The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-Opened

[whoanellie]

Where did I say my ideas were correct?

If you don't have any confidence in the validity of you ideas, why would anyone else?

 

[JayUtah]

Sorry but my belief that Dr Loftus' theories have nothing or little to do with this incident is not defamation. Her theory is...

The theory you mention and correctly attribute to Dr Loftus is not her only theory. In more recent years she also took on false memories. Before that she dealt in the problems with eyewitness testimony and, as I've mentioned several times, wrote the definitive textbook on the subject, which is now in its second edition. The vast majority of that book discusses the essential malleability of human memory. It does not even discuss the issue of falsely implanted memories.

You did more than simply note your opinion that Loftus' more recent research doesn't directly address the kind of eyewitness testimony that the Estonia investigators relied upon. You characterized her as merely a hired gun who worked to exonerate child molesters at trial, a practice you spared no words in describing as morally reprehensible. Your objection to Loftus is not merely an intellectual difference of opinion. You're trying to undermine her credibility by any means possible, including character assassination.

In any case, I mentioned three other researchers who have done more recent research on the same topic, including the issue of vivid recall associated with PTSD and its relationship to the accuracy of testimony. You didn't even bother to acknowledge their existence.

Your common layperson's misperceptions of how memory works and how accurate witnesses are measured to be simply doesn't stand up against the weight of scientific scholarship.

 

[Kid Eager]

If the ship was stopped it would be stopped.

What could stop it 'momentarily'?

What do you think the inertia of a 15,000 ton ship moving at around 15 knots is?

Not that it matters because certain other posters don't do math, but the kinetic energy of Estonia at the time of the accident was 578MJ.

If a 5,000 ton sub hit the Estonia and stopped it, the sub would have had to be travelling at around 55km/h pretty much on the surface in bad weather.

If the imaginary sub was a 1,000 ton minisub, it was doing 122km/h on the surface in bad weather

People with knowledge in this area can spot a couple of problems pretty quickly...

 

[Reformed Offlian]

Not that it matters because certain other posters don't do math, but the kinetic energy of Estonia at the time of the accident was 578MJ.

If a 5,000 ton sub hit the Estonia and stopped it, the sub would have had to be travelling at around 55km/h pretty much on the surface in bad weather.

If the imaginary sub was a 1,000 ton minisub, it was doing 122km/h on the surface in bad weather

People with knowledge in this area can spot a couple of problems pretty quickly...

I hear subs start to shimmy really badly around 90km/h.

 

[SpitfireIX]

What 'consensus' is that?

Her sister ship sailed for many years with no problems.

What exactly made the Titanic unseaworthy?

Sorry for the late follow-up, but I just wanted to point out that during her career the Olympic collided with a cruiser, a submarine, and a lightship (the latter two of which sank as a result). Yet she didn't sink. So please explain to us, Vixen, exactly how the Titanic was unseaworthy.

 

[Axxman300]

Germany hasn't signed the Treaty? Nor has it prosecuted its German citizens visiting the site. Why is the opinion of survivors and the Estonian former chief prosecutor 'irresponsible speculation'? What is it you abhor about the survivors' eyewitness accounts? These guys had to watch as their fellow passengers/crew died in front of them, only to discover their witness statements count for zippo, when we should be grateful that at least someone survived to relate to the world an historical event of what happened as it happened.

That's now how things work in this case.

Witness statements are taken, key points are plotted along a time-line, and a narrative is constructed. These statements are balanced by physical evidence. Unlike Titanic, investigators had/have access to the wreck, and can survey details to get a firm conclusion. In this case the physical evidence (the failed bolt/lock mounts, and the hood) are the center of gravity for the evidence, and the witness statements are a distant second relating to why more people didn't escape the ship (which is much more important, BTW).

Titanic survivors told conflicting stories about the ship breaking in half, and the 1912 report stated the ship sank intact. When the wreck was finally located in 1985 it was in two pieces.

I don't know a better way to illustrate how survivor testimony is not always 100% accurate since those who swore to their dying day that Titanic went down in one piece. The physical evidence proved to be different.

You can talk submarines, bombs, and whatnot all you want. You haven't shown anything which overrules the facts and we know them.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

Eyewitness testimony must be reconciled with other evidence. You can't simply pretend physics doesn't exist just so you can feel righteously in solidarity with survivors.

The righteous solidarity with survivors is a sham, anyway. She doesn't show much solidarity with survivors like Sillaste whose accounts don't fit the narrative she wishes to construct. Somehow *those* survivors are villains. Their trauma, the fact that they lost comrades in the tragedy, is less important than their drug use.

