These theories attempt to explain why there were no surface finds at the place postulated for the KAL 007's impact with the water. There were no bodies, body parts, or body tissues, and there was no luggage. Furthermore, on the sea bottom there was only one partial torso and 10 body parts or tissues, possibly from the same individual, noted by Soviet civilian divers who had commenced diving to the wreckage purported to be of KAL 007 just two weeks after the shootdown. Furthermore, for all of the 269 occupants, divers reported with surprise either no luggage or, in one diver's report, there were only a few pieces of luggage at the bottom. Of the thirteen body parts or tissues washed up on the Japanese Hokkaido beaches 70 miles from Soviet Moneron Island and starting eight days after the shoot down, all were unidentifiable. All the non-human items (see main article) recovered from Hokkaido's beaches were those generally coming from a passenger cabin of an aircraft and none from the cargo hold, contrary to what would be expected if there had been a total destruction from a passenger aircraft crashing into the sea.
Crab theory In his book
The Mystery of Korean Boeing 747, Soviet correspondent Andrey Illesh proposes that the bodies were eaten by
giant crabs. The crab theory has been persistent and been echoed by the Soviet interceptor pilot Gennady Osipovich, who fired the missile that shot down the plane. "... I heard that they had found the 'Boeing' when I was still on Sakhalin. And even investigated it. But no one saw people there. I, however, explain that by the fact that there are crabs in the sea off Sakhalin that immediately devour everything ... I did hear that they found only a hand in a black glove. Perhaps it was the hand of the pilot of the aircraft that I shot down. You know, even now I cannot really believe that there were passengers on board. You cannot write off everyone to the crabs ... Surely something would be left? ... Nevertheless, I am a supporter of the old version: It was a spy plane. In any event, it was not happenstance that it flew towards us." Professor William Newman, marine biologist, explains why the crab (or any other sea creature) theory is untenable: "Even if we proceed from the supposition that crustaceans, or sharks, or something else fell upon the flesh, the skeletons should have remained. In many cases, skeletons were found on the sea or ocean floor, which had sat there for many years and, even decades. In addition, the crustaceans would not have touched bones." Also, the crab theory could not account for the lack of luggage.
Decompression theory Another explanation is provided by
Izvestiya correspondents Shalnev and Illesh's interview of Mikhail Igorevich Girs, Captain of the Tinro 2 submersible which made most of the dives. In the May 31, 1991, edition of
Izvestiya, Capt. Girs suggested that the passengers were sucked out of the aircraft, leaving their clothes behind. "Something else was inexplicable to us—zipped-up clothes. For instance, a coat, slacks, shorts, a sweater with zippers—the items were different, but, zipped up. And nothing inside. We came to this conclusion then: Most likely, the passengers had been pulled out of the plane by decompression, and they fell in a completely different place from where we found the debris. They had been spread out over a much larger area. The current also did its work."
"Wind tunnel" theory The latest reference to the decompression theory of the missing bodies was made by Lieutenant General Valeri Kamenski, most recently Chief of Staff and Deputy Commander of the Ukrainian Air Force and formerly Chief of Staff of the Soviet Far East Military District Air Defense Force. In an article dated March 15, 2001, in the Ukrainian weekly
Fakty i Kommentarii, General Kamenski spoke about this lingering question: "It is still a mystery what happened to the bodies of the crew and passengers on the plane. According to one theory, right after the rocket's detonation, the nose and tail section of the jumbo fell off and the mid-fuselage became a sort of wind tunnel so the people were swept through it and scattered over the surface of the ocean. Yet in this case, some of the bodies were to have been found during the search operations in the area. The question of what actually happened to the people has not been given a distinct answer."
Theory of Soviet removal of bodies This theory rests on the fact that when the Soviet civilian divers first went down to the wreck just two weeks after the shootdown, the finds they encountered were contrary to an aircraft having fallen from the sky. They reportedly corresponded more to "secondary placement" of the wreckage, and removal of both the passengers and aircrew of KAL 007, by the Soviet navy, who they claim had been at work prior to them, using both divers and trawlers. "The first submergence was on 15 September, two weeks after the aircraft had been shot down. As we learned then, before us the trawlers had done some 'work' in the designated quadrant. It is hard to understand what sense the military saw in the trawling operation. First drag everything haphazardly around the bottom by the trawls, and then send in the submersibles? ... It is clear that things should have been done in the reverse order." Captain Mikhail Igorevich Girs: "Submergence 10 October. Aircraft pieces, wing spars, pieces of aircraft skin, wiring, and clothing. But—no people. The impression is that all of this has been dragged here by a trawl rather than falling down from the sky ..."
