On March 21, 2022, China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735, a 737, experienced a sudden and catastrophic event. Cruising normally at 29,000 feet, something happened to cause it to go into a steep dive. After hurtling downward for a minute, records show it briefly leveled off at 8,000 feet, then plunged again, even faster, before crashing at high speed into the ground.

It hit farmland at a near-vertical angle. Local rescuers, unaware of the speed and severity of the crash, rushed to the site in the hope of finding survivors. When they arrived, the scene was bleak. A few small pieces of the plane lay scattered around and some trees above the site were on fire, but the site was dominated by a lack of anything recognizable as a crashed plane.

There was a crater at the center of the site. Scattered around were some belongings of passengers but no bodies. The pieces of the plane that were strewn about were parts of the tail or the tips of the wings. A flight data recorder, also located in the tail, was recovered two days after the crash, the same day that “some human tissue” was first recovered (Jia 2022).

The grim reality of the crash scene, combined with flight-tracking data and a security camera showing the plane descending vertically, painted a bleak picture. The crash was unsurvivable. Hitting the ground at several hundred miles per hour killed everyone aboard instantly. The plane’s fuselage punched deep into the soil, simultaneously compressing, disintegrating, and getting buried. Some loose items and parts of the exterior and tail of the plane were projected away from the impact, but the bulk of flight 5735 ended up underground.

The Flight 93 Crash

This will instantly remind readers of conspiracy theory of the tragedy of Flight 93. The fourth plane hijacked on 9/11, Flight 93 was heading toward Washington, D.C., where the hijackers intended to crash it into the U.S. Capitol building. The passengers had been making phone calls with the seat-back phones and learned of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A group of passengers stormed the cockpit, and in the ensuing struggle the plane became inverted and flew at high speed, near-vertically, into the ground.

The result was very much like Flight 5735. There was a crater with most of the plane underground. Small bits of the plane were scattered around. A fire burned nearby trees. When rescuers arrived, there were no signs of human remains.

The similarities between the two crashes, both in the initial crash scene and in subsequent investigations, recovery, and cleanup, are significant. Footage from both events shows blue canopies set up in staging areas and numerous investigators in protective gear. Excavators were brought in to dig ever deeper. There was the gradual recovery of one flight recorder and then the other. Eventually, jet engines were recovered from deep underground.

Loose Change

Back in the early 2000s, the Flight 93 site was stunning in its uniqueness. Overshadowed for a while by the larger events at the World Trade Center, Flight 93 gradually gained the attention of an increasing number of conspiracy theorists. This reached a tipping point in 2005 with the release of the documentary film Loose Change.

Loose Change was one of the first and most significant conspiracy-promoting films to leverage the internet for free distribution and a subsequent huge audience. A significant portion of all 9/11 conspiracy theorists trace the origin of their belief to watching a version of Loose Change. The film covered the usual theories about the building collapses looking odd and the lack of a visible plane at the Pentagon, but it also devoted a significant portion to Flight 93, stating, “Perhaps the most shocking evidence of all is that at the crash site itself there is absolutely no trace of Flight 93. Nothing but a large crater.” The film also quotes several eyewitnesses giving their first impression of the site, which they (obviously and understandably) described as just a hole in the ground.

Leveraged Uniqueness

Those who create conspiracy theories exploit the tendency people have to seek simple explanations for novel situations. The collapse of the Twin Towers was both horrifying and perplexing in its violence, so it was not difficult to explain it as being the result of explosions to the conspiracy-minded.

The Flight 93 crash site also seemed inexplicable. When people picture a plane crash, they imagine a plane lying on the ground—perhaps broken into pieces but still recognizably a plane. This is because most plane crashes are at relatively low speeds because they happen when the pilot is trying to land or during takeoff. If you do a Google image search for “plane crash,” 98 percent of the first page of results shows a recognizable plane.

So the Flight 93 crash site was unexpected and unique in most people’s experience, creating cognitive dissonance. “Where is the plane?” became the obvious question. Loose Change did not immediately provide an answer except to say “the government is lying to you.” The creators later built upon this foundation to concoct some ludicrous theory about faked phone calls and the plane being spirited away to an army base. Small recognizable pieces of the plane were, as at the Pentagon, nonsensically explained away as having been quickly planted by the FBI. Once you accept the false premise that there’s no plane at the crash site, then anything goes.

To see how relevant this still is more than twenty years after the event, I conducted a short poll on Twitter. Out of the 300 people who identified as 9/11 “Truthers” (conspiracy theorists), 100 (33 percent) said they found the crash site suspicious, specifically due to the lack of a visible plane. An additional 10 percent said they once thought it was suspicious but later changed their minds. A slim majority of 57 percent claimed to have never found it suspicious.

