From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They call me Ben where joyed as always with our super producer Paul, mission control decand most importantly, you are you. You are here? That makes this the stuff they don't want.
You to know.
I was thinking we begin tonight's episode and update on disappearing planes with a lovely piece of correspondence we received from Fatigued and Flying Weirdly enough. I don't want to say it's in defensive Boeing, but I think it's a good entry point for us Fatigue to fly and says, how do you all? I am Fatigued and flying here. I'm way behind, unfortunately, but catching up. I want to make sure something's clear here. Do not conflate airline maintenance
issues with Boeing failures. The real stuff they don't want you to know is there's been an uptick in airline maintenance issues to the point I'm getting stories from captains regarding flagrant disregard of maintenance at a certain airline. Yet the airlines can publicly turn around and blame Boeing things like a wheel falling off. That's a maintenance issue, not a Boeing issue. I would not be surprised to see an FAA investigation by the end of the year. Keep
the dirty side down. Fatigued to fly? I don't know that expression, but I think I like it.
I mean that makes sense.
These planes go through so much wear and tear, and they're not like guaranteed to be impenetrable. You know, you have to change the oil on your car, and that's not the responsibility of your car's manufacturer, is it. You know, got to get new tires, rotate your tires and all of that. It makes sense that would be kind of an easy scapegoat, you know, again, not in defensive blowing.
They've definitely made some serious oopsis. But I can't see how some of these mistakes could be kind of like pushed off onto the manufacturer rather than you know, copping to a maintenance fum.
Yeah, and I think that's one of the one reason and wrote back to fatigue to flying, and one reason I thought that was such an important point is because the news seems to be ignoring it a little bit, especially when headlines go viral. And right now, if you look around the media landscape for the past few years, it seems like planes are constantly encountering accidents and disaster.
It reminds me. I don't know if we ever talked about this on air, but do you guys have a scariest flight you've ever taken that you remember thinking this might be the one?
Just a little you know, extra rough air?
Isn't it funny? I was thinking, I was thinking about this recently. They used to call it turbulence. Now they call it rough air, which seems like a total kind of like sugarcoating of turbulence, you know, like an airplane speak, right, it's a little bit more palatable rough air versus turbulence.
The turbulence in itself was already a term that kind of didn't mean anything except for what it meant, and it I know, just hey, we're going to experience a little turbulence everyone, and really the plane is going to be shaking, You're going to be thrown around a little bit. It's going to be terrifying.
But am I wrong?
And that they've kind of ceased to use that term and they've replaced it with rough air. I swear I haven't heard anybody say turbulence in many years.
I still hear turbulence, And it may be it may not be a mandate, or if it is, it maybe like an airline preference mandate, So it might depend on the airline you go to and the nature of your pilot. The scariest flight I ever, the scariest flights I have been on. I love flying, I'm fear of it. But the trickiest ones have inevitably been on really small planes, not in the US, like huddle jumpers somewhere, because then that's when the turbulce lengths of the rough air can
really start ping ponging you around. But so statistically it is safer to fly than it is to drive or ride in a car in the United States, well even to walk sometimes if you're like adjacent to a roadway. And just to clear it up real quick, turbulence and rough air are kind of interchangeable. So it does seem like it might be a company line as to which
term is used. And over the past decade or so doing this show stuff that'll want you to know we've been able to identify certain trends in the world of conspiracy and conspiratorial thought, and today's episode examines this trend that has only appeared to grow over the past few years, the idea of something something scary in the skies, particularly disappearing planes. Here are the facts.
Well, given that you know, aviation powered flight in the timeline of humanity is a relatively recent development, it could be seen as a bit surprising when one has the realization that it's a bit tricky to figure out exactly how many planes exist, whether in the air or just in general. You know, I'm sure there are ways of you know, of course, there are ways of tracking flights
commercial flights, but that doesn't take into account everything. And I'm sure that's not something that without some serious digging, you know, your average mortal would have access to.
