United Airlines Flight 553 - Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy Theories

The death of Dorothy Hunt led to the accident becoming caught up in the swirl of claim, counter-claim and rumor surrounding the unfolding Watergate scandal. In his book The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate, writer Carl Oglesby described flight 553 as "the Watergate plane crash".

Hunt's purse contained $10,585 in cash and she had purchased flight insurance for $250,000 prior to boarding the flight. Skeptics of the official government narrative speculate that the plane was targeted by government agencies and sabotage of the flight has been covered up. Foremost amongst these was Sherman Skolnick, a Chicago-based private investigator, who alleged that the aircraft had been sabotaged by the CIA This claim was echoed by Nixon's special counsel Chuck Colson in an interview with TIME Magazine in 1974. However, the same article speculated that Colson was accusing the CIA of the broad Watergate conspiracy in a desperate attempt to stave off President Richard Nixon's impeachment in the scandal, and that he may have "lost touch with reality" as he faced a prison sentence.

The day after the crash, White House aide Egil Krogh was appointed Undersecretary of Transportation, supervising the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration - the two agencies charged with investigating the airline crash. A week later, Nixon's deputy assistant Alexander P. Butterfield was made the new head of the FAA, and five weeks later Dwight L. Chapin, the president's appointment secretary, become a top executive with United Airlines. Mr. Krogh would later be convicted of complicity in the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office along with Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy and a small cast of CIA-trained and retained Cuban black-bag specialists. Mr. Chapin was convicted of making false and/or misleading statements in connection to his involvement and spent less than a year in prison; Mr. Butterfield, who previously headed the office that secretly taped President Nixon's White House meetings in the Oval Office, was not prosecuted or convicted in the Watergate scandal.

The office of the Cook County Medical Examiner convened a coroner's jury and launched a parallel investigation. E. Howard Hunt in his "last confessions," reported in Rolling Stone Magazine, claimed the FBI withheld or destroyed evidence.