The year is 1955, and you’re at the airport in New York, getting ready for a flight on
the most luxurious airline in the skies - Pan Am.
Your name gets called, you show your ticket to the airline clerk, and you settle into
your seat for a nice relaxing eight-hour flight.
After a lovely in-flight meal, you fall asleep - and wake up to the sound of shouting.
The situation on the ground isn’t what it was supposed to look like.
All the buildings look different, shiny - almost like you were in the future.
You hear shouting from the cockpit.
“This is Pan Am Flight 914, scheduled to land in Caracas.”
“That’s impossible.
Pan Am Flight 914 was lost over Caracas in 1955.”
“Wait, what year is it?”
“It’s 1982.
This flight has been missing for thirty-seven years.”
What?
How is this possible?
Did your flight travel in time to the future?
Have you really been gone for thirty-seven years?
How does this make any sense that a plane could spontaneously go missing for thirty-seven
years and reappear with no time having passed for anyone on board?
No plane has ever traveled in time - well, at least not for thirty-seven years.
The closest anyone ever came to traveling in time on an airplane was at the end of 2017,
when Hawaiian Airlines Flight HA446 left Auckland, New Zealand shortly after midnight, crossed
the international dateline, and made it to Honolulu, Hawaii before it hit midnight there.
Those lucky passengers had the surreal experience of taking off in 2018 and landing in 2017,
and got to celebrate the new year twice, but that’s the closest anyone’s come to time
traveling on an airplane.
But that hasn’t stopped the story of Pan Am Flight 914 from captivating the internet’s
attention.
The original article telling the terrifying tale of the passengers has been circulating
since the early days of the internet, and is full of details that stick with you.
The article tells the story of confused passengers staring out the window in horror, as the air
traffic controller and pilot try to make sense of the bizarre thirty-seven year gap in time.
Unable to process the bizarre events and clearly going mad, the airline pilot takes off into
the air again with everyone still on board, and the flight once again vanishes into thin
air - never to be seen again.
Conspiracy videos and articles litter the internet trying to make sense of this bizarre
story.
Many people argue that the plane went through a wormhole that broke the laws of time and
space.
Others believe the plane was kidnapped by aliens, and UFO fans try to find reports of
UFO sightings near the time the plane supposedly disappeared and when it reappeared.
Others believe it’s some sort of government conspiracy that took the plane and is lying
to everyone about what happened.
Could the answer be in the notorious Area 51?
No wonder everyone wanted to raid it!
Scientists who are open to these theories have tried to prove or disprove the events.
There is no hard evidence to prove the existence of alien abductions or men in black, so investigations
have focused on the time travel theory.
Could an airplane theoretically travel in time?
Actually, every airplane flight does!
This is called time dilation, a theory predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Because airplanes travel so much faster than people on the ground and because you’re
so high above from Earth’s mass, you’re less bound by gravity and time moves a little
bit faster.
But the time difference is tiny - for an average flight, your watch will run about fifty nanoseconds
or zero point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero five seconds slower than the watch of
a person on the ground.
How fast would you have to go to lose thirty-five years of time on the ground?
No one knows, but it would be well faster than the speed of light.
So what’s the answer?
How did Pan Am Flight 914 travel in time?
After all, if people are talking about something on the internet, it’s got to be true, right?
In truth, the story of the time-traveling flight from 1955 is a complete work of fiction,
with no basis in reality.
The most fascinating thing about the story is that it’s an illustration of how a story
doesn’t need any basis in fact to capture the attention of the internet.
And it all comes back to one of the most notorious tabloids in journalism history - the Weekly
World News.
Do you remember shopping in the supermarket any time from the 1980s to the early 2000s?
The odds are, as you checked out, you remember seeing an odd tabloid with the most ridiculous
headlines imaginable.
“Alien endorses Bill Clinton for President!”
“Volcano exposes the gate to hell!”
“Garden of Eden found!”.
Every week, the Weekly World News would share terrifying, bizarre, and seemingly impossible
news.
And almost every single article in the magazine was complete nonsense, created by the outlandish
fiction writers behind the tabloid.
In 1979, the magazine publisher Generoso Pope, Jr. was looking for another tabloid to supplement
the success of his iconic magazine National Enquirer.
