MH370 Search Update + New Hoax [S2Ep30 video]

Good news: Armada 78 06 is safely in port. Bad news: A dumb new hoax just dropped

Lots of news about MH370 today, some good, some bad.

The good news first: the vessel tasked with the latest seabed search, Armada 78 06, has arrived safely in port in Henderson, near Perth Australia, on March 4, 2025, a little earlier than originally planned. That means it will get refitted and will be back out at the search area earlier, too.

As of last week the ship was due into port on March 5. Judging by satellite weather image posted by Kevin Rupp it looks like it was trying to get of some bad weather coming up from the south.

According to information posted on the port’s website, the ship will be planning to leave again at 7am on March 6, local time, meaning that the port visit will have been less than 48 hours. With a sailing time of about 4 days that should put it back in the search zone around Monday, March 10.

And now for the bad news: I want to talk about the latest disinformation campaign that’s underway concerning MH370. It’s really quite exasperating, I don’t want to give it oxygen by dwelling on it too much but I also don’t want to just ignore it and let people think that I take it seriously.

Now, as anyone who’s followed this case for any amount of time will know, there’s a ridiculous amount of misinformation being spread. And unfortunately it’s being spread by some influential people with a lot of reach.

For one thing there’s Ashton Forbes, with his cartoonishly idiotic UFOs absconding with MH370 through an interdimensional portal. I covered him in Season 2 Episode 13, with David Dunbar, I still get tons of comments saying, hey, you should check out this Ashton guy, he knows what happened to the plane. No, he doesn’t, the whole thing is made up from whole cloth and it’s just silly, it doesn’t bear even the slightest resemblance to reality.

But, there’s another character out there who actually seems to have some chops and is taken seriously by people with authority and reach.

His name is Richard Godfrey, I talked about him numerous times especially in Season 2 episode 25. He like me was one of the original members of the Independent Group, like me he later got kicked out but unlike me I think he actually deserved it.

Among the various dubious claims that Godfrey has made over the years, he says he has come up with a technology called WSPR that can be used to track MH370 in minute detail, such that he can describe a very precise wiggly path that it took into the southern ocean.

It’s like Ashton Forbes’ claim in that it is ridiculous on its face. No one who knows anything about radar or radio transmissions takes it seriously at all. In fact as I reported in episode 25, Joe Taylor, the physicist who invented WSPR orginally, told Victor Iannello:

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.

Given all that you would think that Godfrey by now would have slunk away with his tail between his legs, but no, we live in an era of truly shameless liars.

And Godfrey has gotten considerable traction. No less than the ATSB spent considerable resources commissioning that report I described last week in which Australian government scientists looked at the seabed data for the place where Godfrey claims the plane went.

And extremely influential aviation bloggers like MentourPilot have bought it hook line and sinker and spread his nonense to millions of viewers on YouTube.

So really I think few people have done as much to confuse the public and spread fog over the topic of MH370, and I have no idea why he’s doing it. I don’t think he’s making any money off of it. Maybe it’s just for attention?

I very much hope that Ocean Infinity does go to check the area where he says the plane went, just to prove that he is a liar. I rather suspect that they won’t because they probably don’t want to waste their money, but who knows??

All of that is context for what Godfrey is saying now, he has said today on Geofrey Thomas’ podcast. (Thomas is a long-time coconspirator and fellow spreader of MH370 misinformation). This is the claim, that way back in 2014, on the night that MH370 disappeared, an Emirates Airbus A380 en route from Melbourne to Dubai was flying across the Indian Ocean when it spotted MH370 coming the other way.

And the captain, a man named Martin Smith, has just now 11 years later decided to come forward and tell his story.

Does this story even make any sense?

Let’s leave aside the issue of how someone could have just sat on his hands through all those years when MH370 was the hottest story in the world, all everyone wanted to know was what happened to the plane.

Let’s talk about how, according to Godfrey, this guy is flying over the wide open ocean in the dead of night, and he sees a plane with its lights on, but he’s not seeing it on his Traffic Collision Avoidance (TCAS) screen. Why would he care? Why would he even think about it? They’re they only planes up there in the skay, the ocean is huge, the sky is huge, there’s zero risk they’re going to run into each other, why is he even looking at his TCAS screen? But according to Godfrey the pilot freaks out and calls air traffic control and files a complaint or something.

No this doesn’t make sense.

Thomas headlined his video about this “MH370 - New Evidence Confirmed”. As though there was some additional information by which this story has been confirmed. It isn’t confirmed. This didn’t happen.

So I have a request to the public, to anyone who might watch my show and wonder if they should also listen to Godfrey and Thomas.

This is my advice. Stop paying attention to these people!

OK, that’s my rant for the day. For now we’lll have to wait a bit as Armada 78 06 gets refueled and restocked and re-crewed, pretty soon it will be back making its way westwards and we’ll learn the next great secret to be revealed, which is whether Victor is right about where they’ll search next. I expect he is, and after that area is completed we’ll find out the answer to an even more intriguing puzzle: what the next phase is and whether the search will be extended beyond the planned 15,000 square kilometers, and if so, where.