[Acosta:] Demands are being made for a new investigation into the horrific mid-air explosion of a TWA jet that happened 17 years ago off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people onboard. Now a new documentary is fueling suspicions that a missile might have actually caused the crash. In the film, six retired members of the original investigative team break their silence and they challenge the NTSB's official finding that faulty wiring to a fuel tank was to blame.
[Unidentified Female:] What would your analysis have been?
[Unidentified Male:] The primary conclusion was the explosive forces came from outside the airplane. Not the center fuel tank. Would that statement have been in your analysis? If I got the right one.
[Robert Young, Twa Airline Accident Investigation Rep:] The agenda was that this is an accident. Make it so.
[Acosta:] The investigators won't speculate about the source of the explosion, but the documentary suggests that crucial evidence has been kept under wraps.
[Tom Stalcup, Co-producer, "twa Flight 800":] The family members need to know what happened to their loved ones. This investigation was no not one single eyewitness was allowed to testify. That's unheard of. You know, let the eyewitnesses speak publicly at a government hearing. Reopen the investigation and find out what really happened. And stop this facade that's been going on for too long.
[Acosta:] This has gotten a lot of people talking about this this week, so let's dig deeper into the crash investigation and the doubt surrounding it. CNN's Tom Foreman joins us now. Tom, there are some pretty startling claims being made in all of this that perhaps what we knew is not what we should have been told at the time.
[Tom Foreman, Cnn Correspondent:] Yes, pretty strong pushback against it because of the basic facts we've known for quite sometime. TWA Flight 800 took off at 8:20 on the evening of July 17th, 1996. It was still light out. The weather forecast for the flight to Paris called for smooth sailing, and for 12 minutes it was.
[Unidentified Male:] We just saw an explosion out here.
[Foreman:] Two other pilots were in the air and saw the explosion.
[Unidentified Male:] It blew up in the air and then we saw two fireball goes down into the water.
[Foreman:] Other eyewitnesses were on Long Island.
[Unidentified Male:] It looked like a mile in the sky of flame coming down, straight down. I thought it was coming from the ground up, because the flame looked like it was shooting from the ground up, if you know what I mean.
[Foreman:] Two hundred and thirty men, women and children were aboard Flight 800. Everyone died. People thought terrorism immediately. An alert went out to the FBI. The Navy sent state-of-the-art salvage ships. Investigators ended up recovering 97.5 percent of the plane. In a giant hangar, they actually actually put TWA 800 back together and reconstructed the plane's last seconds. Early on, they determined the center fuel tank blew up, causing the nose and first-class section of the jet to break off and fall away. Incredibly, the coach section kept flying for about 30 more seconds. Evidence pointed not to one explosion, but two, the second blast, half-a-minute after the first erupted when the left wing tore away from the back half of the plane, leaking fuel from the much larger wing tank until something touched off a spark. That, they say, is why people saw a line of flames shooting upward. Those eyewitness accounts of a trail of fire hit the Internet less than 36 hours after the explosion. People speculated it was a terrorist surface-to-air missile. Then, a document began circulating on the Web, taking the missile theory in a new direction. It said a U.S. Navy ship accidentally shot down Flight 800 and a cover-up reaching the highest levels of government was in play. It might have stayed an Internet conspiracy theory, had it not been for one man.
[Pierre Salinger, Former Abc News Correspondent:] It's a document that I got about five weeks ago from an intelligence agent of France.
[Foreman:] In March of 1997, Pierre Salinger, the former press secretary, former U.S. senator and network news correspondent, claimed to have verified the friendly-fire cover-up, specifically naming the USS Normandy as the ship that fired the missile. But there was a problem with his claim. Salinger's proof turned out to be the same unsubstantiated document that had been on the Internet for months. And investigators concluded the U.S. Normandy never fired any of its missiles and, even if it had, it was out of range. More than four years after that explosion, in August of 2000, the NTSB finally released its final report concluding that TWA Flight 800 was the victim of fundamental design problems with the engineering and wiring that cracked and lost its insulation, allowing high voltage into its center fuel tank full of highly explosive fumes. That remains the official story and one reason, Jim, people close to the investigation are pushing back so hard against this documentary suggesting otherwise.
[Acosta:] But it is a fascinating story and a subject to go back and take a look at. And those images from that documentary that you had in your piece of them reconstructing the plane, so many Americans remember that. And obviously these questions are being raised. They'd like to get to the bottom of it.
[Foreman:] Extraordinary work. But these questions that really have been raised numerous times since then. This is just the latest iteration of them.
[Acosta:] All right, Tom Foreman. Thank you. Coming up next, a bombing in New York's Times Square. It's a case that's gone cold, but there are new clues and investigators are asking the public for help.