Yeah, it's tough because you can look at the you can look at the manufacturing numbers of the big boys in the game, like the air busses and your boeings, But so many individual planes have been built over the past century. Like you said, many are retired or they've
been dismantled, destroyed, crashed, or disappeared there was. It was a pretty good move back into one seventeen found some pretty solid estimates that claimed at that time in twenty seventeen, there were an estimated thirty nine thousand planes on the planet, which honestly didn't seem like that many to me. You know,
maybe it's not counting helicopters. Are we count you know, they are we counting military craft as well, because we'll never really know how many military craft are out there, but it looks like it looks like over the course of history, from all the publicly available information, the number was something like one hundred and fifty thousand, which still
seems small to me. But you know, I guess most people don't own a plane, right, And just to backcheck on what I said ever so slightly, there are flight tracker websites that give you a pretty relatively accurate estimate of how many planes are currently in the air, and typically between seven seven hundred and eighty two and eighty seven hundred and fifty five commercial planes are in the air at any time, and again that does not take
into account the retired ones, the ones that have been grounded, dismantled. All of that good stuff yeah, and to that point. Later in just a few minutes, we'll get to introduce one of my favorite favorite stockery websites for the Friendly Skies, a very exciting way to lose a couple of hours. Since Elon Musk and Taylor Swift don't want you to know right right, just so private plane enthusiast in general,
so Boeing in twenty seventeen. Same year, Boeing said, look, civilization overall is going to need another almost forty thousand planes thirty nine, six hundred and twenty over the next two decades. So if all those estimates held correct, the number of aircraft would be something like sixty three thousand,
two hundred something in twenty thirty seven. Of course, those estimates did not factor in a global pandemic which absolutely walloped pretty much well the majority of industries on the planet. Air travel, there's no exception. Did you guys ever travel like take a flight during COVID during those restrictions? No? No, no, not not not during the lockdown. No it was not fun.
I bet it was easy to get on the plane, you know, if you had your right paperwork, but all the little fun parts about riding on a plane were out the window except for sitting by the window seat. That was like the last person. Wasn't there a period though, where flights were grounded like pretty much indefinitely or was there always an ability to take a flight if you you know, have the you know, have the bravado to do so. Yeah. Yeah, So the actual stand down was
pretty pretty abbreviated. So I was thinking, yeah, and we know that a lot of commercial carriers, when they couldn't get human passengers, they started hauling cargo and hauling freight just to keep the businesses going. Also, no country geopolitically wants to lose its airline because at some point it becomes a military capability and you don't want to rely
on another country for that. So it's you get a little I'm not going to say it's easy to run an airline, it is absolutely not, but you get a little more TLC from your home government because they want you to stay in business too. But the cool thing is, unless you're terrified of planes and you hate them, the cool thing is there was this huge rebound in twenty so everything goes to pot in twenty nineteen. In twenty
twenty two, it's predicted these predictions seem in line. It's predicted that overall air travel is going to be higher than it was this year before the pandemic. So there are going to be four billion travelers in twenty twenty four, which is a pretty astonishing number. That's one hundred and three percent of what it was in twenty nineteen.
Is that just a product of people finally becoming fully comfortable. Has there still been sort of some gun shyness surrounding flying and then getting sick potentially or what does that represent? That's very very interesting, kind of alarmingly large number.
Yeah, maybe people well some people probably had money that they were going to spend on vacations that they just saved for several years. So maybe now people are, for instance, going to take that honeymoon they had planned on. You know, there could be any number of reasons. But this is good news, right. But along with this good news, there are a lot of complications. I love that we're mentioning private planes. Environmental damage became a huge you know, like
sticking point in online conversation. The maintenance just gets more expensive the more planes you have and the more active they are, and then the if is structure. I feel like, I hope we don't sound like stodgy old curmudgeons when we're complaining about you know, water mains and crumbling bridges. But have you guys met an air traffic controller. They're
intense and they're kind of stressed out. I actually recently saw a TikTok or something where it was some audio recordings of pilots communicating with air traffic controllers, and they've got some funny, snarky little end jokes, and I wish I could remember exactly what it was, but it was a really interesting peak behind the curtain. I bet you could just google it, and I think you'd probably be There wasn't anything alarming, but it was some kind of
gallows humor for sure, Oh I bet yeah. And I know also that there are boat controllers right who do the same kind of thing for watercraft, and they're just as stressed out because updating the calm systems and updating the control tower and things like that. It's one of those expenses that people don't think about until it breaks. The skies are getting crowded if you go.
To well, I see the high stakes are I mean exactly, if you mess up just a little bit. Uh, you could kill hundreds of people.
Right, and we can always re record on Wednesday.
Exactly true.
It's interesting though, how like it takes a lot to fully erode the trust in air travel. You know, even with all of these you know, seemingly disastrous occurrences that have been happening, it seems a little bit with more frequency lately, it doesn't seem like it's it's been a death now for like the industry, right.
