As the search for pieces of TWA Flight 800 comes to an end, the reason behind the July 17th crash remains elusive. The evidence gathered by investigators has failed to pin the cause on a bomb, a missile, or a mechanical malfunction. So people are beginning to look beyond these three theories of blame. One that's causing spirited discussion both on the internet and in newspapers lately is that Flight 800 was the victim of a freak event--a meteor impact.

"This is not as fanciful as it may seem," said Eliot Jacobson, an Ohio University mathematician, in a posting on the internet.

"We believe the meteor impact theory deserves more considered attention," wrote physicist Charles Hailey and astronomer David Helfand, both from Columbia University, in a letter to The New York Times. Based on the fact that about 3,000 meteors large enough to bring down an airliner strike the Earth every day, they calculated a one-in-ten chance that a commercial flight would be knocked down by a meteoric impact.

"The statistics-based theory that a meteor could have hit TWA Flight 800 is not difficult to support," noted Michael Epley, a computer programmer, in a follow-up letter to The New York Times.

There is actually considerable eyewitness support for the meteoric theory. More than a hundred people on the Long Island shoreline reported seeing an unusual streak of light in the sky just before the crash. And meteorites are known to strike man-made objects--houses and cars, so why not an airliner? Now that the investigators have considered every possible explanation for the crash and failed to find an answer, perhaps it's time they look to the "impossible."