Searchers dispute company's claim that it may have found aircraft wreckage
By Miguel Marquez, David Molko and Holly Yan, CNN
updated 11:46 AM EDT, Tue April 29, 2014
Near Perth, Australia (CNN) -- A private company declared that it has found what it believes is wreckage of a plane in the ocean, but leaders of the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 are dismissing the claim.
The reasons for the skepticism are obvious -- the site where GeoResonance says it found the wreckage, in the Bay of Bengal, is several thousand miles away from the current search area in the southern Indian Ocean.
The Joint Agency Coordination Centre, which is coordinating the multinational search, dismissed the claim.
"The Australian-led search is relying on information from satellite and other data to determine the missing aircraft's location," the JACC said.
"The location specified by the GeoResonance report is not within the search arc derived from this data. The joint international team is satisfied that the final resting place of the missing aircraft is in the southerly portion of the search arc."
Malaysian acting Transportation Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Malaysia "is working with its international partners to assess the credibility of this information."
GeoResonance said it analyzes super-weak electromagnetic fields captured by airborne multispectral images.
"The company is not declaring this is MH370, however it should be investigated," GeoResonance said in a statement.
The company's director, David Pope, said he did not want to go public with the information at first, but his information was disregarded.
"We're a large group of scientists, and we were being ignored, and we thought we had a moral obligation to get our findings to the authorities," he told CNN's "New Day" on Tuesday.
GeoResonance's technology was created to search for nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry under the ocean or beneath the earth in bunkers, Pope said.
The company began its search four days after the plane went missing and sent officials initial findings on March 31, Pope said. It followed up with a full report on April 15.
By going public, the company says it hopes it will spur officials to take its claim seriously.
Malaysian authorities contacted GeoResonance on Tuesday and were "very interested, very excited" about the findings, Pope said.
Inmarsat, the company whose satellite had the last known contact with MH370, remains "very confident" in its analysis that the plane ended up in the southern Indian Ocean, a source close to the MH370 investigation told CNN.
The Inmarsat analysis is "based on testable physics and mathematics," the source said, and has been reviewed by U.S., British and Malaysian authorities as well as an independent satellite company. . . .