 

[Foster Zygote]

Ovberg was very exact and precise. He said 'momentarily' stopped. Now when there is a collision in which you are stopped albeit momentarily, that indicates something has impeded your path. For example a sleeping policeman when driving along a road. And if it is a head-on collision of course you will stop or be flung backwards or sideways.

Somebody needs to take 9th grade physics.

 

[LondonJohn]

Carl-Eric Reintamm saw something moving away through the water. The Finnish Police were interested enough in his account to pay a visit to Estonia to specifically ask him what he saw.

The JAIC rewrote his statement to say he saw 'some broken off stair rails'.

So maybe you now have a sense of why the survivors are dissatisfied with the report and their accounts being treated as worthless or rephrased to fit the JAIC narrative.

The report didn't "rewrite his statement" though, did it? That's just disingenuous.

The report took note of his statement, then sought inferences/explanations which both a) feasibly accounted for his stated experience and (importantly) b) feasibly matched with all of the known reliable evidence (and lack of evidence).

In this particular matter, there is zero credible evidence that there were any vessels or other large-mass objects in the waters anywhere near the Estonia at any point leading up to the sinking; and plenty of credible evidence that there were no vessels or any other large-mass objects in the waters anywhere near the Estonia at any point leading up to the sinking. And that being the case, Reintamm's experience can only have one of two realistic explanations: 1) he was mistaken about seeing anything significant in the water moving away from the ship; or 2 what he saw must have been something that had broken away from the ship.

Thus the report suggests that what he might have seen were stair rail structures which had come free from the superstructure. No biggie whatsoever.


On the other hand, I'll happily provide further grist to the conspiracy mill by noting that Reintamm has been Estonia's Consul General in St Petersburg, Russia, since 2018......

 

[LondonJohn]

Somebody needs to take 9th grade physics.

No no.... I know that whenever I drive over a sleeping policeman, my car momentarily comes to a stop, before moving off again very shortly thereafter.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

No no.... I know that whenever I drive over a sleeping policeman, my car momentarily comes to a stop, before moving off again very shortly thereafter.

[emoji106]

Exactly. It's like the express train which hits a fly. It momentarily stops then moves off again. That's common sense physics right there.

 

[Steve]

Somebody needs to take 9th grade physics.

Inertia and momentum are just theories. They don't actually exist in the real world, and particularly not in the Baltic.

 

[Foster Zygote]

No no.... I know that whenever I drive over a sleeping policeman, my car momentarily comes to a stop, before moving off again very shortly thereafter.

As shown in Chuck Jones' Principia Cartoonica.

 

[JayUtah]

That's now how things work in this case.

Witness statements are taken, key points are plotted along a time-line, and a narrative is constructed. These statements are balanced by physical evidence.

The report didn't "rewrite his statement" though, did it? That's just disingenuous.

The report took note of his statement, then sought inferences/explanations which both a) feasibly accounted for his stated experience and (importantly) b) feasibly matched with all of the known reliable evidence (and lack of evidence).

Yes. This is far more in line with how eyewitness testimony is -- nay, must be -- handled in a real-world forensic investigation. And, frankly, how it's handled in a court of law too.

Interviewing the witness is also an art. We trained using interviews of TWA 800 witnesses as case studies. A court of law has adversarial questioning to probe gaps or differences in eyewitness testimony, but that's not what a forensic engineering investigation does. The goal in forensic engineering investigation when interviewing a witness is to extract as much factual evidence as possible, not to undermine witnesses in order to receive a favorable judgment. That means questioning the witness in a way that strips away assumptions, interpretations, conclusions, and other things that we all do in the process of encoding memories as narratives. It may seem untrusting or adversarial, but it should be more accurately viewed as a collaboration between the interviewer and the witness to extract the best information.

I guarantee that the point is not to make the witnesses feel like their testimony "counts for zilich." And I guarantee it's not to make light of whatever they may have suffered, or whatever strengths and flaws there might be in their character. It's to obtain purely factual information as dispassionately as possible. The notion that brave witnesses who suffered so much deserve to have their statements taken entirely, literally, at face value is simply foreign to the practice of productive, realistic investigation. The conspiracy movement seems bent on lionizing survivors. But that is not good science.

 

[Vixen]

How do you know that?

A Swedish diver, Hakan Bergman, who claimed he was on navy standby as early as 28 September 1994 itself, said he saw and filmed a large hole on the side of the ship. This was published in Swedish newspapers as early as 1999, so it has been known of since at least then. So it can't be the result of 26 years worth of 'wear and tear': two months' if you believe Bergman, six years', if not.

