Shortly after Flight MH370 went missing, Michael Jerome McKay, an oil worker on a drilling platform off Vietnam’s coast, sent an email to his bosses stating he saw a plane crash in the South China Sea. McKay wrote,
“I observed (the plane?) burning at a high altitude and at a compass bearing of 265* to 275*from our surface location. It is very difficult to judge the distance but I’d say 50 – 70 km along the compass bearing 260* to 275*. While I observed the burning (plane) it appeared to be in ONE piece. The surface sea current at our location is: 2.0 – 2.3 knots in a direction of 225* – 235*. The wind direction has been NE – ENE averaging 15-20 knots. From when I first saw the burning (plane) until the flames went out (still at high altitude) was 10 – 15 seconds. There was no lateral movement, so it was either coming toward our location, stationary (falling) or going away from our location. The general position of the observation was perpendicular / southwest of the normal flight paths (we see the con-trails every day) and at a lower altitude than the normal flight paths. Or on the compass bearing 265* – 275* intersecting the normal flight paths and at normal altitude but further away.”
I have no doubt Mr. McKay is a sincere and truthful man who honestly believed he saw a burning object in the night skies over the South China Sea. He was careful not to definitively identify the object as a plane, and tried to be as helpful as possible to rescuers by providing the compass bearing of the object from his location, its approximate distance and altitude, a description of what he saw, and information about sea currents and wind conditions that would help determine the drift of any floating wreckage.
But McKay’s report has proved problematical for two reasons. First, searchers checked out the location he pointed to and found nothing. Second, the object he thinks he saw was more than 2,000 miles away from where experts believe MH370 most likely went down. Of course, as no trace of the plane has been found there either, the experts may be wrong and we can’t completely rule out McKay’s sighting just yet.
But I’m a skeptic. Lots of sincere, truthful, and honest people “see” things that aren’t there, or aren’t what they think. For example, I’m a sincere, truthful, and honest rabbit; and I saw a UFO once. In 1972, I was camping with a friend near Mt. Adams on a clear and starry night, and when I looked toward Mt. Rainier, I saw a yellow light moving in the sky that made maneuvers no man-made aircraft was capable of, and then abruptly shot away over the horizon at about 10 times the speed of a satellite in orbit. It’s interesting that I saw this object in the airspace between Mt. Adams and Mt. Rainier, a traditional “hotbed” of UFO sightings. To this day, I can’t rationalize that experience, but it doesn’t follow that I believe in UFOs. My eyes or brain could have played a trick on me.
Which is where I’m going with this essay.
Moviegoers should be familiar with the “unreliable witness” theme. It’s a central plot device in “My Cousin Vinny,” and figures in other notable films, such as “Twelve AngryMen.” And now, in this age of DNA evidence, we read frequent stories in the press about people who were convicted by juries being exonerated by unequivocal proof of innocence after spending years behind bars, reaffirming how unreliable eyewitness testimony is. And that’s even if there’s no police tampering with the witnesses, which is a major problem in itself.
So why do we still give credence to eyewitness evidence, and depend on it for making important decisions, in the face of so much experience telling us that “seeing is not believing” and even honest and well-meaning eyewitnesses are wrong a high percentage of the time? Despite the notorious unreliability of witnesses, our legal system and particularly our criminal justice system are still heavily reliant on eyewitness story-telling for the decisions it makes — decisions that impact, and sometimes tear apart, people’s lives.
After centuries of misplaced reliance on the system of witness evidence we’ve created, I believe it’s time for legal scholars, legal practitioners, and we as a society to begin questioning these old practices
. We’ve chased UFOs long enough, and too many innocent people have suffered as a result.