Episode 49: Did MH370’s Mystery Just Get Its Best Shot Yet? Jeff Wise on the New Search, Drift Clues, and the Cyber Hijack Theory

We brought back our friend of the show Jeff Wise because—quietly—this is the most consequential moment in the MH370 saga since the early seabed hunts. Ocean Infinity is back out there after years of “maybe next season” hints, and the odds‑on target box has shrunk from quarter‑million‑square‑kilometer hayfields to a tightly defined patch you could almost circle with a Sharpie. If the orthodox “southern arc / fuel exhaustion / steep dive” story is right, wreckage should already be under one of their AUV cameras. If they burn through this smaller box and still come up empty, a whole decade of comfortable assumptions goes wobbly.

Jeff has spent the last year doing something most governments never funded: assembling original drift intelligence. He’s been tracking NOAA drifter buoys, calling strangers when units run aground, harvesting barnacle samples, and building a grassroots dataset no lab ever bothered to collect. Why? Because growth stages on hitchhiking organisms + precise drift paths help tighten timelines: how long something’s been floating, whether a fragment’s travel speed matches the canonical southern crash model, or points to a different journey. Citizen science at its best—while the very public infrastructure (think NOAA observational streams) that makes it possible gets politically kneecapped.

We walk through Ocean Infinity’s “third look” logic. Two live possibilities: (1) The plane is in the accepted zone but sat tucked in seabed relief the earlier passes missed—a statistical bad‑luck roll. (2) It isn’t there because after that last satellite handshake it didn’t simply lawn‑dart; it converted altitude into extra glide distance and exited the high‑probability swath. The math crowd keeps saying “it has to be here,” but every negative pass pushes them toward the lost‑keys routine: you re‑check the counter you already searched because you’ve run out of new surfaces.

Jeff then lays out his contrarian through‑line: the orthodox story assumes cockpit control and an uncomplicated fuel‑burn to oblivion. He’s arguing you can’t rule out a technical commandeering—exploiting the 777’s early fly‑by‑wire architecture through the unlocked hatch to the electronics bay, talking to the data bus that actually drives surfaces, and even manipulating or spoofing those satellite handshake characteristics everyone treats as gospel. In 2014 almost nobody in commercial aviation thought in adversarial cyber terms; “Occam’s razor” was thrown around like a spell. Eleven years later, “unhackable” isn’t a serious word in any other domain—why give this one a free pass?

From there we zoom out: the information environment around MH370 mirrors every other polarized trench (archaeology Twitter, geopolitics, pick your subculture). Attention algorithms reward spectacle, so a video claiming interdimensional orbs yanks more eyeballs than a patient breakdown of Doppler shifts. Audience capture pushes creators to harden narratives, not update them. Jeff’s counter bet is process—build a community that still rewards revision (“I was wrong about X; here’s the new data”) rather than scorches it. It’s slower. It’s also how you inch from fog to clarity.

We also spar (predictably) over geopolitical motive attribution—Jeff’s Russia through‑line versus my challenge that you can swap in a different strategic rival and the mechanics still parse. That tension—same data, divergent priors—is what keeps these episodes honest: neither of us gets to monologue in an echo chamber.

Core takeaways this week: (1) The current seabed pass is a genuine inflection point—watch what doesn’t show up as much as what does. (2) Grassroots drift + biological growth data may end up mattering more than another round of recycled pings charts. (3) If the high‑probability box goes cold again, polite aviation consensus will have to widen its threat model or admit it prefers tidy closure to messy complexity. (4) Maintaining a functional truth‑finding culture online is now part of the investigative workload, not an optional side quest.

If you’re here for long‑form curiosity over dopamine conspiracism—slam the subscribe, share this with the friend who still thinks “we already searched there” ends the story, and stick with us. New episodes every Wednesday at 4 PM EST. Let’s keep pulling on the threads that actually tighten the picture.