Valuable scientists, unexpected onboard fires, and suspicious dial tones.
Theories continue to swirl around the mysterious disappearance of flight MH370.
On March 8, 2014, news broke that Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 had disappeared.
The Boeing 777 was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members when it disappeared, and
the most likely explanation was that it had crashed into the ocean.
However, multiple theories have emerged since the plane seemingly vanished into thin air.
Although more than a decade had passed since the devastating events of September 11, 2001,
some believed that the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was related to terrorism.
Outlets such as The Daily Telegraph pointed to the testimony of an al-Qaeda informant
who claimed in court that a group of terrorists based in Malaysia were planning to take control
of a commercial plane using a homemade bomb.
Days after flight MH370 went missing, investigators released information that the plane's communication
systems appeared to have been intentionally turned off.
This led to air traffic control losing contact with the aircraft, which some argued was consistent
with a hijacking scenario.
One figure who seemed to subscribe to the theory that al-Qaeda had taken control of
MH370 was Fox News owner and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who took to Twitter following the
plane's disappearance.
He claimed, without any evidence, that the plane may not have crashed, but had been stolen
and was now being hidden in Pakistan, raising the eyebrows of several news outlets.
Al-Qaeda wasn't the only group blamed for the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight
MH370 by various news sources and online commentators.
As outlets desperately searched for answers, North Korea was soon suggested as another
possible suspect.
The idea first emerged on social media, where it attracted more derision than genuine interest.
However, the story soon broke through to the tabloids, thanks in part to an editorial on
eTurboNews, which claimed to have received inside information from a professional in
the aviation industry.
The alleged source speculated that the plane had been hijacked at the behest of North Korean
dictator Kim Jong-un as a way of accessing technology on board the Boeing 777 that was
not available in the country at the time.
As North Korea had been responsible for the hijacking of a Korean passenger plane in 1969,
many tabloids drew parallels between the incidents.
In the rush to identify the perpetrators behind the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight
MH370, a number of cyber-sleuths pointed the finger at the United States.
In July 2015, news broke that a piece of debris potentially belonging to the missing plane
had washed up on La Réunion an island in the Indian Ocean controlled by France.
By then, many conspiracy theories were already circulating about the fate of the plane, and
one Twitter user asked,
"How long before conspiracy theorists start bringing up #diegogarcia and [its] location
in relation to reunion island."
Diego Garcia is a British territory in the Indian Ocean, and home to a U.S. naval base,
near where MH370 is believed to have gone missing.
Before long, theories spread that the United States had for some unknown reason intercepted
the aircraft and diverted it to the base, while another unsubstantiated rumor held that
the plane had actually been shot down by the American military.
Though the missing plane indeed appeared on radars not far from Diego Garcia, U.S. officials
ruled out any chance it had landed at the military base very early on.
"Actually, most of the circumstantial evidence points towards an abduction of this plane."
One particular story about how and why Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went missing was suggestive
of a murderous plot orchestrated by big business purely for the sake of profit.
As reported by Reuters, among the 227 passengers onboard MH370 was a group of 20 engineers
and scientists from Malaysia and China, all employees of Freescale Semiconductor, a San
Francisco-based chip-making company.
As renowned experts in the field of electronics, their loss was said to have had a huge impact
on the company, whose CEO Gregg Lowe said,
"These were people with a lot of experience and technical background and they were very
important people [...] It's definitely a loss for the company."
Of course, conspiracy-minded internet sleuths read more into the fact that renowned scientists
were passengers aboard MH370.
A rumor began to circulate that several passengers were co-holders of a lucrative patent in the
field of chip-making.
It was theorized that the plane must have been purposefully taken down so that others
connected to the company could take full control of the intellectual assets.
Though online posts insisting on the existence of such a scheme circulated for months after
the plane's disappearance, the idea has been roundly debunked.
As time went on, many governments and groups were accused of perpetrating the disappearance
of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, and one little-known group even claimed responsibility.
The "Chinese Martyrs' Brigade" hit the news in many countries when they sent an email
to journalists that read, per The Daily Telegraph,
"You kill one of our clan, we will kill 100 of you as pay back."
According to The Nation Thailand, the message was sent to a number of prominent journalists
in China as an encrypted PDF via a service called Hushmail, meaning that its origin could
not be traced.
It was the first time the journalists had ever heard of the "Chinese Martyrs' Brigade,"
raising questions about whether the group truly existed and, if so, what they were attempting
to do by leveraging the story of the missing passenger plane.
The same source stated that the group's claim of involvement in the plane's disappearance
was widely assumed to be a hoax circulated after political tensions and violence erupted
between the Chinese authorities and separatists in the northwestern Chinese Uyghur autonomous
region.
The terrible suffering of the friends and families of those onboard the missing Malaysia
Airlines flight MH370 was widely reported in the aftermath of the plane's disappearance.
Many of those directly impacted by the tragedy appeared in news bulletins and reports.
As the days rolled on, one story emerged from the missing passengers' loved ones that suggested
hope, and a potential cover-up.
