Mike McKay told the British daily: "Almost a year has passed, but I stand by what I saw".
He added that he was unsure if what he saw burning in the sky was MH370 but the timing coincided with when the plane lost contact.
McKay, 57, lost his job as an oil-rig worker after he sent out an email on his company computer on the rig off the south of Vietnam about what he allegedly saw.
He is still jobless and lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
The Daily Mail cited him saying that everyone believed that he was speaking with certainty that he had seen the Boeing 777 crash in flames into the South China Sea.
"Unfortunately my words were misinterpreted. I was careful to say that I 'believed' I saw the aircraft come down. The email was never for public consumption.
"And if it was the plane that has been missing for so long, then the search in the southern Indian Ocean is clearly in the wrong place," he was quoted as saying.
MH370 disappeared less than an hour after departing from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 last year with 239 people on board. About 50 of them were Malaysians.
The initial search and rescue operations covered the South China Sea, the Strait of Malacca, the Andaman Sea and the southern Indian Ocean, involving 65 aircraft and 95 vessels and experts from 25 countries.
The search and rescue phase transitioned to an underwater search and recovery phase led by the Joint Agency Coordination Centre and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
But the Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation on January 29 declared that flight MH370 was lost in an accident, killing all those on board.
Its director-general, Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, said the government acknowledged that the declaration would be difficult for the families and loved ones to consider, much less accept.
Several Chinese next of kin of MH370 passengers came to Malaysia last week, in hopes of meeting with government and MAS officials as they were not satisfied with the declaration.
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