MH370: What the Forensics Actually Show, and What Ashton Forbes Is Claiming

On the eighth of March, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 left Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing with two hundred and thirty-nine people aboard. Thirty-eight minutes later, someone in the cockpit signed off with air traffic control. Two minutes after that, the transponder went silent.

Twelve years later, the aircraft has never been found.

That sentence gets repeated so often it has gone soft. So before we release our full episode on this case, we want to lay out what is actually established, what is actually contested, and where the alternative research fits. Because MH370 is one of the rare mysteries where the hard forensic record and the fringe theories are both more interesting than the coverage usually admits.

The MH370 timeline, in confirmed facts

The aircraft was a Boeing 777-200ER, registration 9M-MRO, with Rolls-Royce Trent 892 engines. It was not experimental, and the 777 has one of the strongest safety records in commercial aviation.

• 00:41 Departure from Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

• 01:07 Final routine ACARS data report transmitted to the airline. Everything normal.

• 01:19 Final voice communication from the cockpit, a routine sign-off as the flight passed from Malaysian to Vietnamese air traffic control.

• 01:20 to 01:21 The transponder ceases transmitting near waypoint IGARI. The flight disappears from civilian secondary radar.

• 01:37 A scheduled ACARS report is due. It never arrives.

• 01:21 to 02:22 Malaysian military primary radar tracks an aircraft turning back across the Malay Peninsula and proceeding northwest up the Strait of Malacca.

• 02:22 Last military radar return. No radar anywhere sees the aircraft again.

• 02:25 onward The satellite data unit logs on and begins exchanging automated hourly handshakes with an Inmarsat satellite.

• 08:11 Final complete handshake.

• 08:19 A partial log-on sequence begins and is interrupted eight seconds later. This is the last transmission from MH370.

  
  

One detail is worth pausing on. IGARI is the handover boundary between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace. It is the precise point at which each country's controllers might assume the other one had the aircraft. Seventeen minutes passed before Vietnamese controllers raised the question.

What the official MH370 investigation concluded

The Malaysian Safety Investigation Report was released on the thirtieth of July, 2018. It is the closest thing to a formal verdict, and its findings are almost entirely negative.

• The precise cause could not be determined, because the main wreckage, the flight data recorder, and the cockpit voice recorder were all absent.

• There was no evidence of fire, explosion, or structural failure before the deviation from the planned route.

• Engines and fuel systems appear to have functioned normally until fuel exhaustion, roughly seven hours in.

• The transponder was manually disabled.

• The turns after IGARI, including the reversal, were consistent with manual piloting inputs rather than autopilot or mechanical anomaly.

  
  

Read that carefully. The report establishes deliberate human action and then declines to say whose, why, or where the flight ended. It rules things out without ruling anything in. Every alternative theory about MH370, from the reasonable to the extraordinary, has grown inside the space that report left empty.

How the Inmarsat handshakes produced the seventh arc

If no radar saw the aircraft after 02:22, how do we know it flew for another six hours?

Because of what amounts to a network check-in system. The satellite data unit aboard an airliner maintains a link with a communications satellite. When nothing is being sent, the ground station periodically pings the terminal and the terminal answers, confirming it is still connected. These are called handshakes, and MH370 exchanged them roughly once an hour.

Here is what is widely misunderstood. Those handshakes contain no position, no heading, no altitude, and no speed. They contain timing and frequency only. How long the signal took to make the round trip, which describes an arc across the earth, and the frequency shift, which encodes something about relative motion.

From that alone, engineers reconstructed the final six hours of a flight nobody could see. The eight-second partial log-on at 08:19 defines what is now called the seventh arc, the line across the southern Indian Ocean where the aircraft could have been at the moment of that last transmission.

MH370 debris: the flaperon and the barnacle evidence

For sixteen months there was no physical evidence at all. Then on the twenty-ninth of July, 2015, a beach cleaning crew on the French island of Réunion found a six-foot section of a Boeing 777 wing in the surf, encrusted with barnacles.

Because Réunion is French territory, the piece went to a military laboratory near Toulouse. After nearly a month of forensic analysis, investigators matched a serial number on the flaperon with the help of a technician at Airbus Defence and Space in Spain, which had manufactured the component for Boeing. French investigators then stated it was possible to say with certainty that the flaperon corresponded to Flight MH370.

It remains the cleanest identification in the entire case.

What the barnacles recorded

The barnacles are where this case gets genuinely elegant. As a stalked barnacle builds its shell, it takes calcium carbonate from the seawater around it, and the ratio of oxygen isotopes it incorporates depends on water temperature. Layer by layer, the shell records the temperature of the ocean it drifted through.

Gregory Herbert, a marine ecologist at the University of South Florida, recognized this the moment he saw the news photographs. The resulting study was published in AGU Advances in 2023 by Al-Qattan, Herbert, Spero, McCarthy, McGeady, Tao and Power. The team reared the species under laboratory conditions to establish a high-precision relationship between isotope ratio and temperature, converted one MH370 barnacle's shell chemistry into a dated temperature series, and matched it against fifty thousand simulated drift histories.