Yeah, And a big part of that is because the industry of the type of craft that are around now and used commercially, they've been normalized, you know what I mean. It's we see, you know, like a jetliner are not a thing because jetliners were not normalized when things went wrong. Right. People are giving Tesla and Cybertruck a hard time for valid reasons, but obviously one big part of that is that they are new, you know what I mean. Ford's
breakdown too. We've heard the acronym found on road dead. But because they've been around so long, people will just shrug and say, mistakes happen. I mean, like you said, are there more disasters in the sky now that now that we've gone from the friendly skies to the crowded clouds or is it just that we're seeing more, we're hearing more about it. Boeing had what nine separate issues within the span of three months of varying severity from like the wheels to the wind interior. Yeah, and then
of course deaths of former employees, whistleblower statements. People started to wonder if there was against or sue with Boeing. But again, you know, you kind of preface the the auto to the auto to aircraft comparison, because if you don't take care of you know, your Honda Odyssey or whatever, it's not Honda's fault when it breaks down.
Well, but but it's Honda's fault if they put the pieces together wrong. Oh, which is what Boeing's whistleblowers are saying, which I think, I mean when we talked about in the past, I think there's definitely a conspiracy there just to put profits over anything else.
Mm hmmm, Yeah, I would tend to agree with you. I don't think I think the maintenance though too, fatigue and flins, I think that point has to be in the conversation. Yeah, because it's definitely maintenance. It's it's not just one loan Gunman of problems in regard.
But I'm just imagining if you if you need to change the oil on your car, right, it doesn't matter if you're if the container that holds your oil is manufactured incorrectly and has some dang holes in it, you know.
Right, A lot of the engineering, a lot of it, Like you know, one thing I've noticed more often now with at least internal combustion cars, newer models, the way they're the way they're they're like, engineering priorities are increasingly inconvenient for the person who owns the car or the person who works on the car, like you should. If you build cars, folks, if you design them first, thank you so much, big fan. Secondly, please make it easy to get to the battery. Jesus, please make it like
reason noble to change the oil. This is ridiculous.
I need you to remove four pieces of this vehicle before you get access to the battery, which is.
The thing that's gonna die front panel or whatever. No, I do think it's worth pointing out to you and Matt. I think you're absolutely right that the Boeing is certainly at fault, and there does seem to be a culture of kind of cutting corners. But based on we're talking about with COVID and the need to kind of claw
back some of those profits that were lost. I think both the manufacturers and the airlines have equal kind of reasons to potentially, you know, maybe cut a few corners here and there to try to get that get those profits back up.
M Yeah, the blood price right now? How much how much profit would you trade for human lives? But this is also bigger than Boeing. You know, in each of those cases we're talking about, you have to individually look at them right to determine the chain of responsibility where any blame might be found. And that's what authorities are doing now. But the reality of the situation is there are more planes in the sky. There are crowded clouds. If you want to get a sense of it, here's
the website we're teasing earlier. Go to a flight radar twenty four dot com. It is an active, live map of the world and it shows you where the majority of the world's planes are right now. If you if you click on it, it's it's nuts, especially when you zoom out. I'm getting lost in it.
Does it have X thirty seven b on there.
No, because it's too too high up high. Yeah, it's too high up. And you know, the dumbest thing I've been doing for the past few months is I'll I'll get onto this site and I'll just check on Antarctica. You know, I just want to see.
Because nobody can fly over the ice wall. Baby.
That's right, mountains of madness, and uh, we're gonna We're gonna pause before we ascend the peak of madness here. Uh, there are more opportunities now for mistakes, accidents, and disasters. And yes, some planes simply disappear. No one sure what happened to these planes, but we do hopefully have some updates. Here's where it gets crazy, all right. It sounds bonkers right to say we lost the plane. We know they're big, but we lost the plane.
Well, there's so much technology on each one of those planes that are meant to ensure that very thing never happens, even if it goes down, even if it catches on fire, explodes.
With the famous black box right right, Yeah, supposedly indestructible and is meant to carry the sort of the electronic and mechanical equivalent of the last words of the plane if something goes wrong, so you can figure out, you can conduct forensics and see like, oh, this temperature sensor said this, or this altimeter reported this.
Well, and they have complex transponders, services, and systems on them that would should allow for anyone to recover it. Even if it's at the bottom of the ocean, like thirteen thousand feet below the sea or something, or even further.
Even Point Nemo stuff, you should be able to find it.
But yeah, it's down there somewhere.
