[This is a continuation of “Flight 93 and the Fake Crash of PSA 1771 that Presaged It,” which you are advised to read first.]
“Operation Northwoods” was a false-flag exercise concocted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the early 1960’s to gin up American fervor for war against Cuba. The plan was rejected by President Kennedy. Evidence of it was revealed definitively in documents relating to his assassination first released following Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK. The feature of Northwoods pertinent here was the pretend hijacking of a civilian airliner, done by putting passengers on a mock-up of a registered aircraft (owned by the Central Intelligence Agency); having it cross paths with the real airliner, which has been converted to a drone; and then blowing up the drone remotely, blaming the destruction and terrible loss of life on Cubans firing on it from another aircraft. Meanwhile, the decoy would land at Eglin Air Force Base in Western Florida, its “selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases” disembarking unnoticed.
There is substantial evidence that the 1987 “crash” of Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 constituted successful implementation of the Northwoods-type plan, except blamed on a disgruntled former employee firing a gun in the cockpit in lieu of Cubans shooting it down with missiles. The PSA 1771 “crash” (really just the drop of a pod of wadded-up newspapers), in turn, served as a dry run for the fake crash of United Airlines Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 11, 2001. More to the point, it tested how easily the public could be fooled.
The Mayday signal. The Northwoods plan provided that “[w]hen over Cuba the drone will begin transmitting on the international distress frequency a ‘MAY DAY’ message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal.”
It appears a similar gambit was employed with PSA 1771. In a report the National Transportation Safety Board released pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request (meaning, it’s not online) appears this statement, at p. 45:
“Although they [USAF air traffic controllers] did not observe the aircraft identification code, the information they provided concerning the aircraft’s altitude, approximate heading, location, and time coincided with the known flight data for PSA Flight 1771.” (Emphasis added.)
This is a key admission: the Air Force air traffic controllers, nearby at Vandenberg Air Force Base, did not observe the aircraft identification code. The statement of Sgt. Theresa J. Kurecki (at p. 140) is even more revealing:
Sgt. Czap backed up her account. The stunning information “the transponder signal terminated” means the Air Force in fact did not know the aircraft’s altitude, heading, or location. Although Ms. Kurecki still was able to see something on the radar scope, if a drone had been substituted for the plane she had no way of knowing. The pilot could have turned the transponder off as soon as the drone got in his vicinity, then landed the plane safely somewhere, maybe even right at Vandenberg, consistent with the Northwoods plan to land it at an Air Force Base, in that case Eglin. The question whether the pilot wants to go to Monterey and whether he thought he could make it–136 miles from Cayucos–is telling, given Vandenberg AFB was about half that far, thus keeping the Vandenberg possibility under wraps. In the meantime, the drone went down (or dropped its pod and went on).
Note that code 7700, for emergency, is never mentioned by the Air Force controllers. 7700 was not squawked. Yet the FBI has produced a transcript of the cockpit voice recorder made by its Technical Services Division in which the pilots say they are squawking 7700 (p. 13), and do not mention squawking 7500 or 7600, as Kurecki attests. So the CVR transcript does not jibe with Air Force witnesses’ accounts. Beginning at p. 11:
The transcript is out of whack with the official account in other material respects, as well. On its face it debunks the fable about disgruntled former employee David Burke shooting up this plane in order to wreak vengeance on his supervisor.
No competent evidence connects David Burke to this event.
Note first the statement at 32:20–“(‘___? problem’ (subject’s voice?))”–the only one attributed to David Burke, and that with a question mark. The technicians can’t make out what was said, or by whom, as they admit many times, e.g., at p. 3 of 20: “The … tape is difficult to understand. The transcript provided may not be fully accurate because of substantial noise interference.” At p. 2, sounds on the tape “may be gunfire or mechanical sounds of unknown origin[.]” At p. 7: “Due to the fact that the subject may have only uttered three words on the tape the voice print comparison may be impossible.” At p. 12: “[T]he recording quality is too poor to allow meaningful comparisons with known voice samples.” Note the extra information on p. 6 that “Los Angeles wishes to keep the contents of the original tape confidential,” implying that that the contents of the enhanced tape being made by TSD would be different. “Los Angeles” would refer to Richard Bretzing, special agent in charge in Los Angeles.
