The Remarkable Blaine Gibson [S1Ep 21 video]
No one has become more synonymous with the missing plane
Ever since Blaine Alan Gibson first crossed my radar screen, half a year before he found “No Step,” I’ve struggled to understand this eccentric character. In the media, he styled himself after Indiana Jones, always wearing a brown fedora. He portrayed himself as an inveterate adventurer and world traveler who before MH370 had pursued any number of quixotic international quests, including an attempt to find the lost ark of the covenant and an expedition to the site of the Tunguska explosion in Siberia. His was a wonderfully appealing persona. After I wrote about him in New York magazine, TV producers started getting in touch with me, hoping I could hook them up with him to pitch reality shows about his life.
He quickly became a central feature of the MH370 story, ubiquitous in media coverage the crash.
After receiving a whirlwind of press attention for “No Step,” his first find, Gibson traveled to Ile Ste Marie, Madagascar, in June accompanied by a crew from France 2 TV. There, accompanied by a film crew, he found yet another piece of aicraft debris.
If it’s remarkable to find a piece of MH370 with TV cameras rolling, imagine doing it twice.
Later that year Gibson was back on Ile Ste Marie, this time with a delegation of MH370 family members and a documentary crew. On the morning of December 8, the group split up and spent the day combing separate areas. The camera crew followed Blaine. Having driven along one stretch of shore on an ATV and found nothing, he turned around and was making his way back when he came upon a piece of debris at the edge of the wet sand. A wave had evidently deposited it within the few minutes since he had passed. “Appears to be Malaysia 370 interior cabin debris,” he declared.
I found it quite extraordinary that a purported piece of MH370 apparently washed up on the shore within half an hour of Blaine’s passing by the spot. The ocean is vast, the number of pieces of MH370 necessarily limited. Bear in mind that Madagascar alone has a coastline of 2300 miles. Consider mainland Africa, the other islands dotted around the region.
The odds of finding a piece of the plane on any given stretch of sand is very small; the odds of finding something that washed ashore within the last half hour must be infinitesmal.
Consider also the other people were looking for pieces of MH370, as well. We’ve talked before about how tens of thousands of people were looking for debris as part of the annual beach cleanup project in Western Australia. A similar project was going on at the same time in South Africa, where the 17,000 and 24,000 people taking part had been given an instruction sheet asking them to turn in anything that looked like a piece of an airplane.
Nothing was turned in.
Ordinary individuals were looking, too. In earlier episodes we’ve talked about how pieces were found on La Réunion, Rodrigues and in Mossel Bay, South Africa, by ordinary people who’d stumbled on stuff and thought it might be something. Blaine himself played a big role in alerting the public and encouraging people to turn stuff in.
As the excitement over his initial finds faded, Blaine kept powering on. By the end of 2016 he had found most of the pieces that had been turned in.
It wasn’t just how much he was finding that I found odd, but how he was finding it. In a seaside village on mainland Madagascar he happened to spot a nine-year-old girl using a scrap of MH370 debris to fan a kitchen fire. “It was light and it was solid and it was part of the plane,” Gibson told The Guardian. “When I put the word out around the village, another guy turned up with another piece he had been using as a washing board for clothes.”
I found it implausible that one might happen upon someone fanning a fire with a flat object that just happened to be a piece of MH370. I became even more suspicious after I found that Gibson had given a different account of how he’d collected the piece in a posting to a closed Facebook group: “We combed the beach ourselves and found one piece of aircraft debris, a hexagonal rubber torque coupling seal… We showed pictures of debris to local people and asked if they had found any, and over the next two days different people brought us the remaining three pieces.” No mention of the girl.
Later he told a different story, that he’d been eating breakfast when the girl, Lendra opened up a bag of toys and there it was.
Flummoxed by Gibson’s claims, and by his eccentricities as a person, I naturally wanted to find out more about who this person was. And there was quite a lot to find.
Born in San Francisco on April 21, 1957 Gibson was raised in Carmel, California. His father, Phil Gibson, was a figure of historic significance, having served as Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court from 1940 to 1964. He was known for his opposition to the emprisonment of Japanese-Americans in internment camps. “He… made friends with the Japanese American community,” Blaine later recounted in a speech to the California Supreme Court Historical Society. “They never forgot that Phil Gibson was the only state official in California to speak out publicly against the internment of Japanese Americans and residents during World War II.” Gibson’s mother was much younger than his father, who was 69 when his son was born. When Blaine got older he and his mother went on international trips together while his father , too old at that point to join them, stayed at home.
Gibson studied political science at the University of Oregon, then moved to Seattle and got a job at Seafirst Bank.
According to Seattle Met “For the next 25 years, Gibson lived a life that could be described as unconventionally adventurous. After a short stint at Seafirst, he moved to Olympia and worked for three years in the office of Washington state senator Ray Moore. Then he joined the U.S. Department of State.”
The State Dept told me he worked there between September 1986 and September 1990, from age 29 to 33. The person I spoke to couldn’t confirm what he did except that it was in “political affairs.” According to a detailed profile in Seattle Met, he spent time with rebels in Afghanistan and was photographed there holding an assault rifle.