Theory of abduction and retention of passengers and crew |right|thumb|110px The abduction theory proposes that KAL 007, having been missed by one of the missiles, landed or successfully ditched with passengers and crew surviving; they were then abducted and put into prison camps by the Soviet authorities. Among its advocates are the Israeli-American Bert Schlossberg, a son-in-law of one of the crash victims (and his organisation, the International Committee for the Rescue of KAL 007 Survivors), and
Avraham Shifrin, a Soviet emigre to Israel in the 1970s and former Soviet prison camp inmate. It has received some coverage in the conservative news agency
Accuracy in Media. Schlossberg, as a new citizen of Israel, met Shifrin in 1989, and through Shifrin, met and questioned one of his sources, and came to question the accepted belief that the people of KAL 007 had perished. Through his own investigation and research of newly released documents, Schlossberg became convinced that the passengers and crew of KAL 007 had been recovered by the Russians and then imprisoned. In a self-published book and on the Committee website, Schlossberg corroborates this theory with claims that Soviet military communication and
cockpit voice recorder transcripts show a post-missile detonation flightpath at altitude 5,000 meters for almost five minutes until over the only land mass in the Tatar Straits and within Soviet territorial waters, where it began a slow spiral descent. He claims this indicates both the aircraft's capability of extended flight, and the pilots' intention to water land near the only point where rescue would be feasible. He furthermore claims that a lack of bodies, body parts and tissues, and luggage, both on the surface of the sea and at the bottom; the Soviet obstruction of US, Korean, and Japanese search vessels trying to enter into Soviet territorial waters around Moneron Island, near which KAL 007 was last tracked spiraling downward; previously unknown Soviet transcripts, released by the Russian Federation, of mission orders within one half hour of the shootdown, sending helicopters, KGB patrol boats, and civilian trawlers to Moneron Island; and the Russian Federation acknowledgement of Soviet deception in its part of the search for KAL 007 all indicate a Soviet recovery of passengers and crew from the damaged and downed passenger jet. Schlossberg has also claimed that a letter sent in 1991 by Senator
Jesse Helms, while he was ranking minority member of the
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, to
Russian president Boris Yeltsin, requesting information about the fate of KAL 007, indicates that Helms took the abduction theory seriously. The letter included, in a list of questions, a request to know the whereabouts of any survivors and their camp locations, and requested also to know of the fate of
Larry McDonald. Schlossberg's work has not gained mainstream media attention; in a review of the circumstances of the death of Larry McDonald,
University of Georgia Law Professor Donald E. Wilkes considered the theory as "even more preposterous" than Michel Brun's theory of a Japanese locale for the shootdown and an air battle having taken place between Soviet and American aircraft. Avraham Shifrin, a self-declared KGB expert, claimed that, according to the investigation of his research centre, KAL 007 landed on water north of Moneron, and the passengers successfully disembarked on emergency floats. The Soviets collected them and subsequently sent them to camps (with the children "separated from their parents and safely hidden in the orphan houses of one of the Soviet Middle Asian republics"). McDonald in particular was supposed to have gone through a number of prisons in Moscow, among them the Central
Lubyanka, and
Lefortovo. The aeronautics journalist
James Oberg, while acknowledging Shifrin's expertise on Soviet prison camps, has stated that Shifrin "got real confused" about the fate of KAL 007. According to Michel Brun this theory is not entirely preposterous. In his book he analyses the first news, communicated by CIA and South Korean government: that KAL 007 landed in Sakhalin and all passengers were safe. In his careful searches, he discovered the source of this first information. It was published in a Japanese newspaper,
Mainichi Shimbun, on September 1, 1983. According to him, this observation came from Wakkanai radars. So, he suggests that another aircraft, probably military, landed at Sakhalin during the "Sakhalin battle" and that its passengers, American, South Korean, or both, were jailed in the Soviet Union. ==Meaconing theory==