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Notes -
Witness statements claiming to have seen a missile of some kind were first proposed days after the crash, and the FBI pushed it fairly hard as a possible terrorist act for quite some time. A handful of witnesses took out newspaper ads, encouraged when a few early tests of wreckage turned positive for trace amounts of RDX and PETN in late August. (The official story is that these traces were left over by Gulf War transport runs.) By November, a retired federal Senator had endorsed the theory of a Navy blue-on-green incident.
Some of this was serious belief, and some of it was just an accident of different and conflicting approaches to community relations. The NTSB is famously resistant to publishing information before a final report, excepting where (a partner) orders regulatory or emergency shutdowns; the FBI held press conferences when they found information, in the theory that they should be asking both partner agencies and the public to report any unusual observations.
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