By Tim Binnall
An Australian deep sea fisherman has come forward with a fantastic account of finding what he believes to have been the wing of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 mere months after the airliner mysteriously vanished. Recounting his remarkable experience to the Sydney Morning Herald, Kit Olver indicated that the incident occurred in the fall of 2014 when he and a three-person crew were operating around 34 miles off the coast of the southern part of the country. Their day took an unusual turn, he recalled, when the boat's trawling net snagged something so sizeable that it caused the vessel to strain. Struggling with the odd obstruction, they finally managed to bring the object to the surface and, Olver marveled, "it was a bloody great wing of a big jet airliner."
While his story may sound like something of a classic fisherman's tale with a modern twist, a crew member from the boat that day lent credence to his account. George Currie described the object as being "incredibly heavy and awkward," while expressing no doubt about what they had snagged. "As soon as I saw it I knew what it was," he said, "it was obviously a wing, or a big part of it, from a commercial plane." Finding themselves unable to extricate the puzzling debris from the net after hours of trying, the exhausted crew ultimately opted to cut the mysterious bundle loose and have wrestled with the weird experience, which they have largely kept secret, ever since.
"I've questioned myself; I've looked for a way out of this," Olver mournfully mused, "I wish to Christ I'd never seen the thing .. but there it is. It was a jet's wing." According to the fisherman, he reported the odd event to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority shortly after the trip concluded and was told that the object was probably connected to a Russian shipping container that had fallen into the ocean around where the incident occurred. While had his doubts about this explanation, Olver let the matter rest for three years until he contacted them with his story again in 2017 and,this time, received no answer.
Having had his story dismissed or ignored by authorities for nearly a decade, Olver finally decided to share his account with the world in the hopes of clearing his conscience over what he and his crew had found. It remains to be seen whether or not anyone with the means and desire to look for the wing will make an effort to go and find it. That said, should someone take up the search, there is the possibility that it could still be salvaged as the fisherman remembers the coordinates where his boat, the Vivienne Jane, encountered and ultimately jettisoned the peculiar object which could hold answers to the MH370 mystery.