Mad Geek

For those of you who haven't heard, Princess Diana, loved the world over for her charm and charity has been killed. I should hope that everyone reading this would have heard, as it happened seven years ago. Good thing we know how to make money off the dead, eh?

Last night I came home after school, dinner/burger in hand, and switched on the TV. There's a ritual I perform where I run up a certain list of channels in a certain order to see what is on; Cartoon Network->History Channel->Discovery Channel->TLC->Comedy Central->Food Network. Always those channels, always that order. Three hops into my sequence, there was a special named "How Princess Diana Actually Died". Like watching an AT-ST about to step on an Ewok, I had to see what happened.

They took everything witnesses said and every consipracy theory that have been floating around and tested them with a panel of "experts". Listed below is what the police reports said happened:

Princess Di and her companion were unbuckled in the back seat of a Mercedes-Benz sedan. Their driver had bit to drink and was driving faster than normal in Paris, France. Upon entering one of Paris' many tunnels, the driver nearly ran right into the back of a Fiat Uno in the far right lane. He swerved and ended up only clipping the other vehicle, damaging the Fiat's rear-left brake light, and the Benz's front right driving light and leaving a white paint streak about 1.5 feet long on the Benz's front quarter panel. Di's driver, still steering to the left to avoid the Fiat, swerved back right to try and regain control, but instead caused the vehicle to nearly hit the Fiat again. He over-steered one more time to the left, and smashed the car at 65MPH into a concrete pillar in the tunnel. The driver of the Fiat was never identified and the vehicle never found.

Here are the opposing testimonies and theories:
People heard the sound of a bomb from the tunnel and not a crash.
The damage to the Benz was so extensive, no crash at only 65MPH could have caused it.
If a Mercedez-Benz at 65MPH clips a Fiat at 35MPH, it would obviously throw the Fiat into the tunnel wall, but it didn't which meant that this was a professional driver.
The Mercedez was facing the opposite direction in the tunnel and could not have fallen that way after a crash.

Panel of "experts" said; no way a crash can sound like a bomb, crash damage at 65MPH should not have crushed the car so badly, no possible way the Fiat could have NOT been thrown out its own lane.

The long and short of it was, through extensive computer simulation, driving range tests, crash tests, audio tests, and even a visit to the actual tunnel to recreate all of it, they proved that not only were all these things possible, they were also very likely (as in the same thing happened in every test). Each and every test proved more and more that the police report was most likely very accurate in its assesments and that the experts really had no idea what they were talking about. All this is happening while the narrator is saying "but we may never know what truly happened, and anything is a possibility."

While I usually applaud people's efforts to try and understand things themselves, and simply not accept what others tell them, I was really just disgusted with this thinly veiled attempt to cast doubt and suspicion on someone's tragic and ACCIDENTAL death. Princess Diana perhaps wasn't the most perfect person to live, but she WAS a very charitable figure who made sure people knew that she loved helping them. To try and make an entire program on it, be proven wrong, and STILL air it was both funny and sad to see.