When Miles was being tested by Niomi, the receipts for the fake plane crash were again mentioned. The man was apparently bringing them to Widmore. Could it be that Widmore had this evidence gathered against someone else who faked the crash? Perhaps it was Ben who had the crash faked in order to "protect the Island."
My take was that they were using the plane crash to confirm his abilities, ie they're getting him to say something they already knew but he couldn't possibly have. So that Widmore is behind the fake plane.
I agree that modern day Dharma makes the most sense. Though the other potential player would be Eloise Hawking. Could even have something to do with whatever Faraday does in the 1970s, during the years that he was off-Island, before he returns in the sub. In fact, even if there's no connection to Ilana & friends, I do think it would be really cool to have Faraday, while he's on the mainland in the 1970s, arrange for circumstances to play out in the future such that they all end up getting rescued, and brought back to 2007.
We do know now that the island continues to jump through time, right? I'm reminded of a scene with Hurley and Sayid in an early episode where they're listening to a radio, and they hear music that might have been from like the 1940s or something. Sayid says since radio signals bounce off of the atmosphere (or something like that), it could have come from anywhere, and Hurley says "Or any time..." At first I thought he was joking, but maybe they really were in the 1940s at that moment, and they just didn't know it.
The problem is that the Sun, Moon, stars, and clouds are all part of the outside world, so if the Island itself skips through time, then how come no one ever notices sudden shifts in the sky, like it suddenly shifts from day to night, or the cloud cover shifts instantaneously?
I don't think the Island time-shifts unless you Donkey-Wheel it. However there are those freakishly fast arriving thunderstorms that some characters can sense coming to explain.
That's right. John stopped the Island from jumping through time when he used the wheel. Otherwise people would still be dying from nose bleeds, brain damage, etc...
All we know for sure about the island is there is at least a slight time discrepency between the island and the outside world -- or at least there was in season 4.
After I wrote that post, I started wondering the same thing. Any observant person like, oh, say, Sayid, or anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of science (paging Dr. Arzt!) would have noticed something like that. What was the whole point of the Lamp Post, then? It was designed to locate the island's whereabouts, in both space and time. The way I understood it, the island is never in one set time period, but after Ben moved it, he disrupted the process, and that's why every jump was hurting the people who'd been displaced (i.e. Sawyer and company).
Perhaps the plane traveled through time, not the Island. Same with the music over the radio. So our Losties would have experienced these things simply appearing.