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!
