Shillong: Even as the mystery over the Air India Kanishka bombing continues, a report released Wednesday by a rights activist in Meghalaya suggested that the plane could have been the victim of a "Star Wars" experiment by the US.
"The plane (Kanishka) could have been the victim of the Strategic Defence Initiative or the so called "Star Wars" experiment," said Michael N. Syiem in his report titled "The Sixth Possibility".
The laser-based Star Wars technology was launched in 1983 by the Ronald Reagan administration with the aim of protecting the US from missile attacks by erecting an impenetrable defensive missile shield across the entire North American continent.
It was quietly shelved after the Kanishka explosion in 1985.
Kanishka, the Air India flight 182 operating on the Montreal-London-Delhi-Bombay route, was blown up at an altitude of 31,000 feet June 23, 1985, killing all 329 people on board.
In his 29 page report, Syiem said that on June 23, 1985, the Americans, in their second attempt succeeded in testing their functional accuracy of the Star War technology, when Kanishka exploded mid-air into the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Ireland.
The US space agency NASA had launched the 18th flight of the space shuttle "Discovery" June 17, 1985 with the mission to determine whether a laser beam could track the a speeding missile warhead and explode it in mid-air before it could reach its target.
04/03/11 IANS/Times of India
To Read the News in full at Source, Click the Headline
0 comments:
Post a Comment