page_title: Korean Air Lines Flight 007 alternative theories
section_title: Theory of spy mission involving USAF aircraft
hierarchical_section_title: Korean Air Lines Flight 007 alternative theories / Theory of spy mission involving USAF aircraft
caption_attribution_description: English: Moneron Island in the Sea of Japan (East Sea)
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: Another theory was suggested by a French aeronautical expert, Michel Brun, in his book Incident at Sakhalin: The True Mission of KAL Flight 007. It has been supported by a former American diplomat to Moscow, John Keppel, and the American association Foundation for Constitutional Government.
  According to this book, the USSR was not guilty. The massacre of Flight 007 was directly caused by the Americans or Japanese. KAL 007 was involved in a spy mission intended to trigger Soviet air defences and to cover up for the missions of several USAF surveillance aircraft. Soviet Fighters attacked these aircraft but did not destroy KAL 007 which crashed far away from Sakhalin in Japanese "friendly" territory in the Japanese sea near North Honshu.
  The Korean aircraft was correctly communicating with other KAL crews, forty-six minutes after the official time of the shootdown. A large air battle allegedly occurred between the Soviet Air Force and the USAF, during which the Soviets shot down several American aircraft, including an RC-135, an EF-111 and probably even an SR-71. The SU-15 pilot, Major Osipovich, flew two sorties and shot down two targets (contradicted by the 1991 interview with Osipovich). Furthermore, for a long time all the experts believed that the Soviet fighter pilot was called Major Kazmin. Michel Brun believes that Kazmin and Osipovich twice destroyed an aircraft, but absolutely not the KAL 007. According to the theory, the whereabouts of the KAL-007 wreckage is not known to anyone, but is probably 500 kilometres (310 mi) away from Moneron Island down the coast of Japan. The theory postulates further that the real cause of the destruction is not known, but could have been a surface-to-air missile fired from USS Badger (similar case with USS Vincennes shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655) or from Japanese forces, who could not identify the airliner which was keeping radio silence.
  In  March 1991 an anonymous Japanese pilot said on TV that he knew who was guilty: a colleague who became a taxi driver in Tokyo. The lack of bodies, body parts, and wreckage of KAL 007 around Sakhalin and Moneron Islands was an indication to Brun that KAL 007 did not come down in those locales. Sparse remains showing up on the beaches of Hokkaido, nine days after the destruction of KAL 007 south of Moneron and Sakhalin, are evidence to Brun that KAL 007 was downed further south and that these remains were brought northward by the north running Tsushima current along the west Japanese coast. This opposes the commonly held understanding that the remains were carried from the waters near the islands of Sakhalin and Moneron by the West Sakhalin current flowing south between the two islands (at 1 mile per hour (1.6 km/h)), then by the West Sakhalin convergent current (6.9–8.1 mph, 11–13 km/h) near the tip of Sakhalin (35 nautical miles away from Moneron), into the Soya Strait, and finally onto the beaches of Hokkaido. Brun also discovered that KAL 007 communicated by radio in Korean with two other Korean aircraft after 03:27, the official time of its destruction: at 03:54 with KAL 015, 04:10 with KE50, and twice at 04:13, the true time of the aircraft crashing. This unusual last call, which was sent to the two aircraft and suddenly cut, could probably be explained by a serious problem occurring.
  In his book, Brun published a photograph of a weapon found by Japanese sailors from JMSA among KAL 007 debris "north of Moneron Island on 10 September 1983", bearing the mark "N3". The letter N does not exist in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, suggesting that the weapon was not Soviet. 
  Brun's theory attempts to account for the only eyewitness report of an explosion near Moneron Island which is considered to be that of KAL 007 on its way to the water. A Japanese fisherman aboard the Chidori Maru 58 had reported to the Japanese Maritime Safety Agency (and this report was forgotten in 1984 but cited by the ICAO analysis in 1993) of hearing a plane at low altitude but not seeing it. Then he heard "a loud sound followed by a bright flash of light on the hori
caption: Moneron Island
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