The TSA was not prepared for what happened in Seul-Coeur. They did not realize that this was no ordinary plane crash. Teams of forensic investigators from the United States and Canada descended on a scar in the Quebec countryside that was still smoking. I have a great deal of sympathy for those men and women, who must deal so clinically with such violent death on a daily basis. The sight of all those charred remains, a kind of mass crematorium, must be there whenever they close their eyes. That vision is on the inside of my eyelids, and I have only seen photographs. They could smell the bodies.
I only learned what they knew long after the fact of their investigation. I do not remember much of that time. My boss was good enough to give me time off from my work at first, as grief leave is not exactly all that common. Eventually, though, he could not tolerate my growing focus on why and how Zoiey died. Her death was terrible enough, but the cruelty continued. By the time I lost my job, my own employer, who had worked with me for so long that I considered him a friend, gave me a severance check and told me that people do not permit men to cry or scream in the office. By then, I was used to the indignity.
One of the reasons I’ve begun this blog is to overcome that indignity of being dismissed as one more pathetic crank whose mind was broken by grief over his wife. A crank would never have been able to amass the kind of comprehensive data that exist in my files, the kind of data that our governments do not want people to know about. There are people who would be all too happy to see me dismissed as a madman.
Yet reality is insane enough. This week, I will describe for you some of what the TSA report found had happened to the wreckage. It summarizes the report, which you can view in full at this link, written by the crash’s lead investigator at the TSA, Chad Stottlemeyer.
The fuselage was in tatters: burnt, fragmented, twisted metal. The tail, however, was damaged, but largely intact. The investigators, however, found that it had developed bulbous, thick spheres emerging from its surface. Stottlemeyer compares them to tumor growths. These growths, however, were made of metal, and retained enough heat for a week after the crash to bring the metal almost to melting point. Where the metallic tumors touched the grass, it left blackened vegetation.
Whatever energy brought down United 2581 in 1997, it was not an energy that is so far known to human science. It was capable of growing metal from metal, as if it were organic tissue. It is a chemical reaction that, according to every known principle in contemporary science, is impossible at the massive scales the crash investigators found. It is a phenomenon more suited to the hallucinations and nightmares of alchemists instead of sober, rational scientists.
