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By Jack Cashill and James Sanders
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com

It arrived shortly before noon, Washington time, on July 17 – a fax sent to Al-Hayah in London, the most prestigious Arabic language newspaper. Sent by the Islamic Change Movement – the jihad wing in the Arabian Peninsula – the warning came one day after the group had taken responsibility for the destruction of Khobar Towers. It was as serious as a truck bomb:

The mujahedin will deliver the ultimate response to the threats of the foolish American president. Everyone will be amazed at the size of that response. Determining the time and the place is the hand of Al-Mujahedin, and the invaders should be prepared to leave ... dead or alive. Their time is at the morning-dawn. Is not the morning-dawn near?

As the sun was about to rise on the Arabian Peninsula, it was about to set on Long Island. At 8:31 Dwight Brumley, whose long Navy career included special expertise in electronic warfare, put down the book he was reading and glanced out the window of US Air 217. Night had already fallen to the east, the direction in which he looked.

"I noticed off the right side what appeared to be a small private airplane that was flying pretty much at a course right at the US Air flight," Brumley recounts. "I followed it until the fuselage and the inboard wing cut off my field of view. My first thought – that was awfully close!" Brumley estimates that the plane passed a mere 300 or 400 feet beneath him.

About 15 seconds after the small plane had passed, Brumley noticed "what appeared to be some kind of a flare," but he realized quickly that this bright, burning object ascending off the ocean was no flare. "It was definitely moving pretty much parallel to the US Air Flight and it was moving at least as fast, perhaps even faster."

As the flare-like object raced north, and Flight 800 ascended slowly and innocently east along the Long Island coast, Mike Wire, a millwright from Philadelphia working on a Westhampton bridge, saw a streak of light rise up from behind a Westhampton house and zigzag south, southeast away from shore at about a 40 degree angle, leaving a white smoke trail behind it.

Richard Goss, upon seeing the same object, turned to his friends at the yacht club and said, "Hey, look at the fireworks." Everybody turned to look, and they all watched it climb. "It was bright, very bright," says Goss, "and, you know, that almost bright pink … and orange glow around it, and it traveled up."

Vacationer Lisa Perry, on her Fire Island deck, watched an object shoot up over the dunes of Fire Island.

"It was shiny, like a new dime," says Perry. "It looked like a plane without wings. It had no windows. It was as if there was a flame at the back of it, like a Bunsen burner. It was like a silver bullet." The object was heading east, southeast toward the Hamptons.

As Paul Angelides walked out onto his Westhampton deck, he picked up what was likely the same object now high in the sky. From his angle, it appeared to be a "red phosphorescent object ... leaving a white smoke trail." At first he thought the object a distress flare, but he soon realized it was too large and moving too fast. Spellbound, he followed the object as it moved out over the ocean in the direction of the horizon.

Goss followed it, too. "It seemed to go away in the distance toward the south, and that's when I saw it veer left, which would bring it out east. It was a sharp left."

From a Westhampton school parking lot, Joseph Delgado saw Brumley's streak, the one heading north toward shore and slightly west. As he told the FBI, he saw an object like "a firework" ascend almost vertically. The object had a "bright white light with a reddish pink aura surrounding it." The tail, gray in color, "moved in a squiggly pattern." From Delgado's perspective, the object "arced off to the right in a south westerly direction."

At 8:31, FAA radar operators out of Islip saw an unknown object appear on screen and head toward Flight 800. At the same moment, FAA radar picked up something else unusual – a ship of good size nearly right under Flight 800's airborne position.

The two National Guard pilots in their nearby helicopter now picked up the streaks high in the sky. Capt. Chris Baur saw the streak Brumley had first observed: "Almost due south, there was a hard white light, like burning pyrotechnics, in level flight. I was trying to figure out what it was. It was the wrong color for flares. It struck an object coming from the right and made it explode."

Maj. Fritz Meyer, a winner of the Distinguished Flying Cross for his service over Vietnam, saw the southbound projectile clearest. "It was definitely a rocket motor," says Meyer.

Delgado saw a second object "glitter" in the sky and the first object move up toward it. He thought at first it was "going to slightly miss" the glittering object, TWA 800, but it appeared to make "a dramatic correction at the last second." Then Delgado saw a "white puff."

"From my vantage point," says Goss, "there was a direct explosion that followed, and then after that there was a second explosion that was off to the east a little farther that was much larger."

Meyer saw a bright white light also. "What I saw explode was definitely ordnance," he said. "The initiating event was a high velocity explosion, not fuel. It was ordnance."

"I then saw a series of flashes, one in the sky and another closer to the horizon. I remember straining to see what was happening," says Angelides. "There was a dot on the horizon near the action, which I perceived as a boat."

"About two seconds later," claimed Meyer, "lower, I saw one or two yellow explosions, from that the fireball, third. The first two high-velocity, the last low-velocity petrochemical explosion."

"Then a moment later there was another explosion, and the plane broke jaggedly in the sky," says Perry. "The nose is continuing to go forward; the left wing is gliding off in its own direction, drifting in an arc gracefully down; the right wing and passenger window are doing the same in their direction out to the right; and the tail with its fireball leaps up and then promptly into the water below. The sounds were a huge BOOM! – then another BOOM!"

"You could feel the concussion like a shock wave," reports Mike Wire of the initial blast. Indeed, it shook the bridge on which he was standing in Westhampton even at ten miles distance.

"The sounds shook the house," remembers Angelides. "My wife, who was on the bathroom floor drying our son from his bath, felt the floor shaking as she heard the noise and I heard her cry out, 'What is going on?'"

And then confusion, a hellish, horrific confusion. "There seemed to be a lot of chaos out there," says Angelides. Now he, Wire, Perry, Meyer, Baur, Goss, Delgado and Brumley watched as the plane's fuel tanks exploded, and Flight 800 morphed into what Delgado described as a "firebox" and others as a "fireball."

"It got much larger, maybe four or five times as large," says Brumley, who was watching the explosion from overhead. "It was the same explosion. It just got bigger. My first thought was, 'Boy, what was that?'"

"When that airplane blew up it immediately began falling," adds Meyer. "It came right out of the sky. From the first moment, it was going down."

Brumley saw the burning debris hit the water and turned to summon a flight attendant. As he did, a passenger in the seat behind him, James Nugent, cried out, "Did you see that too?" Brumley and the others were hardly alone in what they had seen. On that soft summer eve, thousands were watching the sea and the sky. More than 700 of them would share their stories with the FBI.

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