resumed in Easter Ukraine, adds the report.
In this article on the www.humansarefree.com, the author goes to great lengths to explain his theory by comparing pictures of the two planes. His moot point is an extra window that MH 370 did not have, nor did the MH 17 wreckage it seems.
Another one of the conspiracy theory states that, the bodies recovered from the crash site of the MH17 were not of the passengers onboard that specific flight. In fact the bodies were of the people from the missing MH370. When the plane crashed, the people inside were already dead. This was carried in a report by Breathe Cast.
The same report also states that when the MH17 crashed, it gave rise to theories about the MH370 having shot down “by a United States and Thai strike fighters during a training drill”.
Shortly after the disappearance of the MH370, Rob Brotherton wrote a piece on New Scientist, discussing why people resorted to conspiracy theories during such accidents with little or no information. Part of his report reads, ‘Psychologists suggest that part of the reason so many think this way is because we are all biased towards seeing ambiguous events as the product of someone's intentions rather than a mere accident. Moreover, when something has momentous consequences we are again more likely to see it as the result of something equally momentous, like a conspiracy. This is perhaps why the most successful conspiracy theories concern historic, often shocking events – the shooting of JFK, Princess Diana's death, and 9/11.’
Maybe conspiracy theories are our ways of coping with events, of our urge to have a closure to events that otherwise have no specific ends. It could also be a way of trying to deflect the blame, or mislead people into believing the false. As for the double tragedies of the Malaysian airlines, these conspiracy theories will continue till the investigating agencies and government comes up with definite answers.