The Disappearance (July 2, 1955): The day was a routine one at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Pan American Douglas DC-4, Flight 914, took off bound for Miami, Florida. On board were 57 passengers and four crew members, expecting a short, standard flight. Everything was normal until, about three hours into the journey, the flight suddenly dropped off all radar screens.
No distress call was received. No wreckage was found in the vast search effort that followed. After years of fruitless searching, the airline was forced to declare all 61 souls lost. The case was closed, filed away as one of the great unsolved aviation mysteries of the mid-century.
The Reappearance (May 21, 1992): Thirty-seven years later, the impossible happened.
At the international airport in Caracas, Venezuela, air traffic controller Juan de la Corte noticed an anomalous, slow-moving blip on his radar. Visually, it was an old propeller plane—a type that hadn’t been in active service for decades.
The plane approached the airport and circled erratically. De la Corte finally established radio contact. What he heard was chilling: the pilot identified himself as Captain Charles Taylor of Pan Am Flight 914, stating they were scheduled to land in Miami at 9:55 AM on July 2, 1955.
When De la Corte informed the confused pilot that he was in Caracas, Venezuela, and that the current date was May 21, 1992, the cockpit erupted in screams. Ground crew rushing toward the plane saw terrified, bewildered faces pressed against the cabin windows.
The Second Vanishing: As airport security scrambled toward the aircraft, the pilot, visibly distressed, suddenly pushed the throttles forward. The DC-4 roared down the runway and took off into the sky, vanishing into the clouds as quickly as it had appeared.
The only piece of evidence left on the tarmac was a small, tattered pocket calendar that had slipped from the cockpit, clearly dated for the year 1955. The flight was never seen again.
Case File 2: Santiago Flight 513 – The Plane of Skeletons
The Disappearance (September 4, 1954): This tale is darker, claiming a Brazilian commercial aircraft, Santiago Flight 513, vanished shortly after leaving Aachen, Germany, bound for Porto Alegre, Brazil. The Lockheed Super Constellation aircraft carried 88 passengers and four crew members. Like Flight 914, no distress signal was ever sent, and no debris was recovered despite extensive searches of the Atlantic.
The Horrifying Landing (October 12, 1989): After 35 years, Flight 513 reappeared, materializing seemingly out of thin air to circle Porto Alegre’s airport before making a completely unassisted, perfect landing on the runway.
When ground staff and security cautiously approached the silent aircraft, they found a scene straight out of a nightmare. All 92 people on board—passengers and crew—were present, still strapped into their seats. However, every single person had been reduced to skeletal remains. The pilot, Captain Miguel Victor Cury, was found as a skeleton, his bony hands still resting on the controls. The engines of the long-lost plane were reportedly still idling.
The Chilling Mystery: The sheer impossibility of the event—a plane flying itself for 35 years and landing with a full cabin of skeletons—baffled authorities who tried to explain how a human body could decompose so fully within a pressurized cabin, or how the plane could have flown a decades-long route without fuel or a living pilot.
The Reality Behind the Hoax
While these stories are haunting and have been featured in countless books and TV shows, both Pan Am Flight 914 and Santiago Flight 513 are now definitively known to be works of fiction. They originated in the infamous U.S. tabloid, the Weekly World News, a paper known for fabricating sensational, bizarre, and often humorous stories.
The power of these stories, however, is real. They continue to be shared because they tap into our deepest fears and fascination with time travel and the supernatural. The question remains: If a plane could vanish and return, which of these terrifying outcomes would be worse?
