Allegations C-130 was shot down, Times report today 4 June
Ecce Homo! Loquitur...
That’s not what the report actually says.
The essence of the report is a couple of divers report finding parts of the wreckage after spending a year with a side scan sonar. Parts because the bits found indicate that the main sections were salvaged. The story then recaps the usual stories about armed Wattisham jets, Hunters etc. No new evidence whatsoever. The divers haven’t even yet dived on the site.
There are reasonably current threads on this forum debunking such stories with first hand witness accounts which can be found without having to go round the whole wheel again….
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/d...anic-mrvdfsxh7
Divers ‘solve’ mystery of Hercules stolen by homesick US mechanic
The crash of a stolen Hercules transport plane into the Channel during the Cold War has invited dozens of conspiracy theories about the fate of Paul Meyer.….
Evidence has now emerged that there was a secret mission to recover the Hercules as part of a cover-up of the embarrassing episode.
A pair of British divers who tracked down the wreckage after spending a year dragging a sonar device alongside their boat claim that parts of the plane were salvaged and taken back to Meyer’s base at RAF Mildenhall.…..
Grahame Knott, 66, and Simon Brown, 53, are confident that the aircraft landed in one piece and sank largely intact. However, the wreckage is now scattered and shows marks of being cut by a cable used by a salvage team to recover parts that the military wanted back.
They have spoken to two sources who saw the recovered parts in a hangar at Mildenhall and were able to describe what was missing from the wreckage.
Knott and Brown said that marks on the remaining fragments were consistent with a “wire sweep” from a salvage operation rather than damage accidentally inflicted by a trawler.….
Knott, a retired dive operator, received his first break in 2015, when a trawlerman recalled finding a fragment of an aircraft in his net 21 years earlier. The fisherman told him: “We pulled up a piece of a wing, but you won’t be interested in that because it’s not wartime, it’s modern.”
The tip-off allowed the divers to narrow down the search to ten square miles halfway between Portland and Cherbourg, but even so they spent a year fruitlessly towing a side-scan sonar device mapping the sea floor.
Then, on the last day of the season in November 2018, they saw fish gathering around something unusual 230ft below them.
Knott said: “We took the cameras out and had a look at it. We ran over it several times. It’s a scrapyard. There’s bits. Lots of it. We could see that it was an aircraft. Aluminium. That was obvious.
“It was a flat, calm day. We’d been looking at it for quite some time. We sat there and looked at each other and said, ‘You know what? I think that’s it.’ ”
Brown, a specialist in reconstructing car accidents, said that neither had been tempted to give up despite the £200 daily cost for diesel alone.
“When it comes to answering a question, an obsessive nature develops,” Brown said.
They put on hold their plans to dive on the site because Knott’s wife was seriously ill, then because of the pandemic. Now they are waiting for a plankton bloom to subside so that the water is clearer.
Knott said that he and Brown were convinced that they had heard the full story from an American former serviceman but wished to corroborate it before going public.
“What we don’t want to do is add to the rumours. You get contacted by three types of people. People who googled it. People who have heard something and then embellished it. And someone who actually knows something.”
The divers say that they will be relieved when they are able to put the story to rest.
“We want to move on with our lives,” Brown said. “There’s so much else to do. There’s Kristin Scott Thomas’s father’s aircraft in Lyme Bay.”
The essence of the report is a couple of divers report finding parts of the wreckage after spending a year with a side scan sonar. Parts because the bits found indicate that the main sections were salvaged. The story then recaps the usual stories about armed Wattisham jets, Hunters etc. No new evidence whatsoever. The divers haven’t even yet dived on the site.
There are reasonably current threads on this forum debunking such stories with first hand witness accounts which can be found without having to go round the whole wheel again….
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/d...anic-mrvdfsxh7
Divers ‘solve’ mystery of Hercules stolen by homesick US mechanic
The crash of a stolen Hercules transport plane into the Channel during the Cold War has invited dozens of conspiracy theories about the fate of Paul Meyer.….
Evidence has now emerged that there was a secret mission to recover the Hercules as part of a cover-up of the embarrassing episode.
A pair of British divers who tracked down the wreckage after spending a year dragging a sonar device alongside their boat claim that parts of the plane were salvaged and taken back to Meyer’s base at RAF Mildenhall.…..
Grahame Knott, 66, and Simon Brown, 53, are confident that the aircraft landed in one piece and sank largely intact. However, the wreckage is now scattered and shows marks of being cut by a cable used by a salvage team to recover parts that the military wanted back.
They have spoken to two sources who saw the recovered parts in a hangar at Mildenhall and were able to describe what was missing from the wreckage.
Knott and Brown said that marks on the remaining fragments were consistent with a “wire sweep” from a salvage operation rather than damage accidentally inflicted by a trawler.….
Knott, a retired dive operator, received his first break in 2015, when a trawlerman recalled finding a fragment of an aircraft in his net 21 years earlier. The fisherman told him: “We pulled up a piece of a wing, but you won’t be interested in that because it’s not wartime, it’s modern.”
The tip-off allowed the divers to narrow down the search to ten square miles halfway between Portland and Cherbourg, but even so they spent a year fruitlessly towing a side-scan sonar device mapping the sea floor.
Then, on the last day of the season in November 2018, they saw fish gathering around something unusual 230ft below them.
Knott said: “We took the cameras out and had a look at it. We ran over it several times. It’s a scrapyard. There’s bits. Lots of it. We could see that it was an aircraft. Aluminium. That was obvious.
“It was a flat, calm day. We’d been looking at it for quite some time. We sat there and looked at each other and said, ‘You know what? I think that’s it.’ ”
Brown, a specialist in reconstructing car accidents, said that neither had been tempted to give up despite the £200 daily cost for diesel alone.
“When it comes to answering a question, an obsessive nature develops,” Brown said.
They put on hold their plans to dive on the site because Knott’s wife was seriously ill, then because of the pandemic. Now they are waiting for a plankton bloom to subside so that the water is clearer.
Knott said that he and Brown were convinced that they had heard the full story from an American former serviceman but wished to corroborate it before going public.
“What we don’t want to do is add to the rumours. You get contacted by three types of people. People who googled it. People who have heard something and then embellished it. And someone who actually knows something.”
The divers say that they will be relieved when they are able to put the story to rest.
“We want to move on with our lives,” Brown said. “There’s so much else to do. There’s Kristin Scott Thomas’s father’s aircraft in Lyme Bay.”
And Glen Millers` Norseman....
