Terrorism, Aliens, Vile Vortices: The Mysteries of Missing Flight 370

Mysteries love theories. Unknown gaps in data call for speculations. We are seeing it happen this weekend.

Malaysia Airlines MH370, a Boeing 777, has gone missing. Airline officials lost contact with the plane, which was carrying 239 passengers, two hours into the Kuala Lumpur-to-Beijing flight, on Saturday, March 8, at 2:40 a.m. local time (18:40 GMT). It is thought it went missing off the coast of Vietnam, but that is pure speculation.

This photo provided by Laurent Errera taken Dec. 26, 2011, shows the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER that disappeared from air traffic control screens Saturday, taking off from Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport in France. The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 carrying 239 people lost contact with air traffic control early Saturday morning, March 8, 2014 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and international aviation authorities still hadn't located the jetliner several hours later. (Photo Credit: Laurent Errera)

Who was on board? A delegation of painters and calligraphers, a group of Buddhists returning from a religious gathering in Kuala Lumpur, a three-generation family, nine senior travelers and five toddlers.

Most of the 227 passengers on board missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 were Chinese, according to the airline's flight manifest. The 12 missing crew members on the flight that disappeared early Saturday were Malaysian.

Other passengers were from India, Indonesia, Australia, the United States, France, New Zealand, Ukraine, Canada, Russia and the Netherlands, the airline said.

Keller, Texas native, 50-year-old Philip Wood, was on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 when it disappeared over the Gulf of Thailand in the South China Sea. Philip Wood works as a technical storage executive at IBM Malaysia and was transferred to a job from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, where the flight originated.

Terrorism

A Boeing 777 goes missing. Is someone playing a numbers twilight game?

Was it terrorism? Two people named on the manifest -- an Austrian and an Italian -- whose passports had been stolen were not aboard the plane. But speculation is they were just trying to immigrant, yes, illegally, from Iran. There are questions about a third, Chinese, passport, but word of that has disappeared from the media.

Freescale, Motorola, Lear, UFOs

On March 8th, the Austin, Texas-based Freescale Semiconductor confirmed that 20 employees were passengers on Flight 370. Twelve are from Malaysia and eight from China, the company said.

The history of Freescale Semiconductor is intriguing. Freescale was one of the first semiconductor companies in the world, having started as a division of Motorola in Phoenix, Arizona in 1948, according to the company's own historical data. In 1955, a Motorola transistor for car radios was the world’s first commercial high-power transistor. It was also Motorola’s first mass-produced semiconductor device. It was in 2004, a mere decade ago, when it became autonomous by the divestiture of the Semiconductor Products Sector of Motorola.

Motorola? 1948 for this division? In Phoenix? Who came up with the name Motorola? It turns out most credit for the name is given to William "Bill" Lear, in 1930, the investor/inventor who would go on to produce such items as the 8-track music cartridge and the Lear Jet. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that the mystery of UFOs date to such events as Roswell in 1947, in nearby New Mexico. 

Some folks take the notion of "Reverse-Engineering Roswell UFO Technology" very seriously. In that paper, computer company chief Jack Shulman argues that the transistor could never have been invented so suddenly at AT&T in late 1947 without input from top secret Government projects, that some have identified to him as being from alien spacecraft.

And then there is Bill Lear's son, John, who is an accomplished pilot, former CIA operative, and Ufologist. He is noted in the latter field for promoting a variety of conspiracy theories which are based, he claims, on information obtained from military contacts.

Lear is a controversial figure in Ufology, to say the least, for many of his statements.

Lear believes that any number of flying discs 'fell' into our hands when they crashed in the southwest in the late 1940's and early 50's.
Lear's scenario also includes the suspicion that the government has made secret deals with the 'aliens', actually exchanging humans for advanced technological data. Source.

Will we be hearing that aliens are behind the disappearance of Flight 370?

Ooops. I guess some sites are already writing about this form of speculation.

Missing Planes and Sanderson's Vile Vortices

Did Flight 370 vanish off Vietnam into a Devil's Triangle-like area, like the one found off Japan? Who knows, but this is not an area recognized in Fortean literature for such disappearances. Indeed, examining Ivan T. Sanderson's traditional map of "Vile Vortices" around the globe does not show one in this location.

But an airliner is missing, and answers are wanting about what happened.

Update March 12. It has been confirmed by military radar, and missed by civilian radar, that the plane's transponder was turned off as 370 neared the Vietnam coast. The flight then turned around and fly over the Malay Peninsula. 

Late on March 12, the Chinese authorities announced they have new images of 79" by 72" object in the ocean that they think is 370 debris.

Or was Flight 370, like Flight 19, the way into one of Ivan's Vile Vortices?

Other Mysteries

As the search for the aircraft continues, the rescuers are bumping into other mysteries. Take this Sunday, March 9th, CNN report:

'Strange object' not debris from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 

The mysteries surrounding the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, and the true identities of some of its passengers, are as deep as the South China Sea waters where a multinational search team is searching for the jet.
One promising lead has turned out to be a dead end. A "strange object" spotted by a Singaporean search plane late Sunday afternoon is not debris from the missing jetliner, a U.S. official familiar with the issue told CNN on Sunday.
A U.S. reconnaissance plane "thought it saw something like debris but it was a false alarm," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

If all those on board Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 are found to have died, it will rank as the deadliest airline disaster since November 12, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed into a New York neighborhood, killing all 260 people on board and five more on the ground. Many recall that crash with horror, as it followed so closely after the events of 9/11 in New York City.