Was John F. Kennedy Jr. a U.S. Senate frontrunner before his “suspicious” plane crash in 1999?

First of all, it’s hard to believe that was 20 years ago already!

Then getting back to the question…, the answer is yes…, and no.

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No…, because JFK Jr. had not “officially” declared himself a candidate in New York’s U.S. Senate race before dying in the July 1999 plane crash.

Yes…, because JFK Jr. was extremely well known and extremely popular, and all he would have had to have done was announce his candidacy and the senate seat would have been his.

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It would not have been long after that that he would have been considered a front runner to be president.

As with the Senate, if he had then decided to run for president he would have been president.

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This is precisely the trajectory that Hillary Clinton was hoping to take…, except her popularity was nowhere near JFK Jr.’s.  And her timetable was a lot shorter as well.

First lady and Senator-elect Hillary Rodham Clinton gestures to reporters at the end of a press conf..

JFK Jr. was potentially the only stumbling block in her political future.

I’m not saying anything new here…, I’m just saying it.

JFK Jr.’s death in that plane crash was just very advantageous for Hillary Clinton…, that’s all.

Very advantageous.

Very, very, very advantageous.

Did I mention that it was very politically advantageous for Hillary Clinton that John F. Kennedy Jr. died in that plane crash in 1999?

According to Bethania Palma on Snopes.com, “John F. Kennedy Jr. was a popular public figure from his childhood until he died in a plane crash at the age of 38 in 1999.

While there is never a shortage of conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedys, or for that matter, the Clintons, an unfounded rumor circulating in political circles during the 2016 presidential election claimed that John-John was on the cusp of a successful U.S. Senate bid until Hillary Clinton threw her hat in the ring — with the insinuation that Kennedy was killed to clear the way for her candidacy.”

“Earlier this year, in one of the best-kept secrets in state politics, Kennedy considered seeking the seat of retiring Sen. Daniel Moynihan in 2000, friends confirmed.”

“The friend who expected Kennedy to seek office in the ‘foreseeable future’ also told of speaking with Kennedy earlier this year about the Moynihan seat. ‘I asked him was he casually thinking about it, or was he serious. He sort of said, “I’m not sure. Let me think about it.”’”

“But the second friend called Kennedy’s interest ‘pretty serious,’ adding: ‘I think he was intrigued by the idea … Would he have decided in the end to go for it? I don’t know. But he was clearly thinking about it.’”

“Clinton won the Senate election on 7 November 2000, beating Republican Rick Lazio more than a year after Kennedy Jr. was killed along with his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, 33, and his sister-in-law, Lauren G. Bessette, 34, in the crash of the single-engine plane he was flying to Martha’s Vineyard.”

So what exactly was determined about this crash?

“The implication that the Clintons had somehow engineered the death of Kennedy Jr. to prevent him from challenging her in her first bid for elective office is contradicted by the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) report on the accident, which assigned the probable cause to pilot error.”

“The probable cause of the accident, as stated in the accident report, is:

The pilot’s failure to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation.  Factors in the accident were haze and the dark night.

‘There was nothing suspicious about the circumstances of the crash,’ this article’s author surmises.”

The fact that the report says “There was nothing suspicious about the circumstances of the crash,” is suspicious.

Well, isn’t it?

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“But, in an article from the New York Times, written by Mike Allen, ‘Investigators said Mr. Kennedy’s plane was plunging at 5,000 feet per minute just before radar contact was lost Friday night, and pilots and aviation authorities said the description that has been provided seems to indicate a “graveyard spiral,”’ a corkscrew descent in which the pilot becomes disoriented and, desperate to right the plane, loses control.’”

This report would seem to be in conflict with the report that blamed the crash on confusion over where the horizon was, and disorientation during his descent, caused by haze and darkness, into Martha’s Vineyard.

How were they in a “graveyard spiral,” “corkscrewing” down at 5,000 feet per minute, when, in effect, the NTSB is saying they just lost track of their altitude and nosed into the ocean?

Those are two completely opposed scenarios which are mutually exclusive of one another…, meaning it had to be one or the other, not a combination of the two.

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“John Kennedy Jr. had won the nation’s heart when at two years old he was seen on camera saluting his father’s coffin during the nationally televised funeral procession after President Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination. Nicknamed John-John, he grew up handsome and charismatic and was thus seen as a potential heir to the family’s glory days of political influence and celebrity.”