In contrast to these candid admissions of uncertainty made by the FBI’s own technical lab is the definite identification of David Burke as the perpetrator of this crime, in media reports as well as the Smithsonian movie about the crash (Season 3, Episode 3, “I’m the problem”). All assert that Burke killed Ray Thomson with a gun in the main cabin, then came into the cockpit and said “I’m the problem,” whereupon he shot both the pilot and co-pilot. Page 8 of the FBI report says “I’m the problem” was stated in a black male voice, yet look in vain for that statement in the FBI’s Technical Services’ transcript. Not only is that statement not in the transcript, it did not identify the voice as that of a black male. Black Lives Matter should be getting riled up about this racist slur (except BLM is an intelligence op, itself, so you won’t find this matter on its to-do list). The transcript also refers to the sounds repeatedly as “gunshot-like” and says they could be mechanical in origin. Aviation experts said it was unlikely a handgun could cause enough damage to bring down the airliner (pp. 20-21)–compare the recent blow-out of a door in the passenger compartment of an Alaska Airlines plane in mid-flight, which landed safely with no fatalities–and a former Boeing employee told the FBI that the BAe-146 typically made booming sounds after changing speed (p. 12 of 173).
No note and no airsickness bag. I asked explicitly for production of the handwritten note on the airsickness bag in my FOIA (Freedom of Information Act request) to the FBI. The note was neither produced nor even mentioned in FBI’s response, and my appeal of the failure to produce it was denied, again without any mention of this item. Is this a cover-up or is this a cover-up? While I could have taken this further, to challenge the willful withholding of this key piece of evidence via a FOIA suit in court, I won’t, because what their answer tells me is that the item does not exist. David’s brother Altamont (who died in May 2020) told me that he and their other brother Allen (who died in 2004) went to the FBI’s offices in Los Angeles shortly after the December 1987 incident demanding to see the note, and were roughly escorted out of the building. They wanted to verify it was their brother’s handwriting–and the FBI would not let them. It did not want them not only unable to confirm it was not their brother’s signature on the airsickness bag, but that there was no airsickness bag.
How did David Burke even become a suspect? Sabrina Burke, David’s daughter, was 12 and living with him in Newport Beach, California when he supposedly shot four people on this PSA flight and then caused it to crash, killing 39 more, including himself. He told her, the morning of December 7th, 1987, that he was going to San Francisco, but would be back in the evening. Sabrina knew nothing about her dad’s having been fired or attending a hearing in San Francisco that day, and thought it unusual that he did not take her with him, because usually he did. (David’s brother Altamont knew nothing about any employment difficulties his brother was experiencing, either.) Sometime between 9 and 10 p.m., the police came to Sabrina’s door, showing their badges at the window. They said her dad had been in an accident and they had to get a woman officer. She then got a call from someone at Pacific Southwest Airlines, who asked how old she was and whether there was an adult in the home, and when she said “12” they hung up.
One odd detail is that Sabrina called her mother in Rochester, and although her mother could not have known what had happened–Sabrina herself did not know anything, at that time–her mother screamed, “I know he didn’t do it!” The mother, Beatrice Johnson, had visited David and Sabrina in California for a few days about two weeks earlier. It is unfortunate that Beatrice died in 2016, before I started looking into this matter. Some important secrets certainly died with her.
At any rate, “the Feds” (Sabrina’s term) took possession of David’s answering machine that night, with no warrant–FBI’s reports say a search warrant was authorized on Dec. 8th (p. 6), so they had no warrant when they showed up–and then took Sabrina to stay with Jackie Camacho, referred to in the press merely as “David’s girlfriend.” According to news reports Camacho two days earlier, on Dec. 5th, had reported to Hawthorne Police that David threatened her with a gun in a parking garage at 1 a.m. on Dec. 4th. Hawthorne Police closed the case on December 7th, reportedly because the victim refused prosecution–and refused to be named! Coincidentally, the suspect died that day. And then the police destroyed the report. So no official report backs up this story of David threatening Jackie with a gun. Why would she make and then withdraw such a complaint, if she was not assisting in a plan to make him look like a bad guy?
How was it the police came to David’s apartment, and removed his daughter from the home, three days before David was identified as a suspect, and weeks before any of the dead passengers were identified (p. 22)? In fact, the San Luis Obispo Coroner’s Office’s report, referred to on that FBI report page, does not even contain an entry for David Burke. And why is that page cut off when the FBI brings up this very subject, anyway? FBI ultimately says the identification of Burke was from a fingerprint taken from a piece of skin which happened to be left on the trigger of a gun recovered at the crash site (an absolutely implausible scenario on its own). The gun suddenly appeared among the wad of newspapers on Dec. 10th.