"Håkan Bergmark, 41, from Stockholm was one of the first who dived down to the "Estonia". He says that he saw and filmed a big hole in the side of the ship. He did not consider it much at the time. 'It wasn't my task to find the cause of accident. But when the Final Report of the Commission was issued many years later I was very surprised', says Bergmark, who today would like to forget all about the "Estonia". Two of the four other divers, who were down together with Bergmark, do not want to comment on the "Estonia" at all."
Fredrik Engström, Swedish daily Expressen 22 August 2000

Early in the morning of September 28, 1994, the phone rang at the home of the diver Håkan Bergmark, a reserve officer in the navy. It is the navy's rescue service on Muskö that asks him to be prepared to step in as a diver at short notice due to the Estonia disaster.

He does not hear anything for a number of days, but when he talks to other diving colleagues, he realizes that they have also received the same order to be on standby. Bergmark's military career began in the late 1970s with an 18-month diving training under the auspices of the navy. He eventually became associated with KSI, the Office of Special Collection, an organization under MUST, Sweden's military intelligence service. KSI was previously called SSI, the Section for Special Collection, which in turn was a successor to IB, a long-unknown intelligence activity in Sweden that had a close connection to the Social Democratic Party.

[---]

Håkan Bergmark sees two dead people during his dives, the other divers see significantly more. In the sea waters of northern Europe, there may sometimes be mines from the Second World War, but this hole had not been made by an explosion from the outside, the hole had instead exploded from the inside and out. Bergmark's personal experience of the hole in the hull is that a bomb exploded on the car deck and that this explosion sank the ship. His firm belief is that it is about sabotage.

He has a hard time saying how big the hole is, as it is difficult to get an overview due to the poor visibility, but it is quite possible for him to get through the hole with the diving equipment on.

It is estimated that it is an elongated hole, 4-5 meters long. Håkan Bergmark and the other divers also hear conversations on deck where it is suggested that those responsible will never tell the truth.

"No external damage has been observed to the wreck, except those on the visor and in the area around the bow ramp." (Accident report, 8.5.1, page 120).

 

[theprestige]

Do bravery and courage make one better at sensing whether a ship has stopped? I get that the report indicates he was thrown forward. But he's inside a cabin in a ship at sea in a storm at night. He has no reference. No way to tell if the ship has stopped.

A rare positive ad hom.

 

[Andy_Ross]

It could have happened while the ship was sinking. It was subjected to forces and stress it was not designed for.
It could have happened in the time between the sinking and the dive as the wreck settled

 

[theprestige]

I hear subs start to shimmy really badly around 90km/h.

I hear they gain the ability to retcon maritime disasters somewhere around 88mp/h.

 

[Vixen]

Where have you ever admitted you were wrong? You told your critics they were "deluded" if they didn't accept the conspiracy theory you were presenting.



You are making allegations of fact. Labeling them opinion doesn't change their essential nature.



And when that basis is questioned you strenuously defend your position. Again, don't debate and then pretend you aren't debating after you get stuck.

I was asked for my view on the matter as people were complaining they didn't know what my opinion was, so I gave it. And then people complained, who do you think you are, having an opinion?

As for the ridiculous claim that I never admit to being wrong, that comes from a thread under 'crime' in which a certain group of people resented that I considered the person guilty whilst they they did not, so they started a campaign of personal attack that they now follow me around with from thread to thread, disparaging me on a personal level, always the same people, so nothing at all to do with the topic at hand. It's pathetic, isn't it, that a person can't bear someone else to have a different opinion, so they take it as a great affront and think it gives them a licence to be vindictive. So now you have joined in because perhaps you don't have a mind of your own and just copy others because you enjoy the sport of haranguing the chosen prey. Water off a duck's back.



I didn't say 'my' critics were deluded, I said anyone who thinks the presence of the hole in the Estonia is some kind of conspiracy theory is deluded, in the same way a flat earther is deluded despite being shown endless evidence, videos, photos, expert opinion on the matter tha actually the world is global, and they continue to claim the world is flat. They are not deluded because they claim to be critical of me but because they refuse to accept an authentic news item is not a conspiracy theory. These flat earthers will only believe it when they see it confirmed in the mass media.

 

[Vixen]

If you don't have any confidence in the validity of you ideas, why would anyone else?

Having the confidence of stating your opinion is not the same as claiming to be right.


I have said, 'this is what I think', and then explained why thought it, using sources and references.

Why that should upset anyone is a mystery to me.