Yeah. Point Nemo is the remote part of the Earth, folks, if you make it out to Point in Nemo, in very intimidating, intimidating, distant part of the Pacific Ocean. This is true. The closest people to you are going to be the astronauts in the International Space Station. That's how far away that is. That's how big the Pacific Ocean is. And I think maybe that's the most important part to remember when we ask about losing planes. There's just so
much area to search. And you're right, Matt, GPS, satellite networks, these great improvements in surveillance and communication would make us think the days of Amelia Earhart are a thing of the past. But Lessening the chance of a disappearance is
not the same thing as reducing it to zero. So the most infamous recent disappearance that we might start with today would be that of Malaysia Airlines Flight three seventy or MH three seventy, which on March eighth of twenty fourteen, was heading from Kuala Lumpur, which is the capital of Malaysia, to Beijing when it took an unscheduled I guess deviation from its from its flight flight plan fight flight path.
It turned west across the Malay Peninsula.
And if anyone you know has has watched TV series or whatever about like you know, terrorism in the air or whatever, there's a show recently called Hijack. It was on Apple when when a plane deviates from its flight plan, it's a big deal. Like people notice this because it could, you know, indicate that there's something very bad that is happening up there in terms of the pilot no longer being in control of the plane, right.
Yeah.
And it also depends if it's a manual shift, right, or if it's like if you recover something and it shows to some kind of automatic system that shifted the flight's path right.
You're and also it's an interrelated system, especially there are more planes in the air. When you deviate from a path, you risk a domino effect right of all the other things. It's kind of like on the ground version of this would be if you are ever in a parking lot and you see someone has done a crappy job parking
right everybody over the line. Well, also we have to exercise empathy, you know, because the person who looks like they did a bad parking job, they may have only done that because the person before them left and the and then that person's left. It looks like, yeah, I know, you're totally right, dude. Yeah, I for a moment I was like, empathy for those monsters. Never but Ben, you're right, there's there's oftentimes an unseen factor.
There's always a BMW Prime.
Exactly, Yeah, exactly, there's a Toyota Mary. Yeah, all all three villains. So yeah, we talked about in age three seventy in twenty nineteen. I think that's a great quick and dirty recap. The reason this still remains such a mystery is that a lot of planes that disappear are your smaller things, your pipers. You're privately privately owned or piloted things in remote parts of the world where and I'm not dismissing the tragedy at all, but a smaller
amount of people disappear. This is a Boeing seven seventy seven. It had two hundred and thirty nine people on it. And that's the thing, like I was saying too, I mean, there's so many eyes on these things because a little deviation like that could affect other flight paths. You know, it could cause a collision, mid air collision or any number of things. So there, you know, could be international eyes on it, depending on what parts of the skies.
You know, this is taking place in not just the air traffic controllers of the originating you know, country, and the origin of the passengers and the social position of the passengers also plays a role. These people were from fifteen different countries. They were flying internationally, so yes, there were a lot of eyes on immediately. To the credit of the authorities, people are searching everything they can and they spend months looking. If the first search is fifty
two days, it is covering. They have hundreds of other flights going over the flight path and anywhere near it, over ocean where currents may have washed things around. They cover one point seven million square miles and at first they find nothing. It's as if the plane vanished, which led to a lot of conspiracy theories. Of course, yeah, makes perfect sense. I mean those kinds of questions would be being asked. Before you get to the theories, let's walk through some of the other ins and outs. So
multiple governments, like we said, were involved. They spent something like one hundred and fifty million dollars Australia, Malaysia, China, and I think Japan, and they had a search where they covered forty six thousand miles of ocean, and then in twenty seventeen they called off the search and they said,
we just were not finding stuff. But that obviously didn't satisfy the family members and the loved ones of those two hundred and thirty nine people, so they pressured the Malaysian government, and the Malaysian government launched a new search with private industry, a really interesting company called Ocean Infinity. They're very good at what they do. But unfortunately, after months of searching in this other you know, in this other partnership, they didn't find anything. Would these be like
unmanned small submarine craft. When Paul and I were working with John Walzac on Missing Season one, which is about a mysterious plane disappearance, we used one of those underwater underwater vehicles, like a remotely operated vehicle.
Now, to my understanding, Ocean Affinity struck a deal with Malaysia to basically search and if they didn't find anything, they wouldn't get paid. That was kind of the deal they struck, which is an amazing deal for Malaysia because my gosh, if it fails, if the search fails, and you don't have to pay anything, and that's what happened, right.
Is this an example of a company trying to make a name for itself and we're rolling the dice on a deal like this? I mean, very maybe very interesting. I mean it seems like a very risky move, maybe to maybe to some degree. They were founded in twenty seventeen, so they were not around when this occurred. But they've done a lot of other operations. They've located wrecked watercraft and stuff like that, so they weren't. They weren't acting
in bad faith. I think they, like most people, were just personally hoping to contribute to closure in this situation. I'm certainly not suggesting they were outreating bad faith necessarily.
I just think being willing to take that deal.
