MISSING MALAYSIA AIRWAYS Flight MH370 - Malaysia Claims to Have NO ENGINE DATA. Hidden Agenda?

A Chinese satellite looking into the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 "observed a suspected crash area at sea," a Chinese government agency said — a potentially pivotal lead into what has been a frustrating search for the Boeing 777.

China's State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense announced the discovery, including images of what it said were "three suspected floating objects and their sizes."

The images in the Strait of Malacca were captured on March 9 — which was the day after the plane went missing — but weren't released until Wednesday.

Search planes dispatched Thursday to examine an area where Chinese satellite images showed what might have been debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 found nothing, officials told CBS News.

The Malaysian Air Force director of operations told CBS News in Kuala Lumpur that planes sent up based on the Chinese satellite images from Sunday, the day after Flight 370 went missing south of Vietnam, had located no debris.

Later Thursday, Malaysian civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman reiterated the latest bad news in the search for the plane. "There is nothing. We went there, there is nothing," he told reporters.

Investigators trying to determine what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 after it was reported missing in the Gulf of Thailand on March 8 have had little to go on: no distress signal from the flight, no wreckage found and no severe weather reported in the vicinity that could have caused a crash.

Even the oil slick previously attributed to the flight turned out to be a false lead. More shocking, the passengers' relatives said that they were able to call the cell phones of those missing and hear a ringing tone, which should have been impossible if the plane crashed into the ocean.

According to the official account, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down by a Soviet Su-15 interceptor in the Sea of Japan after violating Soviet air space during its flight from Anchorage, Alaska to South Korea. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency said on Tuesday intelligence officials could not rule out terrorism as a factor in the disappearance of a Malaysian Airlines plane.

"You cannot discount any theory," CIA Director John Brennan said during rare public comments in Washington.

A massive search operation for the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER has so far found no trace of the aircraft or the 239 passengers and crew since it was reported missing on Saturday.

The 'unprecedented mystery' behind the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370 deepened on Monday when relatives claimed they were able to call the cellphones of their missing loved ones.

According to the Washington Post, family of some of the 239 people on board the vanished Boeing 777 said that they were getting ring tones and could see them active online through a Chinese social networking service called QQ.


One man said that the QQ account of his brother-in-law showed him as online, but frustratingly for those waiting desperately for any news, messages sent have gone unanswered and the calls have not been picked up.

This new eerie development comes as the Malaysian authorities said they had identified one of the men on two stolen European passports who were on the flight -- and that he was not considered likely to be a terrorist

Like many other people, I am following the story of what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 with keen interest. Much of what we've been told doesn't add up, deepening the mystery.

It seems to me that we can already draw a number of conclusions from the known data by pursuing a logic-based analysis of what is possible and what can be excluded as illogical.