page_title: Korean Air Lines Flight 007 alternative theories
section_title: Theory of abduction and retention of passengers and crew
hierarchical_section_title: Korean Air Lines Flight 007 alternative theories / Theories about lack of human remains and luggage at impact site / Theory of abduction and retention of passengers and crew
caption_attribution_description: View of Lubyanka (KGB headquarters) in 1983, while it was undergoing renovation and the third storey was added.to the left half
context_page_description: Korean Air Lines Flight 007 alternative theories concerns the various theories put forward regarding the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007. The aircraft was en route from New York City via Anchorage to Seoul on September 1, 1983, when it strayed into prohibited Soviet airspace and was shot down by Soviet fighter jets.
  Flight 007 has been the subject of ongoing controversy and has spawned a number of conspiracy theories. Many of these are based on the suppression of evidence such as the flight data recorders, unexplained details such as the role of a USAF RC-135 surveillance aircraft, or merely Cold War disinformation and propaganda. Some commentators also felt that the International Civil Aviation Organization report into the incident failed to address key points adequately, such as the reason for the aircraft's deviation. The release of flight data recorder evidence by the Russian Federation in 1993, ten years after the event, seriously challenged many of these theories. Some alternative interpretations focus on evidential questions largely independent of political considerations.
context_section_description: The abduction theory proposes that KAL 007, having been missed by one of the missiles, landed or successfully ditched with passengers and crew surviving; they were then abducted and put into prison camps by the Soviet authorities. Among its advocates are the Israeli-American Bert Schlossberg, a son-in-law of one of the crash victims (and his organisation, the International Committee for the Rescue of KAL 007 Survivors), and Avraham Shifrin, a Soviet emigre to Israel in the 1970s and former Soviet prison camp inmate. It has received some coverage in the conservative news agency Accuracy in Media and also the magazine of the  John Birch Society, whose second president, the Democratic representative from Georgia Larry McDonald, was a passenger on the flight.
  Schlossberg, as a new citizen of Israel, met Shifrin in 1989, and through Shifrin, met and questioned one of his sources, and came to question the accepted belief that the people of KAL 007 had perished. Through his own investigation and research of newly released documents, Schlossberg became convinced that the passengers and crew of KAL 007 had been recovered by the Russians and then imprisoned.  In a self-published book and on the Committee website, Schlossberg corroborates this theory with claims that Soviet military communication and cockpit voice recorder transcripts show a post-missile detonation flightpath at altitude 5,000 meters for almost 5 minutes until over the only land mass in the Tatar Straits and within Soviet territorial waters, where it began a slow spiral descent. He claims this indicates both the aircraft's capability of extended flight, and the pilots' intention to water land near the only point where rescue would be feasible. He furthermore claims that a lack of bodies, body parts and tissues, and luggage, both on the surface of the sea and at the bottom; the Soviet obstruction of US, Korean, and Japanese search vessels trying to enter into Soviet territorial waters around Moneron Island, near which KAL 007 was last tracked spiraling downward; previously unknown Soviet transcripts, released by the Russian Federation, of mission orders within one half hour of the shootdown, sending helicopters, KGB patrol boats, and civilian trawlers to Moneron Island; and the Russian Federation acknowledgement of Soviet deception in its part of the search for KAL 007 all indicate a Soviet recovery of passengers and crew from the damaged and downed passenger jet.
  Schlossberg has also claimed that a letter sent in 1991 by Senator Jesse Helms, while he was ranking minority member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, requesting information about the fate of KAL 007, indicates that Helms took the abduction theory seriously.
  The letter included, in a list of questions, a request to know the whereabouts of any survivors and their camp locations, and requested also to know of the fate of Larry McDonald.
  Schlossberg's work has not gained mainstream media attention; in a review of the circumstances of the death of Larry McDonald, University of Georgia Law Professor Donald E. Wilkes considered the theory as "even more preposterous" than Michel Brun's theory of a Japanese locale for the shootdown and an air battle having taken place between Soviet and American aircraft.
  Avraham Shifrin, a self-declared KGB expert, claimed that, according to the investigation of his research centre, KAL 007 landed on water north of Moneron, and the passengers successfully disembarked on emergency floats. The Soviets collected them and subsequently sent them to camps (with the children "separated from their parents and safely hidden in the orphan houses of one of the Soviet Middle Asian republics"). McDonald in particular was supposed to have gone through a number of prisons in Moscow, among them the Central Lubyanka, and Lefortovo.
  The aeronautics journalist James Oberg, while acknowledging Shifrin's expertise on Soviet prison camps, has stated that Shifrin "got real confused" about the fate of KAL 007. Hans Ephraimson, a relative of one of the pass
caption: Lubyanka in 1983
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