David Burke purchased travel insurance–for the wrong flight. He bought three policies for $370,000 in travel insurance. One policy was for a round trip flight on Dec. 7 on flight #1769 that left at 2:30, not flight #1771, the crashed flight that left at 4:00 p.m. (p. 3 et seq.)! The others had no flight number listed. Only one person saw David board Flight 1771, and that was Jackie Camacho, who was his co-worker at PSA. But there is no interview of Jackie–just a hearsay statement in the FBI’s report that she saw him board the plane, which means it is not evidence. Altamont called Jackie in April 2020 at my suggestion–I found her in whitepages. He had met her years before, when he, David (with Jackie accompanying him), and their brother Allan attended the Rose Bowl in January 1987. So 33 years after the fact, Altamont calls her up to ask what she knew about David and the plane crash. She threatened to call her lawyer and slammed the phone down.
No past employment lawsuit.
I have not found any case backing up the widely reported information about David Burke suing his employer, which, in the 1970’s, would have been PSA’s predecessor in interest, Allegheny Airlines, for discrimination. Nada. Altamont was unaware of any such suit, and also unaware David had any employment difficulties in 1987, yet the brothers were close.
More lies to make David look bad.
FBI took over the air crash investigation in violation of law.
An axiomatically problematic aspect of this crash, just as with Flight 93 on 9/11, is the FBI taking over the investigation, appropriating the responsibilities of the National Transportation Safety Board–pushing the NTSB out of the way, as it were. Technical expertise for evaluating aircraft crashes is with the NTSB, which is what that agency is set up to do. FBI has no expertise whatsoever.
So by law, primary jurisdiction over all airplane crashes reposes in the NTSB. However, authority can be ceded to the FBI if the United States Attorney and chairman of NTSB confer and agree that the crash was a criminal act. This transfer of responsibilities is provided for by 49 U.S.C. Sec. 1131(a)(2)(B): FBI is authorized to take over an aircraft crash investigation upon (1) notification to the U.S. Attorney General and (2) consultation between the AG and the chairman of the NTSB. From Wikipedia:
The NTSB has primary jurisdiction over civil transportation investigations, but not criminal investigations. If the Attorney General declares the case to be linked to a criminal act, the NTSB must relinquish control of the investigation to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.[2] The NTSB may still provide technical support to the FBI in such investigations. In two high-profile examples, the NTSB sent aviation accident investigators with knowledge of aircraft structures and flight recorders to assist the FBI’s criminal investigation into the murder-suicide of Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 in 1987, and the September 11, 2001 attacks fourteen years later.[17]
(Emphasis added.) Huh, see, I’ve got something here: the cession of NTSB’s jurisdiction to FBI has occurred in only PSA Flight 1771 and the September 11, 2001, attacks!! Wiki gives no other examples!
I made FOIA requests to both agencies asking for documentation of the required notification and consultation between the Attorney General and NTSB respecting Flight 1771 and got nothing whatsoever. Look at this lame “Final Response” from Doug Hibbard at the Dept. of Justice, which does not say one word about whether there are documents responsive to my request, just tells me if I have “any further questions” here are places I can go! (Note that this letter was sent to an email address of some “anderson” instead of my address, so I never got it by email. I had let my post office box expire, too, so it took months to find out they had sent this letter to me.) NTSB similarly produced no documentation of notification or consultation with the AG. So, there was no notification or consent given or obtained from either the Attorney General or the NTSB for FBI to take control of the investigation, as required by law. This means the FBI’s involvement was unlawful. And it forcefully substantiates my conclusion in the first blog post: that the FBI “took control” because the whole thing was a psy op, not a real crash. This was FBI’s hoaxbaby.
NTSB was playing along. Recall from my original blog post that NTSB’s website does not even have this crash on its docket of airline accidents and its “aircraft accident report” for Flight 1771 is only that sophomoric blurb, in all capital letters, about killer David Burke who had been fired, taking revenge against his boss. More fraudulent documents from NTSB are discussed below.
The Spokane Chronicle reported that the Vice-Chairman of the NTSB, Patricia Goldman, headed the on-site investigation team from Washington, D.C. This website says, “Patricia Goldman, head of the National Transportation Safety Board’s on-site investigators, said they could find “no apparent problems with the aircraft, frame, structure or engines” that would have led to the crash. But Goldman said in this interview in 2013 that she was never involved in any investigation! How funny that she did not remember this crash that killed 43 people.