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President John F. Kennedy,John F. Kennedy Jr.

“While his death was untimely and no doubt a tragedy, it was ruled an accident.”

There are accidents and then there are “accidents.”

What do you think?

 

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The MIRACULOUS survival story of Juliane Koepcke!

17 year-old Juliane Koepcke was sucked out of an airplane in 1971 after it was struck by a bolt of lightning.  She fell 2 miles to the ground, strapped to her seat and survived after she endured 10 days in the Amazon Jungle!

She survived!!!

And she was able to walk away.

Unbelievable.

How have I never heard about this story before?

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In case you haven’t:

On December 24, 1971, Koepcke and her mother were traveling from Lima, Peru to Pucallpa, Peru, the city with an airport closest to Panguana, to visit their family.  Things were going well on the flight until they flew into a thunderstorm.  The plane was struck by lightning and started going down.  Koepcke said she only remembers the “quiet” free fall into the Peruvian jungle before she passed out as she entered the trees.

Koepcke only suffered a broken collar bone.  She was discovered by a team of loggers on January 3, 1972.  She’d been in the rain forest for 11 days.

How did she manage to survive the crash at all?

She was the sole survivor among 91 other people on the plane.

Let’s take a closer look at an amazing story you probably never heard about.

The Ill-fated Flight:

On Christmas Eve of 1971, 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke boarded LANSA (Líneas Aéreas Nacionales S. A., translated “The South American National Airlines”) Flight 508 at the Lima Airport in Peru with her mother, Maria.  The two were traveling to the research area named Panguana after having attended Juliane’s graduation ball, in Lima, on what would have only been an hour-long flight.

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They had only been flying in the Lockheed Electra L-188A commercial plane for about 30 minutes when they flew through a sudden and violent storm. The plane was struck by lightening and in an instant began to break apart, at which point Juliane heard her mother declare calmly, “Now it’s all over.”

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Amelia Earhart disappeared in a Lockheed Electra as well, although it was an earlier model and also a different model.

Passengers were sent falling from the plane two miles above the Peruvian Amazon rain forest.

Juliane was strapped to her seat and was catapulted from the plane, spiraling through the air, until she hit the jungle canopy, with the other two seats in her row still attached. The dense forest obviously played no small part in making her landing survivable.

The Incredible Trek:

Before Koepcke hit the ground she had lost consciousness.  She awoke to a concussion, a broken collarbone, and cuts on her arms and legs. Miraculously, she was still able to walk and attempted to look for her mother and for other survivors, but with no luck.

Armed with a bag of sweets from the plane, Koepcke found a stream and followed it, reminded of her biologist father’s advice that it would always lead to a larger river and to people.

She then followed the call of the Hoatzin bird, which is found mainly near open waters, a fact she learned from her ornithologist mother, having grown up in the jungle in a hut on her parents’ research facility.

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For 10 days she traveled through the jungle, often floating in the middle of the stream to avoid piranhas. Upon reaching a logging camp, Koepcke found some gasoline and used it to clean the wound on her arm, which by this point had become infected with maggots.  The gasoline trick was another she had learned from her father.  In another lucky turn, Koepcke was found unconscious by loggers that same day, as they rarely visited the camp.

Survival:

It seems unlikely that most people would have been able to survive the ordeal.  But, Koepcke, with her unique childhood experiences, had the skills to make her way through the Amazon.  Many visitors have lost their lives in the jungle due to the overwhelming heat, the sheer number of insects, and all of the dangerous animals.

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A young Juliane with her mother.

Now a librarian of zoology who has studied bats, Koepcke has written a book about her harrowing experience, “When I Fell from the Sky: The True Story of One Woman’s Miraculous Survival.”

There have been two films made about her as well.

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Panguana research hut where Juliane spent most of her life until the accident. Via/ Wiki Commons

Years later Koepcke would be interviewed and filmed for the film “Wings of Hope” by Werner Herzog, a filmmaker who avoided dying in the same crash that Koepcke managed to survive.  Herzog had tried to book a seat on the doomed Flight 508, but had been (fortunately) unsuccessful in doing so.

Amazing…, amazing…, amazing…, and amazing.

From an article by Rose Heichelbech.

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NOTE:  If you’re not already “following” me and you liked my blog(s) today, please “click” on the comment icon just to the right of the date at the bottom of this article.  From there you can let me know you “like” my blog, leave a comment or click the “Follow” button which will keep you up to date on all of my latest posts.

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