KUALA LUMPUR, March 14 — As an international search for the missing Malaysia Airlines jumbo jet moved from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean, the world’s third-largest body of water, a US navy official likened it to a new game played not on a chess board but a football field.

“It’s a completely new game now,” Cmdr William Marks of the US Seventh Fleet told CNN, and added, “We went from a chess board to a football field.”

He said the Malaysian government had requested the USS Kidd, a destroyer from the US Pacific Fleet, to move into the Indian Ocean to begin searching that area.

This new directive came as the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported today that the missing plane, originally bound for Beijing, had sent a series of “pings” or electronic pulses, with the last transmitted from a location over water at a cruising altitude.

The US daily also reported that the satellites had also received speed and altitude information about the aircraft from the five or six “pings” before the pulses disappeared, which the experts believe could help them decipher its route and location.

But the unnamed officials involved in the matter, had declined to divulge the specific flight path the plane had transmitted, WSJ reported.

According to the report, an industry official said it was possible that the system sending them had been turned off by someone on board the plane.

The report follows new evidence showing the Boeing 777-200 jumbo jet carrying 239 people had continued its flight hours after it supposedly left radar detection.

Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein would not confirmed the satellite information at today’s 5.30pm press conference.

MH370 was last spotted on radar at 1.30am on Saturday morning, about 120 nautical miles off the coast of Kota Baru which lies on the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia, near the South China Sea.

The Indian Ocean is far to the west of Malaysia.

For MH370 to reach that location, it would have had to fly several hours past 1.30am when it went missing.

The aircraft, according to MAS, was carrying enough fuel to fly up to 8.30am that morning.

Rescue and intelligence officials are still verifying the credibility of the latest data received while search vessels head towards the Indian Ocean to continue their hunt for the aircraft there.

In a rare multi-nation effort, military aircraft and vessels from across 13 nations are now scouring 37,000 square nautical miles on both sides of the peninsular, in search of the missing plane and the people on board.

“I, like most of the world, really have never seen anything like this,” Marks said of the scale of the search, which involves dozens of ships and planes from a range of countries. “It’s pretty incredible.”

The search operation now involves 57 ships and 48 aircraft from the 13 countries, Hishammuddin told a news conference broadcast live from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport this evening.

A senior official told CNN that analysts from US intelligence, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) have been scouring satellite feeds and, after ascertaining no other flights’ transponder data corresponded to the pings, came to the conclusion that they were likely to have come from the missing aircraft.

“There is probably a significant likelihood” that the aircraft is now on the bottom of the Indian Ocean, the official said, citing information Malaysia has shared with the United States.

Meanwhile, Chinese researchers said they recorded a “seafloor event” in waters around Malaysia and Vietnam about an hour and a half after the missing plane’s last known contact.

The event was recorded in a non-seismic region situated 116 kilometres (72 miles) northeast of the plane’s last confirmed location, the University of Science and Technology of China said.

In a statement posted on the university’s website, it said the seafloor event may have been caused by MH370 crashing into the sea.

Hishammuddin said the Malaysian authorities have no information on the event.