Ms. Goldman moved on from her high position at NTSB to become a vice-president of US Air, the very entity which had acquired Pacific Southwest Airways the year before the Dec. 7, 1987 crash. Goldman had previously been married to Charles Goodell, a New York Congressman and Senator who died in office in January 1987.
NTSB’s fake reports.
On April 12th, 2021, to my surprise I did get a 186-page accident report from NTSB about PSA Flight 1771. I say “surprise” because I had earlier been told that all accident reports were online. Well, this one is not–and we can see why. First, the scan they sent me is shameless. Pages are missing, page numbers are crossed out, fax headers and text are often cut off, and photographs are grievously bad quality. The “reports” themselves are on standardized forms required entries on which are blank. The date on the report is Dec. 14th, 1987–one short week after the crash, months before the Cockpit Voice Recorder was transcribed, and four days after the flight data recorder (FDR) was recovered. Was it pre-written in accordance with a script?
Engine serial numbers don’t match FAA registration records.
The serial numbers NTSB reports for the four engines on the plane, from parts it says were found on the ground, are 5121, 5207, 5125C, and 5214 (pp. 39-40). Too bad for the story line: the manufacturer’s serial numbers, which the FAA produced as part of this plane’s registration materials, are LF05129, LF05102, LF05127, LF05128, and LF05252 (p. 25 of 1700). Those were recorded by the FAA on Dec. 31, 1984. Not a single one matches the serial numbers in the NTSB report. (There were five engines registered, not four, because one was a spare.) This FAA document, bearing the engine serial number information on the real aircraft, is the termination of a sublease between Pacific Aircraft Finance Corporation and PSA which occurred July 25th, 1988 and refers to the recorded conveyance.
Another document, from Shawmut Bank, says “N350PS was on the aircraft on the date destroyed” (p. 3 of 1700) even though there had been a change to a special registration number–new number N168US–on Sept. 8, 1987, which was cancelled on April 13, 1993 (p. 5 of 1700). This doc shows the plane’s current tail registration number as N 350PS, however, and serial number at that point to be E2027. It is likely this change in the registration number three months before Dec. 7th played a role in the fakery, which may have been insurance fraud in addition to a psy op, but I am not sophisticated enough with financial frauds to unravel it. It suffices to say not a single one of the actual engines was found in the “wreckage.” The “found” serial numbers were made up.
Bungling every which way you look.
The wrong flight number (1776) appears on p. 2 of the NTSB report and the narratives in both Systems and Powerplant Groups’ reports say (pp. 41 and 35) that the accident occurred on Dec. 12th, the latter in a Summary which directly contradicts the “date of accident” of Dec. 7th that appears a mere three lines above it. The time is also off by 18 minutes. Sloppy work. Page 53, at item 16, asks for a “Narrative Statement of Facts” in which is hand written “See brief”–but there is no brief. Page. 76 says: “airspeed at impact: 210 plus knots. Flight path angle 90 deg. 0 deg roll. Terrain angle level”–but they have no way of knowing any of that, since they do not have the Flight Data Recorder (discussed below). Radar would not tell them whether the aircraft was rolling or supply its angle to the terrain (but no radar reports are referenced, anyway). On this page there is supposed to be a sketch of the crash site, but it only says “see packet”–what are they even talking about? No packet! P. 84 says “no firefighting units notified” yet p. 86 says “sparks caused post-impact fire.”
On p. 45 appears this paragraph:
Although they [USAF air traffic controllers] did not observe the aircraft identification code, the information they provided concerning the aircraft’s altitude, approximate heading, location, and time coincided with the known flight data for PSA Flight 1771.
I’ve already pointed out that the Air Force air traffic controllers’ failure to observe the aircraft identification code meant that if a drone had been substituted for the aircraft they would not have had any way of knowing. But because they also said the transponder signal terminated, they could not have provided information on the plane’s altitude, heading, or location before the crash, either. But here is NTSB glibly saying that they did, based on “the known flight data for PSA Flight 1771.”
So, what about that “known flight data”?
The useless FDR.
The Federal Aviation Agency requires that commercial airliners be equipped with two “black boxes” which record information about the flight. One of these, the Cockpit Voice Recorder, is discussed above. The other is the Flight Data Recorder (FDR), which, by current regulation, records 88 parameters of the flight such as time, altitude, airspeed, heading, and aircraft attitude. Some FDR’s record up to 1000 different parameters.