The result identified a drift path far to the south of a previous isotope-based reconstruction. Of the fifty thousand simulated drifters, only one reached the waters around Réunion by the actual stranding date.

The limitation is real and worth stating plainly: the barnacle analyzed was roughly five months old, so it began growing many months after the flaperon entered the water. It records the end of the drift, not the beginning.

And an earlier Australian analysis by Patrick De Deckker, published as Appendix F of the ATSB final report in 2017, found that temperature curves from the Réunion flaperon and from a cabin bulkhead recovered at Rodrigues Island did not match one another. De Deckker's own summary was that the timing of barnacle adherence and the ages of the barnacles remained unknown.

Multiple rigorous, peer-reviewed forensic methods applied to the same debris have produced answers that disagree. That is not a cover-up. It is what a hard problem looks like from the inside.

The MH370 search in 2026: what has been covered, and what is left

The scale here is difficult to hold in your head.

• The Australian Transport Safety Bureau led a three-year campaign covering approximately 120,000 square kilometers of seabed along the seventh arc, suspended in January 2017.

• Ocean Infinity, a marine robotics company, has covered approximately 140,000 square kilometers across campaigns beginning in 2018, spending 151 days at sea.

• In December 2024 Malaysia agreed in principle to a new attempt. The contract was signed on the twenty-fifth of March, 2025, under a no find, no fee structure: seventy million dollars payable only if the aircraft is located, targeting a new 15,000 square kilometer high-probability box.

• Search ran in two phases, a twenty-two day effort in late March 2025 cut short by weather, then from the thirty-first of December 2025 through the twenty-third of January 2026. About 7,571 square kilometers of the box were covered.

• On the eighth of March 2026, the twelfth anniversary, Malaysia's Air Accident Investigation Bureau confirmed no wreckage had been identified.

• On the twenty-seventh of June 2026 the Malaysian Cabinet approved a one-year extension running to the thirtieth of June, 2027. Roughly 7,428 square kilometers remain in the box. Search vessels cannot return until November, during the calm sea season.

  
  

Voice370, the families' association, noted after the last phase that no significant discoveries were made before the vessel had to redeploy for other commercial work. Their argument for extending the contract was that the government pays nothing unless the aircraft is found. Twelve years in, that is the argument they have left.

Roughly a quarter of a million square kilometers of ocean floor. Three independent campaigns. Three independent reconstructions of where the aircraft should be. And it is not there.

Ashton Forbes and the MH370 orb video

Ten weeks after the disappearance, on the nineteenth of May 2014, an anonymous YouTube account posting as RegicideAnon uploaded a clip presented as stereoscopic satellite imagery. It shows an aircraft banking into frame over cloud and ocean. Three white spherical objects enter and orbit it. There is a flash, and the aircraft and the objects are gone. A second clip, presented as thermal drone footage of the same event from a different angle, was posted on the twelfth of June. The original uploads have been deleted but survive on the Internet Archive.

For nearly a decade almost nobody paid attention. What changed was Ashton Forbes, a citizen journalist with a software and project management background who began a sustained public investigation into the footage in 2023.

What Forbes argues

His case is more specific than the word "teleportation" suggests, and it deserves to be represented accurately. His own published summary includes these points:

• No hoaxer has ever been identified, and no aircraft has ever been found.

• The United States holds classified material responsive to his Freedom of Information requests that it will not release.

• He identifies the leaker as Lieutenant Commander Edward C. Lin, a United States Navy officer assigned to VPU-2, a special projects squadron, on the fifteenth of February 2014, three weeks before the disappearance. Lin's defense counsel is on record that the investigation into him began on the second of April 2014. Lin entered a plea deal, received a nine-year sentence, and served six.

• He identifies the wide shot as Gorgon Stare, a wide area motion imagery system integrated by Sierra Nevada Corporation.

• He describes the orbs as plasma magnetohydrodynamic propulsion and the flash as a magnetic wormhole, arguing the aircraft was moved directionally rather than destroyed.

• His Freedom of Information request to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service was denied in full under Executive Order 13526, subsections 1.4(c) and 1.4(d).

  
  

In 2026 the material moved again. Lin's court-martial record was obtained under Navy FOIA case 2026-NavyFOIA-005116, and Forbes filed a parallel request through the Office of the Judge Advocate General. He has called for congressional hearings on MH370. None have occurred.

Components versus connections

This is the analytical distinction we think matters most, and it is the spine of our episode.

Gorgon Stare is a real wide area airborne surveillance system. Sierra Nevada Corporation is its actual integrator. Edward Lin was a real officer in a real special projects squadron whose espionage case made national news. Executive Order 13526 says exactly what Forbes says it says.

Every component in that list is documented. Not one of the connections between them and the two videos has been established.

A wall can be built entirely out of real bricks and still be standing in the wrong place. That is not a dismissal. It is how a great deal of otherwise serious research fails.

