The airliner took off from New York in 1955 and landed in Venezuela in 1985, or was it 1992? We’re going to get to the bottom of things!
A Pan Am DC-4, similar to the one in this photo, is said to have disappeared for decades, only to reappear under strange circumstances.
Pan Am Flight 914 was a Douglas DC-4 with 57 passengers and six crew members that took off from a New York airport bound for Miami, Florida.
The date was July 2, 1955. The flight was supposed to last a few hours but never arrived in Miami. Instead, he appeared on March 9, 1985, unexpectedly and unseen on Caracas’ radar!
The pilot voiced his concerns to the tower and taxied to the gate after a conventional landing, and ground agents could see the faces of screaming passengers pressed against their windows, looking out at a fantastical new world.
The pilot, in turn, threw a small calendar out the window before rushing back to the runway, where he took off and disappeared as abruptly as he had arrived.
And the calendar? Did he accidentally drop it? Or does it hold the secret of what happened? What exactly did it say?
Maybe we will never know. The story goes that the governments of both Venezuela and the United States seized the tower’s calendar and tapes, and even once in the following decades refused to comment on the incident. What really happened to Flight 914?
For once it’s a mystery that has an answer.
The theories
The story has been making the rounds on the Internet for years and is a popular topic on forums among UFOs and time travelers.
The most popular theory is that the plane passed through some sort of time portal or wormhole and instead of landing in Miami in 1955, arrived in Venezuela thirty years later.
It is believed that he returned through the wormhole after leaving Caracas. It’s apparently unclear exactly how wormholes or time portals work.
The truth
As I hope you have already understood, the story of Pan Am Flight 914 was a complete fabrication. But in this case, contrary to many urban legends, the source of this invention is known.
This is an article first published in 1985 by the Weekly World News, the former tabloid (now website) that specialized in wild, made-up stories like this. The newspaper published the article two more times in the 1990s (although the plane’s arrival date was changed to 1992 in these later articles). The story received a huge boost when YouTube channel Bright Side posted a video about the disappearance.
The expertly produced video has been viewed more than 15 million times, but the fact that it was a fake tabloid article doesn’t become clear until about two-thirds of the way through.
Bright Side introduced a number of “details” not included in the original Weekly World News article, including the fact that the plane was visible on radar.
Regardless, it’s only towards the end that the video reveals the story to be a hoax.
It’s likely that others used this actual fake news to spread the story without adding the one relevant detail, which was that everyone knew all along that it was all a fanciful fabrication.
It all shows how fascinated people are by airplanes, even if the story is invented to create a paranormal sensation.
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