In many articles, like this New York Times profile, he portrays himself as a footloose wanderer who’s obsessed with visiting every part of the world. But for a while he focussed on the Soviet Union and its successor states. The Seattle Met article describes him as “in the late ’80s he could see that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse and decided to capitalize on it. For 10 years he lived off and on in the newly capitalist Russia, serving as a consultant to new business owners and fattening a bank account that would later fund his globe-trotting.”
I don't know when Gibson first went to Russia, but in 1992 he established a company called Siberia-Pacific Co, domiciled in his Seattle condo, with two co-founders from the Kemerovo Oblast, a coal-mining region of central Russia.
I’ve tried without success to reach either of these men.
Blaine was apparently very immersed in Russian culture. When I spoke to him on the phone shortly after his discovery of “No Step,” he told me that he had been only the second American to ever visit the epicenter of the Tunguska meteorite impact: “I speak Russian fluently, I have access to Russian scientists, drinking vodka with them, they told me what they really thought.”
In 2002, Gibson took part in a conference held in the western Russian city of Obninsk called “Successes and Difficulties of Small Innovative Firms in Russian Nuclear Cities: Proceedings of a Russian-American Workshop.” Gibson gave a talk about navigating the ambiguities between privately and publicly held companies in cities that were home to nuclear power plants, which at that time foreigners were still restricted from visiting. This suggests a deep level of knowledge on Gibson’s part about the workings of Russian business at the ground level.
Glenn Schweitzer, who organized the conference, told me that it was hard to find Americans who had experience doing business in these kinds of cities and so was grateful that he had found Gibson. When he spoke to me it had been a few years since the event, and Schweitzer said he couldn’t recollect much about Gibson but that he recalled that he had traveled all over Russia, even to small, obscure places that few Americans ever went: “I found him to be an interesting guy, because he wasn’t like most of the Americans there.”
On June 10, 2004, Gibson took part in a conference held at the Department of Commerce in Washington, DC, entitled “International Travel to the U.S.: Dialogue on the Current State of Play.” He doesn’t appear to have given a talk, and no one at Commerce could remember him when I made inquiries years later.
Between 2005 and 2008 Gibson was involved in a now inactive Tajikistan travel company called Naison, where he was listed as “supervisor and consultant” of ecological tours in the Tajik National Park.
When investigating Gibson’s ties to Russia, I was particularly intrigued by his relationship with Vladimir A. Gololobov, who is quoted in several profiles of Gibson. An Associated Press article describes him as a “friend” who “met Gibson nearly two decades ago while the American was in Siberia on business trips.”
Indeed, Gololobov attended university in the same region of Siberia that Gibson’s business partners hailed from. He was born in 1977 and earned a master’s degree in English and German Languages from Russia’s Kemerovo State University in 1999, and a master's degree in International Trade Policy Studies/Commercial Diplomacy from the Monterey (Calif.) Institute of International Studies in 2001. In the first 20 years that Gololobov was in the US, he lived at three addresses—all of them are addresses that Gibson shared. One of them is in Carmel, in Monterey County, so it’s likely they were living together at the time. Note that Gololobov was 22 years old in 1999, and Gibson was 42.
In 2002 Gololobov moved to Washington, DC and started working as a lobbying at CSI, (Coalition of Service Industries) handling its Russian WTO accession project. That same year Gibson bought a condo in DC that became Gololobov’s residence. In 2013 Gibson sold the condo to Gololobov for about $100,000 less than its market value.
Looking at all the publicly available evidence, it seems clear that Blaine Gibson has extensive, longstanding business and personal ties to Russia. He seemed pretty open about it when I first talked to him. But after I started raising questions —questions motivated by evidence that Russia could have hijacked the plane and flown it to Kazakhstan, in which case the pieces of debris would have been sourced out of Russian and planted to mislead investigators—he started denying those ties.
When the journalist William Langewiesche visited him for a story that later ran in the Atlantic, Gibson told him that the only business he’d ever done in Russia was to dabble briefly in tourism in the Russian Far East.
This is clearly contradicted by publicly available information, but far from concede the weakness of his claims Blaine has gone on the counterattack. He has even claimed that he has received death threats as a result of my reporting.
“I very much doubt that Jeff Wise would go on Netflix and accuse me of being a Russian Spy,” he says during the third episode of MH370: The Plane That Disappeared. “He has absolutely no basis for that and he knows that it would be very very serious defamation.”
Later, following a segment in which the husband and father of a missing French family expresses his incredulity at Gibson’s incredible aptitude for finding pieces of the plane, Gibson says: “I’ve been accused of absolutely horrible things that are just so ridiculous, they’re laughable. I’ve been accused of being an American spy, a Russian spy, a Chinese spy, an international organ trafficker, an international sex trafficker. I mean, you name it. It is just patently ridiculous.”
In all of my research into Blaine Alan Gibson and his role in the search for MH370, I am not aware of anyone ever having accused him of being an American spy, a Chinese spy, or an international organ trafficker.