Flight MH370 was accidentally shot down by US and Thai forces that were undertaking joint military exercises over the South China Sea.

This was the theory advanced by the first book ever to come out after the ill-fated Boeing 777 aircraft disappeared in the sky on March 8.

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"Flight MH370: The Mystery" was written by Nigel Cawthorne and goes on sale Monday, just 10 weeks after the Malaysian passenger jet went missing with 239 people on board.

Basing his book on already-known data, along with interviews with anonymous sources and theories that emerged after Flight MH370's disappearance, Cawthorne broached the idea that the Beijing-bound plane may have been caught in the middle of a joint military exercise where US, Thai and other foreign forces were conducting live fire drills.

For real, the United States and Thailand started a multinational military exercise in mid-February called Cobra Gold.  It was participated in by thousands of troops from the United States, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, along with a handful of invited troops from China.

Cobra Gold, conducted over Thailand's Phitsanulok province north of Bangkok, was three weeks into the live fire drill at the time Flight MH370 disappeared.

Cawthorne included a real-life character by the name of Mike McKay, a New Zealand oil rig worker who claimed to have seen a burning plane whisk through the sky over the Gulf of Thailand in the early morning hours of March 8.

Cawthorne then tied up Mckay's sighting of a burning plane with the real-life timing of the US-Thai military exercises, and puts forth the theory that the drill participants may have accidentally shot down the Malaysia Airlines flight.

Whether for real or just a scenario in his head, Cawthorne helps the plot "thicken" by suggesting that the military exercise participants had to sow misinformation to divert the actual search for Flight MH370 to another location in order to cover up for their mistake.

Multinational search and rescue teams, after days of scouring the South China Sea for possible debris from MH370, had moved their search operations to the south Indian Ocean, a remote body of water which oceanographers said had never been mapped nor explored due to its extremely harsh conditions.

Cawthorne's ensuing suggestion that passengers of Flight MH370 may never be found is reminiscent of the 1860s novels by Jules Verne, specifically the novel "In Search of the Castaways", where the French author described the remote part of the south Indian Ocean as the perfect place to cast away someone, or something, that is intended never to be found.

An Australian relative of two of the missing passengers of MH370 believed it was too early to release a book about the missing flight given the fact that no conclusive evidence has even been found regarding its whereabouts and the circumstances that led to its fate.

"Flight MH370: The Mystery" pulled together all the events and human drama that ensued following the plane's disappearance, but does not claim to offer any answers to the burning questions that the rest of the world has been waiting to hear, hence living up to the last half of its title: The Mystery.

TagsFlight MH370 book, mh370, Nigel Cawthorne, news_mh370