So, for a significant number of people—a third of all 9/11 Truthers—the “Where’s the plane?” question remains a foundational piece of evidence that underlies their belief in the conspiracy. That might then become part of a foundation for other conspiratorial beliefs, such as QAnon or even anti-vaccine views or climate-change denialism. After all, if the government can lie to you about a plane in a field, they can lie to you about anything. So it’s something well worth addressing.

Offering Counterexamples

One of the most effective ways of addressing this type of conspiracy theory evidence is to supply counterexamples. I’ve done this successfully in many cases, including when “chemtrail” theorists claimed that contrails in earlier eras always quickly dissipated. I showed them a video of seventy years’ worth of books on clouds that explained that they often did not.

Supplying a counterexample works because it is often perceived as neutral. People will respond better to information if it’s something they can reasonably check for themselves or it’s in some inarguable form—such as a fifty-year-old book in a library. It also works best if there are multiple examples.

Flight 93 was initially a difficult case to find useful counterexamples for. It was not that they didn’t exist; planes had been burying themselves in the ground since World War II. In 1944, a B-24 Liberator crashed vertically when returning to the United Kingdom (Wright 2021). Eyewitnesses described a familiar scene: a brief fire, then a crater with no visible plane and just some parts scattered around. The plane, deep underground in farmland, was not excavated until 1974.

In 2005, the internet was still finding its feet. Older descriptions of such crashes were largely text based, and the comparisons fell flat. But sadly, over the years planes have continued to crash on occasion. In March 2019, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 experienced technical issues (later found to be a design flaw), which resulted in the plane flying vertically into the ground at nearly 700 miles per hour.

A depressingly familiar scene resulted: a crater, most of the plane up to thirty feet underground, a brief fire, some scattered debris. Photos of the crash site look eerily similar to Flight 93. It was a good counterexample, and this is what I wrote about it at the time: “With the tragedy of Flight 302, with its similar crater and lack of visible debris, the truthers are again forced to decide if they are going to give up a precious piece of evidence, or if they are now going to become Ethiopian 302 Truthers”  (West 2019).

That was the first nearly exact counterexample; now, with the Flight 5735 tragedy, we have two—along with numerous other examples that replicate one or more of the things that Truthers find suspicious about Flight 93. When you can get these examples across to people, it makes a difference.

The Plasco Backfire Effect

Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work. When I made the comment about 9/11 Truthers “going to become Ethiopian 302 Truthers,” I was referring to the curious case of the Plasco Building—the first good counterexample relating to the 9/11 building collapses. Plasco was a twenty-story building in Tehran. On January 17, 2017, it caught fire, burned for a few hours, and then suddenly collapsed. This collapse exhibited many of the characteristics that the 9/11 theorists find suspicious about the collapse of the Twin Towers, such as expulsions of material—which they attribute to explosives but were actually just collapsing floors compressing air.

So, I thought, here’s a great counterexample. Now they will have to drop those claims. The evidence set for conspiracy would be reduced again, and people would start to question their assumptions. Some undoubtedly did, because it is a pretty clear-cut counterexample. It assuredly has helped some out of the rabbit hole. But some people simply rejected it and claim it looked nothing like the collapse on 9/11. And some doubled down. They admitted it looked like the events of 9/11, but they claimed it was another conspiracy and the building had been demolished with explosives.

Led by the biggest 9/11 conspiracy promoters, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (which has more than $500,000 in its yearly budget), they became Plasco Truthers and started to lobby (in Farsi) the Iranian Government  to comb through the wreckage for traces of nano-thermite. Then they started accusing me of being irrational for not seeing their truth (Walter 2018).

You can’t win them all, and there’s no magic bullet. But I’ve found that having a set of good, independently verifiable counterexamples is a valuable tool when trying to help someone mired in conspiracy thinking. I encourage people to gather such counterexamples before setting out to engage with believers. I think many of that 10 percent of former “Where’s the plane?” believers were swayed by counterexamples, and if one minuscule good thing might come from the tragedy of Flight 5735, it might be that a few more people will be helped, a little bit, out of the rabbit hole.

References

Jia, Cui. 2022. Crashed aircraft’s black box found. China Daily (March 24). Online at https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202203/24/WS623baad7a310fd2b29e52dae.html.

Walter, Ted. 2018. Why “demolition deniers” are obsessed with the Plasco Building demolition in Tehran. AE911 Truth (January 30). Online at https://www.ae911truth.org/news/402-why-demolition-deniers-are-obsessed-with-the-plasco-building-demolition-in-tehran.

West, Mick. 2019. Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and 9/11’s United Flight 93. Metabunk (March 10). Online at https://www.metabunk.org/threads/ethiopian.10552/.

Wright, Jack. 2021. The hunt for Johnny Reb. Daily Mail (June 30). Online at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9740409/American-veterans-dig-Sussex-field-Air-Force-B-24-bomber-crashed.html.