The case against the footage

Any honest treatment has to include this. Jonas De Ro, a visual effects artist, states that the background of the satellite clip uses his own stock cloud photography, shot in Japan in 2012, two years before the disappearance, and made available on textures.com. He has demonstrated the correspondence publicly. Corridor Crew, a group of professional visual effects artists, independently concluded the footage was fabricated. Another analyst recreated a comparable clip using Cinema 4D and After Effects. Skeptical Inquirer described the clip as producible in a few days with common tools and raised separate questions about apparent stock footage used for the flash itself.

Forbes's counter is that the causality runs the other direction, that the cloud images were cut from a single continuous source photograph, and that the debunkers have not accounted for the second clip.

Where that leaves the evidence: the provenance and chain of custody of the videos are unverified in both directions. No agency has authenticated them. No single debunk has been universally accepted. What is certain is that two hundred and thirty-nine people are unaccounted for.

The MH370 threads almost nobody covers

These are the parts of the case we find most genuinely unfinished, and they get a fraction of the attention the orb footage does.

The French criminal inquiry. France opened a criminal investigation separate from the Malaysian safety investigation, because French nationals were aboard. A safety investigation asks what happened. A criminal investigation asks who is responsible. Ghyslain Wattrelos, who lost his wife and two children on the flight, has pushed it forward for a decade, and journalist Florence de Changy has published a reconstruction that differs from both the official account and from anything Forbes proposes.

The satellite data itself. The entire southern ocean reconstruction rests on timing and frequency values from an automated system never designed as a navigation instrument. Credentialed analysts inside the aviation research community have raised sustained questions about whether the military radar track has ever been independently reviewed by radar specialists.

The barnacle disagreement. Three careful, methodologically distinct forensic approaches to the same recovered debris, producing results that do not agree about where that debris originated. Still unresolved, in the published literature, right now.

Coming soon on Fear and Wine

Our full MH370 episode goes deep on all of it: the seventeen minutes nobody was watching, the serial number that closed one question and opened ten more, the barnacle chemistry that disagrees with itself, and the orb footage argued from both sides without a thumb on the scale.

Subscribe so you do not miss it, and join The Uncorked Coven for early access, extended research notes, and the material that does not fit in the episode.

MH370 frequently asked questions

What happened to MH370?

No one knows. The 2018 Malaysian Safety Investigation Report concluded that the precise cause could not be determined without the main wreckage and the flight recorders. It found the transponder was manually disabled and that the turns after IGARI were consistent with manual piloting inputs, but it did not identify who was responsible, why, or where the flight ended.

Has any part of MH370 ever been found?

Yes. Around thirty pieces of debris consistent with the aircraft have come ashore across the Mascarene Islands, Madagascar, and the east coast of Africa. The most significant is the flaperon recovered at Réunion Island on the twenty-ninth of July 2015, confirmed by serial number after nearly a month of forensic analysis in France. The main wreckage has never been located.

Where is the MH370 search happening now?

Nowhere, at the moment. Ocean Infinity left the search area on the twenty-third of January 2026. Malaysia extended the no find, no fee contract to the thirtieth of June 2027, but search vessels cannot return until the calm sea season beginning in November 2026. Roughly 7,428 square kilometers of the current high-probability box remain unsearched.

Who is Ashton Forbes and what does he claim about MH370?

Ashton Forbes is a citizen journalist who since 2023 has argued that two anonymously uploaded 2014 video clips show MH370 surrounded by three orbs and then removed from the sky by advanced technology. He identifies the wide shot as a Gorgon Stare surveillance system and names a US Navy officer as the leaker. The footage has never been authenticated by any agency, and visual effects professionals have identified 2012 stock cloud photography in the background.

Is the MH370 orb video real?

It is unverified in both directions. No agency has authenticated it. Multiple visual effects professionals, including the photographer whose 2012 stock cloud imagery appears in the background, have concluded it is fabricated. Forbes disputes that analysis. No single debunk has been universally accepted, and the aircraft has still never been found.

How much ocean has been searched for MH370?

Roughly a quarter of a million square kilometers of seabed across three campaigns since 2014, using the most advanced marine survey technology available. The aircraft has not been located in any of it.

Sources

• Malaysian Ministry of Transport, Safety Investigation Report, 30 July 2018

• Australian Transport Safety Bureau final report, October 2017, including Appendix F

• Ocean Infinity, "Conclusion of the search for Malaysian Airlines flight MH370," 8 March 2026

• Al-Qattan, Herbert, Spero, McCarthy, McGeady, Tao and Power (2023), "A stable isotope sclerochronology-based forensic method for reconstructing debris drift paths with application to the MH370 crash," AGU Advances 4, e2023AV000915

• NBC News, flaperon serial number confirmation, September 2015

• Free Malaysia Today and The Diplomat, June 2026, contract extension reporting

• AVweb, March 2026, renewed search conclusion

• Skeptical Inquirer, "The MH370 Teleport Hoax"

• The Quint fact-check documenting the Jonas De Ro texture analysis and Corridor Crew assessment

• Ashton Forbes, public statements and published research summaries, cited as his stated position

For more of our investigative work, including the cases we keep returning to, browse the full archive.