28. Stage Magic

What the art of deception tells us about a missing plane. Plus: WSPR

To watch Deep Dive MH370 on YouTube, click the image above. To listen to the audio version on Apple Music, Spotify, or Amazon Music, click here.

For a concise, easy-to-read overview of the material in this podcast I recommend my 2019 book The Taking of MH370, available on Amazon.

Interested in connecting with a growing, passionate audience? Let’s talk. Email andy@onmilwaukee.com.

It’s a special episode today: Andy is on vacation, so for the very first time I’m helming this podcast without him. It’s a pretty common thing for co-hosts of podcasts to alternate taking episodes off and I think it’s a pretty practical thing but it’s also venturing into new waters, so we’ll see how it goes.

I’m really excited for today’s episode because we’re going to be talking about two things, one that’s brand new and one that’s an old favorite. The new one has to do with a viral YouTube video by a popular aviation podcaster named Mentour Pilot about a new technology called WSPR, pronounced “whisper.” A lot of listeners and viewers have been asking about it, so we’ll be tackling that today.

But first, a topic that I’ve been fascinated by for years: the art of stage magic and what it can tell us about MH370.

When we’re trying to solve a problem, one of the first steps is to figure out what the correct tool to use for the job is. If your problem involves dripping water, you’re probably going to need plumbing tools. If you’re finding sawdust, you’re going to need insecticide to kill carpenter ants.

For the last ten years, the conversation about MH370 has been dominated by engineers and pilots, and the net result is that they haven’t found the plane. And they really can’t explain why. It sounds to me like they’re using the wrong set of mental tools. So what set of tools to use? Well, what kind of problem is this? What is it like?

Well, you have an object disappear into thin air, it sounds like a job for a magician. I’m thinking of that Penn and Teller show, “Fool Us,” where they watch a magic act and try to figure out how it’s done. I’d like to do something like that with MH370: find out what the puzzle of the disappearing plane look like to someone who makes things disappear for a living.

To that end I’m joined today by Ed Dentzel is the host of an excellent podcast Unfound, in which he’s examined hundreds of missing persons cases. In a previous life Ed was the stage manager for “The World’s Greatest Magic Show” at the Greek Isles in Las Vegas from 2005 to 2008. While there he worked with more than 50 magicians, helping them create and hone new tricks.

Ed wrote a guest post for my blog back in 2019 and I found what he said really fascinating and I’ve been wanting to have him on the show for a long time.

One of the many interesting insights he shared with me was the idea that often small, seemingly innocuous details can have crucial details in making a trick work. As an example, he cited a David Copperfield trick in which the celebrity magician seemed to walk through the Great Wall of China:

From Ed’s perspective, it’s notable that Copperfield uses a platform to “enter” the wall, then the platform is moved to the other side, where he then “comes out of” the wall via the same platform. Why did Copperfield use the same platform twice? Was he trying to economize on props?

MH370 has a number of features that could offer similar insight into how the disappearance was pulled off, most notably the reboot of the plane’s satcom system. This detail was sufficiently inconspicuous that for a long time many of the commenters who offered theories about what happened to the plane simply ignored it. But, like a platform that gets used twice, this subtle detail opens up all kinds of possibilities once its potential significance is recognized.

In the second half of the show, Ed and I discuss a technique called WSPR that supposedly can use archival ham radio data to figure out where MH370 flew with a great degree of accuracy. This idea has been promoted energetically by an Independent Group member named Richard Godfrey, who we’ve met before in the podcast. Godfrey has managed to get WSPR picked up by mainstream outlets such as 60 Minutes Australia. What really seems to have made a splash, though, is getting it featured in a recent video by the popular aviation YouTuber Mentour Pilot:

Quite a few viewers and listeners have reached out to me asking for my take on this video and about WSPR in general, so I wanted to talk about it a little bit in today’s episode. I didn’t want to get in great detail, though, because I think the verdict about the validity has been rendered pretty convincingly by Victor Iannello, who devoted an excellent blog post to the topic. Victor found the concept pretty suspect from the get-go, but nevertheless rolled up his sleeves to find out if he could get the math to work. The long and short of it: he couldn’t. Not even close.

But we don’t have to take Victor’s word for it. To get a second opinion, Victor reached out to the person who is pretty much the most reputable source on the topic imaginable: Nobel-prize winning physicist Joe Taylor, who invented WSPR. Taylor told Victor: “As I’ve written several times before, it’s crazy to think that historical WSPR data could be used to track the course of ill-fated flight MH370. Or, for that matter, any other aircraft flight… I don’t choose to waste my time arguing with pseudo-scientists who don’t understand what they are doing.”

I’d like to think that that would lay the matter to rest, but unfortunately that’s not how the information economy is growing. The three million people who have seen Mentour Pilot’s video as I write this is is no doubt many orders of magnitude larger than the number of readers who have read Victor’s much more carefully thought-out analysis.

As I’ve often said, the key to solving the mystery of MH370 is to assembling all of the evidence and seeking the expertise of a wide variety of experts to help us understand what it means. Equally important, though, is to avoid the distractions and deflections of people who use their soap box to promote misinformation.