A British woman, sailing the Indian Ocean in March, believes she saw the missing Malaysia Airlines jet going down in flames and smoke.
Katherine Tee, a 41-year-old Liverpool resident, just came forward and filed a report with authorities last weekend.
The sailor said she and her husband were en route to Phuket, Thailand, after a 13-month sea journey when she allegedly spotted a flaming object in the night sky.
“I was on a night watch. My husband was asleep below deck and our one other crew member was asleep on deck,” she told the Phuket Gazette.
“I saw something that looked like a plane on fire. That’s what I thought it was. Then, I thought I must be mad.”
Flight MH370 went missing shortly after its departure in the early hours of March 8. An international search has yet to turn up any evidence of where the jetliner, with 239 passengers and crew on board, might have gone.
“It caught my attention because I had never seen a plane with orange lights before, so I wondered what they were,” she said.
“I could see the outline of the plane, it looked longer than planes usually do. There was what appeared to be black smoke streaming from behind it.”
Tee also reported seeing two other nearby planes, and she assumed those aircraft would have reported any distressed jet.
“There were two other planes passing well above it — moving the other way — at that time. They had normal navigation lights. I remember thinking that if it was a plane on fire that I was seeing, the other aircraft would report it,” she said.
“And then, I wondered again why it had such bright orange lights. They reminded me of sodium lights. I thought it could be some anomaly or just a meteor. It was approaching to cross behind our stern from the north. When I checked again later, it had moved across the stern and was moving away to the south.”
Tee and her husband arrived in Phuket on March 10 and only then did she begin to realize the significance of what she might have seen.
Tee was slow to report the sighting because her memory is fuzzy about the exact time it happened.
“I wasn’t sure of the date or time [of the sighting]. I am still not,” Tee said.
“I did think that what I saw would add little, and be dismissed with the thousands of other sightings that I assumed were being reported. I thought that the authorities would be able to track [the plane’s] GPS log, which I assumed was automatically transmitted, or something like that.”
The world traveler still isn’t 100 percent sure of what she actually spotted.
“’Most of all, I wasn’t sure of what I saw. I couldn’t believe it myself, and didn’t think anyone would believe me when I was having trouble believing my own eyes,” said Tee.
“I didn’t even consider putting out a Mayday at the time. Imagine what an idiot I would have looked like if I was mistaken, and I believed I was. So I dismissed it, and got on with the business of fixing myself and my marriage.”
It was only this past weekend that Tee and her husband filed a report to the Joint Agency Coordination Center, the Australian organization coordinating the search for Flight MH370.
Tee said she regrets not speaking up a long time ago.
“Will this help the authorities of the families get closure? I have no idea. All I can confirm is that I have since learnt that we were in the right place at the right time, so it seems possible, but I chose to sweep it under the carpet and now I feel really bad,” Tee said.
“Maybe I should have had a little more confidence in myself. I am sorry I didn’t take action sooner.”