Both [FDR and CVR] are typically installed in the tail of the plane, the most crash-survivable part of the aircraft. The boxes themselves are made of stainless steel or titanium and made to withstand high impact velocity or a crash impact of 3,400 Gs and temperatures up to 2000 degrees F (1,100 degrees C) for at least 30 minutes.
The FBI said (p. 23) that the in-flight data recorder for PSA 1771 was “severely damaged and of doubtful value” and that they sent it to NTSB headquarters on Dec. 9th, 1987. Neither FBI nor NTSB provided me the FDR output. NTSB, for its part, says the FDR was “destroyed on impact” (p. 89). Note that the FDR for United Airlines Flight 93, the plane that reportedly crashed at Shanksville, Pennsylvania on 9/11, was found and data recovered from it, no problem. But no data was available from the FDR of PSA Flight 1771.
Victims, Shmictims.
The San Luis Obispo County sheriff’s office, which doubles as the county coroner, issued a big report about the victims, huge because of all the repetition about the fake accident. A significant problem with it is that David Burke is not listed among the dead.
In the first installment of this investigation, and above, I noted a few passenger discrepancies. It’s hard to prove that the victims are fake. For some there is no information, at all. For others there are photos of tombstones, Social Security numbers, marriage records, birth records, and more–but remember, this was an FBI operation. The FBI might have created new identities and Social Security numbers for the participants, which is what the DOJ does for persons in the Witness Protection Program–and what was planned with Northwoods. Whether, in this case, there were real people who got on a plane at all is unknown; but if there were, they could have done so under “carefully prepared aliases,” meaning documents were “carefully created” to make the fictitious person appear to have a history. Remember that many of the deceased bear a date of death, in the SSDI, as “December 15, 1987,” or just “December 1987.” This means the date for the “crash” had not been decided upon timely or was changed or was not communicated to the person reporting it.
In many cases what I found, using both whitepages and ancestry.com, is a person for whom every detail matched official records except for one thing, such as date of birth off by a couple of years or months or different middle initial. I only examined about a third of the 43. That said, I have one that matches in every respect–and of course all it takes is one person supposedly on that flight who is still alive to prove it did not crash! This person, again like the Flight 93 people discussed in the first article, did not even bother with a name change; and, interestingly, has not bothered to monitor her presence on the web as the years have gone by and the internet has emerged, linking powerful computers to reach ever farther into people’s lives. She was easy to find.
This is airline attendant Debra Lynn Vuylsteke. Her first name is spelled as “Deborah” in the coroner’s report, but “Debra” on her tombstone. (She actually has two memorials, in two different states!) The San Luis Obispo coroner gives her date of birth as 9/13/55 on p. 44. In whitepages is a Debra Lynn Vuylsteke, DOB 9/13/55 (and date of death 12/1/87–whoops, again, not even Dec. 7th)–listed with a current address at 530 San Bernardino Ave. in Newport Beach, CA. Maiden name Watterson. I took the following screenshot of the first page in 2020:
Interestingly, as I am finalizing this on Oct. 30th, 2024, I see that whitepages has removed the date of death, but retained the date of birth, Sept. 13, 1955. She’s 69 years old:
This removal of the date of death is evidence Debbie is active.
She was married 4 July 1984 in California (ancestry says San Diego) to Kenneth Vuylsteke. There is an SSDI entry for “Debra Lynn Watterson” (with alternate names Debra Lynn Vuylsteke and D. Vuylsteke) which gives date of death as just “December 1987.” Debra is also in the Connecticut death index, shown as residing in Redding, CT, and a Connecticut driver’s license was found among her effects (p. 44). The FBI reports a California driver’s license, however, CA N4186645 (p. 37). The Connecticut residence is curious, since she would not have been able to work as an airline attendant for PSA–which only served the Western states–and live in Connecticut very easily. In fact, a “personnel order” to Northwest Orient Airlines was recovered with her effects. So her very employment with PSA is suspect.
She had these residences in California after she died, too, in Danville and Newport Beach:
She must have gotten a good “settlement” to participate in this massive fraud.
530 San Bernardino Ave, Newport Beach: worth over $4.7 million (but Vuylsteke is not the owner of record).
Postscript: Pacific Southwest Airlines sold sex. Get a load of the outfits it made stewardesses wear:
Spread yer legs, honey!
And wouldn’t it make you feel safe to see a smirk on your airplane? “The Smile of Stockton.”
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Thanks to David Cole and Anne Berg for their valuable assistance!