Nineteen families of those onboard MH370 found that they received a dial tone, rather than
voicemail, when attempting to call the cell phones of the missing passengers.
This suggested that the passengers' phones were intact and turned on, and therefore,
that the plane had not crashed.
The families reportedly relayed this information to Malaysian authorities, who failed to engage
with it.
However, NBC News later published an analysis dismissing the families' claims.
In the story, a wireless expert explained that just because a dial tone is received,
there's not necessarily a connection to the phone in question.
Rather, the network is "searching" for the phone in an attempt to make the connection.
Ultimately, the existence of a dial tone gave no real insight into the potential fate of
the passengers onboard MH370.
"This is a really scary thing that happened.
A plane, a giant plane filled with people was just taken."
Some experts used their knowledge and experience to offer suggestions as to how and why the
plane went missing.
One such expert was Chris Goodfellow, a Canadian former pilot with 20 years of experience in
the field.
Like many of those in the aviation industry, Goodfellow turned to social media to discuss
the disappearance with his friends and colleagues.
He published a lengthy post on the now-defunct Google+ outlining his thoughts on what happened,
which was considered so insightful that it was later picked up by Wired, who published
it in full.
Goodfellow's theory was that MH370 was the victim of an incident on board, most likely
an electrical fire or a fire related to the landing gear.
Goodfellow also pointed to a similar fire that happened to a Nigerian Airlines plane
in 1991.
The captain, Goodfellow suggested, unsuccessfully attempted an emergency landing.
Goodfellow even offered insight into the plane's unexpected trajectory.
MH370 made a sudden turn in its final moments on radar, which some speculated meant that
the plane had been purposefully taken off course and had landed somewhere.
But Goodfellow believes that the experienced pilot was attempting to land at a nearby airport.
In the weeks after the plane's disappearance, British writer Nigel Cawthorne worked intensively
to write "Flight MH370: The Mystery," which was rush-released just two months after the
plane went missing.
Cawthorne's theory was that MH370 had been shot down by the United States Air Force,
an accident that tragically occurred during routine training exercises.
Cawthorne then accused the U.S. and other governments around the world of conspiring
to cover up the accident.
The book was widely discredited upon its release, with several reviewers characterizing the
book as cynical, irresponsible, and baseless in its assertions.
More importantly, Malaysian authorities continued to insist that there was no evidence whatsoever
that Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 had been shot down.
Some people have alleged that traditional military intervention wasn't the only way
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 might have been brought down from the outside.
One theory that gained traction among tabloid news outlets, after being suggested by some
former security experts, was that the plane may have been hit by a cyber attack, which
disengaged its communication systems.
In the reports, sources claimed that the security software of a Boeing 777 could be overridden
by malware, with the attack triggered by nothing more than a regular cell phone.
However, a detailed investigation by NPR pointed out that Boeing 777 planes are equipped with
numerous communication systems that would be extremely difficult to override.
Indeed, former pilots argued that even those onboard would be unable to challenge the integrity
of the systems, which are "hardwired."
Boeing itself later released a statement challenging the credibility of reports that MH370 had
been brought down by a cyber attack, dismissing them as mere speculation.
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who was piloting MH370 when it disappeared, was well respected
in his field and had reportedly accumulated 18,000 hours of flight time during his career.
However, relatively soon after the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines plane, online commentators
turned their suspicions toward the 53-year-old captain.
Later it was revealed that authorities allegedly suspected that Shah may have purposefully
crashed the plane, killing everyone else onboard.
Though the plane's black box has never been recovered to substantiate these claims, the
theory has gained more prominence in recent years.
In fact, a group of experts assembled by "60 Minutes" suggested that Shah's behavior was
consistent with a pilot looking to make his own plane disappear from radar.
While no solid evidence has even been discovered that proves Zaharie was responsible, the possibility
hasn't been ruled out.
"It's all consistent with someone that simply wanted to vanish from the face of the earth
and make sure the ultimate crash site was never found."
In 2015, one group of academics came forward with a theory that seemingly explained why
recovery efforts undertaken by numerous governments in the aftermath of the disappearance of MH370
had failed.
Published in the journal of the American Mathematical Society, the researchers' offered a model
of how the Boeing 777 likely crashed into the Indian Ocean.
The team suggested a theory of "vertical entry."
Rather than hitting the water horizontally, which would spread debris and jet fuel from
the plane across the surface of the water, the plane must have nosedived into the sea
at a relatively low speed.
The aircraft, they argue, must have remained intact before sinking to the bottom of the
ocean, limiting the spread of remnants from the crash to a relatively small area.
"And it would've sunk right to the bottom of the ocean."
In January 2015, some nine months after the plane's unexplained disappearance, the Malaysian
government issued an official statement via their Department of Civil Aviation.
Per USA Today, the statement said,
"It is with the heaviest heart and deepest sorrow that we officially declare Malaysia
Airlines Flight MH370 an accident."
All 239 people on board flight MH370 were declared dead.
While some pointed out that the move assisted in the families' compensation claims against
Malaysian Airlines, many of those affected refused to accept the declaration before more
details regarding the ultimate fate of the plane were discovered.