While the Enquirer was known for its focus on celebrity culture and its questionable
grasp of the facts, the Weekly World News would know exactly where it stood on the question
of facts - it had no use for them.
Based in Florida and printed entirely in black and white, it hired Eddie Clontz, a high-school
dropout and former low-level copy editor as its lead editor.
And while its bizarre articles may have annoyed serious journalists, the low-cost magazine
certainly found its audience - in the 1980s, its circulation was over one million copies
an issue!
The Weekly World News occasionally published wacky real-world stories, like the tale of
Hogzilla - the 800-pound wild pig that was shot and killed by a Georgia farmer - or graphic
details of the autopsy of Ted Bundy.
That last one actually got someone arrested, when the employee of the Florida Medical Examiner’s
office who leaked the photo was charged with stealing classified information and selling
it to the tabloid.
But the paper was best known for its tales of the surreal and supernatural.
They had occasional articles by notorious students of the supernatural, like exorcism
expert Father Gabriel Morath.
Maybe the paper’s most popular regular feature was the opinion columns of Ed Anger.
A curmudgeonly character known for his extreme opinions, his signature line was “Let’s
pave the stupid rainforests and give school teachers stun guns”.
Every issue would feature an article by Anger yelling about the subject of the week, but
much like everything else about the News, Anger was fake.
His columns were written by Eddie Clontz until Clonts left the paper in 2001 and other writers
took over.
But Ed Anger was so popular that his columns were collected in several books which outlived
the paper.
The Weekly World News’ biggest lasting legacy, though, is the character that made them famous
- Bat Boy.
Not related to that guy in Gotham City, Bat Boy is a tiny monster that appears to be half-bat,
half baby.
The bald critter first appeared on the cover of the June 23, 1992 issue, baring his fangs
to the reader.
It went on to become one of the best selling issues in the magazine’s history.
Described as a juvenile delinquent, he was supposed to be one of a group of strange Bat-monsters
living in the Ozark mountains, and repeatedly appeared in the magazine endorsing politicians,
protesting laws, and even running for California governor.
Bat Boy may have been another of the Weekly World News’ wacky creations, but he crossed
over into the real world when his story was made into an off-Broadway musical featuring
such tunes as “Hold Me, Bat Boy”.
So what was the downfall of the Weekly World News?
After the departure of Eddie Clontz, the paper started getting a little predictable.
Stories fell back on old favorite characters rather than trying to shock the people into
buying a copy out of curiosity.
How many times can you see Bat Boy doing something wacky before you figure, eh, I’ll buy a
candy bar instead?
The editors even started reprinting some of their most popular stories with minor changes.
The spooky tale of Pan Am Flight 914’s mysterious flight into the future first appeared in 1985,
but it was reprinted again in 1993 and 1999.
The only difference in the articles was the date - and somehow, the appearance of the
Air Traffic Controller involved changed completely between articles.
As conspiracy buffs continued to circulate rumors about the mystery plane, including
a seven-minute 2019 video that barely acknowledges the possibility of the story being a hoax
near the end, the internet investigators at Snopes went to work.
The rumor-debunking site was able to find evidence that the photo of the supposed landing
was a stock photograph of a plane from 1935, not a Pan Am flight at all.
The story was clearly a fake, but the inspiration may have come from a 1961 episode of The Twilight
Zone.
In that episode, a freak breaking of the time barrier sends a commercial airline hurtling
back in time - first to the prehistoric age where they encounter dinosaurs, then to the
1939 World’s Fair.
Did that episode of one of TV’s most acclaimed sci-fi series inspire the article that inspired
countless conspiracy buffs?
The legend of Pan Am Flight 914 continues to fascinate conspiracy buffs, even if it’s
a fake cobbled together from a variety of sources.
But in a final bit of irony, the Weekly World News’ fake story may have created a homage
of its own.
The TV series Manifest, about an airplane that takes off from Jamaica and lands in the
United States five years later with the people on board not having aged a day, is currently
going strong on NBC with a complex plot that involves psychic powers and government conspiracies.
The Weekly World News may have ceased publishing in 2002, but it's bizarre legacy of conspiracy-driven
stories lives on.
For another strange tale of disappearing airlines, check out “What Happened to Malaysian Airlines
Flight 370?”, or check out this video instead.
Thanks for watching, and see you next time!