( CNN ) -- Nothing gets conspiracy theorists going more than a passenger plane crashing under mysterious circumstances . In the absence of hard information to explain such disasters , people look for answers , and the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 early Saturday could prompt the same response . TWA Flight 800 fell out of the sky on July 17 , 1996 , shortly after leaving JFK International Airport , killing all 230 people on board . Recovery and investigative efforts were hampered because TWA 800 went down in the Atlantic . Some soon posited that terrorists armed with surface-to-air missiles had brought down the plane . This theory seemed to be bolstered by eyewitness accounts such as that provided by Naneen Levine , who said she saw something streaking up toward the doomed plane . `` I thought it was something on the beach going straight up . '' Three months after the TWA crash , former ABC News correspondent Pierre Salinger , who had once been President John Kennedy 's press secretary , weighed in at a news conference that a U.S. Navy ship had brought down TWA 800 with a missile . Salinger came to this conclusion because of a document on the Internet making this claim . Bob Francis , the former vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board , said of Salinger , `` He was an idiot . ... He did n't know what he was talking about , and he was totally irresponsible . '' Opinion : Why so few clues about missing Malaysia flight ? After a four-year investigation , the NTSB ruled that the TWA 800 crash was caused by `` an explosion of the center wing fuel tank , resulting from ignition of the flammable fuel/air mixture in the tank . '' Three years after TWA 800 went down , EgyptAir Flight 990 left JFK International and soon plunged into the Atlantic , killing more than 200 people on board . Two competing theories about what happened emerged . The NTSB , widely regarded around the world as the most authoritative investigator of plane crashes , concluded after a three-year investigation that one of the Egyptian pilots , Gameel al-Batouti , had intentionally downed the plane . NTSB pointed to the fact that the downward trajectory of the plane was inconsistent with mechanical failure . Based on the recovered cockpit voice recorder , NTSB also underlined al-Batouti 's constant use of the phrase , `` I rely on God , '' and his lack of surprise when the passenger jet suddenly began descending . In Egypt , this was not a popular view , and Egyptian officials pointed to supposed mechanical failure as the cause of the crash . The conspiracy theories that developed around TWA 800 were caused by unreliable eyewitness accounts and Internet rumor-mongering . In the case of EgyptAir 900 , Egyptian officials would not accept that an Egyptian pilot would commit suicide , killing many others , and came up with an alternative explanation for which there was scant evidence . In the case of the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 , there was a deliberate effort to inject a conspiracy theory into the narrative of the events . Pan Am 103 blew up over Scotland on December 21 , 1988 , because of a bomb in the hold , which killed 270 on board and others on the ground . Juval Aviv , who presented himself as a former Israeli counterterrorism official , was hired by Pan Am to investigate what happened . In his report , Aviv claimed to have proof that the murder of the passengers on Pan Am 103 was the result of a CIA sting operation that went awry , an assertion for which there was not a shred of evidence . Yet a piece partly based on Aviv 's fairy tale then ended up as a cover story in TIME magazine . The U.S. government later concluded that the attack was ordered by the Libyan government , something the Libyans would eventually concede was , in fact , true . The TWA 800 , EgyptAir 990 and Pan Am 103 cases represent the likely range of reasons that brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 : mechanical failure , pilot actions or terrorism . Based on these past cases , we should be careful not to allow conspiracy theories about what happened to get too much play . The truth will come out only after a careful and lengthy investigation .
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared early Saturday with more than 200 aboard . Peter Bergen says passenger jet disasters lead often to conspiracy theories . He notes that people questioned government findings on TWA Flight 800 and Pan Am 103 . Bergen : The plane was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it vanished over the Indian Ocean.