A 2019 video about the mystery of Pan Am flight 914 has garnered over 22 million views. It generated renewed interest in a conspiracy theory that’s been around for over 30 years about a flight from New York to Miami on July 2, 1955 with 57 passengers and six crewmembers on board the Douglas DC-4.
Miami radar showed no approaching aircraft, and nobody received a distress call, but the story is that the flight disappeared from radar without any contact. While it was believed to have crashed in the Atlantic, the story goes, 37 years later it appeared from out of nowhere on radar approaching the Caracas airport.
According to the video, when the pilot landed he was asked if he knew it was… 1992? And the pilot simply taxied out and took off. The plane vanished. And it’s over 7 minutes into the video before any skepticism is offered about the story.
In one version the pilot,
dropped a small calendar out the window before he made a hasty turn back to the runway, where he took off and disappeared as suddenly as he had arrived. And the calendar? Did he drop it accidentally? Or does it hold the secret to what happened? What exactly did it say?
We might never know. The governments of both Venezuela and the United States, the story goes, were said to have seized the calendar and the tower tapes and have refused to comment on the incident even once in the intervening decades.
And in another the passengers actually returned to their homes, not having aged at all.
The problem? People don’t watch the video of this story past 7 of the 9 minutes, and so come away thinking there was a Pan Am 914 that went missing. The story was first covered multiple times, over the course of several years, in… the Weekly World News.
And there was no such flight. Oh, and that it’s basically the Twilight Zone episode Odyssey of Flight 33. The Weekly World News even gave a nod to the Rod Serling classic.
Well that’s, like, just your opinion, man.
The moral is that some people will believe anything. But that’s not news
When I was a kid in the 1980’s the stories in the Globe, National Enquirer, and others were omni-present in the supermarket aisle as a 11 year old kid helping his parents buy groceries.
The problem? Our science teacher asked if we learned any scientific fact that day, and I proudly declared that Martians are real- because the Globe said so!!
Needless to say, I was made fun of… but not by everyone. My fear in today’s “anti-truth” and propaganda filled environment is that too many of us believe what we are being told in the echo chamber of our own circle of friends. Sigh.
Orson Wells material!
Brings to mind The Ghost Of Flight 401.
Check out the recent book “The Anomaly” for a similar plot. Great book!