Open season for conmen, crooks and crackpots

I was saddened to read of a proposal by an organisation calling itself the Reward MH370 Campaign to raise $5 million in the hope that a ‘whistleblower’ will be tempted to come forward with some hitherto undisclosed information about the fate of the missing Malaysian airliner.

The campaign, which involves several, but by no means all the families who have lost loved ones on the flight, pre-supposes there is a conspiracy by someone – perhaps the Malaysian Government, the Chinese Government, the authorities conducting the search, or maybe some shadowy terrorist organisation – to withhold information on what actually happened.

Sarah Bajc, the girlfriend of one of the passengers, supports the campaign because she says the traditional search has turned up nothing “either because of a faulty approach or due to intentional misdirection by one or more individuals”.

It is neither. The reason nothing has yet been found is because the Indian Ocean is a very big and remote place which has tested the limits of even 21^st century technology and ingenuity to conduct a successful search. 

At the root of this campaign is the desperate hope some still carry that the passengers and crew did not crash, are still alive but are being prevented from revealing their whereabouts. That is why Reward MH370 is seeking to revive the long discredited northern arc of possible flight which might have taken the plane to a secret landfall.

The terrible thing about this misguided approach is that the organisers of the campaign will receive plenty of claimants to their $5 million – from conmen, crooks and crackpots – and that they will waste their money, time and emotional energies sorting through the mass of conspiracy  theories, abduction by aliens, black holes etc etc.

For many years now we have been conditioned to thinking of Planet Earth as tamed; fully explored and exploited to the needs of mankind; a fragile structure we must strive to preserve and protect from our own excesses.

In part this is true, but MH370 has shown there are still vast, wild areas about which we know very little and the floor of the southern Indian Ocean is one of these; so remote, so inhospitable that we have left it alone – until now.

I remain convinced the resting place of the Malaysian airliner will eventually be found. Whether its discovery will shed any light on what happened onboard during that fateful night of March 8 is another matter altogether.