You know, it seems like the benefit to them would be to have their names in the headlines and to kind of like, you know, make a name for a relatively newly established a company, you know, have a big success.
To my understanding, that forty six thousand square miles you're mentioning there've been that was previously searched, right, Ocean Infinity said, Okay, we've got this drift study. So if there was debris anywhere in that huge sector of the ocean that was already searched, if it did drift, it probably went north
in this direction. So they said, we're going to search that area, and that's going to be our plan, right, But since that failed, I don't know, I guess I'm really interested to hear what these updates are, because man, it feels like, if that amount of ocean has already been searched, where the heck else could it be?
Yeah, exactly where else could it be? And the the issue too, is that already we see speculation thriving right on things like where the location of the craft could end up right, and a lot of oceanography has to be involved when we're thinking through the passage, the post accident passage of said a lot of folks were saying in the beginning, maybe a crash in the ocean after running out of fuel, which is terrible because the Indian
Ocean is a pretty dangerous place to crash. And the thing is, the pieces started washing up to the shore over time. Twenty pieces that were believed twenty pieces of debris, just chunks of stuff that we're believed to be from the plane were located around the coast of the African mainland and then a bunch of small remote islands in the Indian Ocean, which is I believe Madagascar, Mauritius, and Rodriguez. Yeah,
Reunion is probably one of the best examples. In twenty fifteen, just a little while after the crash, people found a large object something that I was not familiar with apologies aviation experts, a flapperon, which is kind of a silly name, but a flapperon is the it's a thing on the wing. They found a flapper a flappy doo from the wing. It definitely came from a Boeing seventy seven, and given the timeline, that means it was almost certainly three seven.
Is that what they is that the flaps they're talking about.
Okay, this is just.
The long name that they short knit to flaps, full flaps. That's how you you know, grade your angle, you know, and move, you know, your trajectory of a fight.
Because flapperon sounds silly. It's a silly thing for a pilot to say, like we're adjusting the flapperons. Flapparon sounds like an insult from Don Quixote. It really does, like you'd slap somebody with a glove, you know.
I don't know what it says here on the Wall Street Journal that flaperons helped stabilize planes during low speed flying, during takeoff and landing.
And they're a portmanteau of flap and aliron.
Are they are true? What what's the second word?
A luron?
Well, that would we have a whole other word we have to explore. I don't know that one either.
So it's astonishing. I think the just how far these individual pieces of what appears to be a single plane of washed, you know, to the earlier point about drifting currents. That's frightening.
I guess my question though, and I know that we're going to get to some of this is like would this have been some sort of catastrophic failure like a mid air explosion that would have tossed debris but not but only some of it? Like why would there have only been like parts if it all went down in one peace well from the impact the ocean impact, you know.
But I mean, if it runs out of fuel, couldn't they coast and do like an emergency water landing without having some sort of insane impact that would have caused you know, some sort of catastrophic you know, destruction.
It goes into a lot of the different theories, right. I think we're gonna we're gonna you jump into all that stuff because there are reasons, plausible reasons for a plane to just continue flying in some direction until it runs out of fuel and then impact the ocean.
Autopilot is a hell of a drug. Yeah, this is true. After more than four years of searching and investigating this stuff, there was an official report released. It was a novel. It was four hundred and ninety five pages in twenty eighteen, and people were very unhappy with it because despite five hundred or so pages of research. There were no conclusive answers about what happened, and that's horrifying if you know
one of your loved ones was on the plane. No one knows why it went off course, no one knows exactly where it is today. It's one of the greatest aviation mysteries of all time. So there's no surprise people have cooked up all sorts of strange theories about the disaster. Some are distressingly plausible, others are downright bizarre, to the point that people involved have felt even bringing them up is disrespectful. Should we start with the most plausible ones? I think so? Running out of fuel?
Yeah, I mean, I guess that was That was one of my questions was if you did run out of fuel, you would be forced to make an emergency landing. And see, it's part of the whole spiel that you hear, you know, and the event of a water landing and all of that stuff. You know, you inflate, you're like vest before you helped, you know, the young person that you're with
or whatever. So this is definitely a scenario that we've all mentally been prepared for in the most kind of cute sea of a video presentation to make Gato actually worry about it. But we are required by law to express this eventuality.
Yeah, and if you like some of us in the crowd today, if you're one of those people who loves sitting in an exit row because you like the idea of being heroic, you might be surprised to know those inflatable water slides things. Yeah. I don't think they're really used, you know, very often, but it.
Is a possibility, right, you can make a water landing.
You can't. People have, people have.
It's just not gonna go the way. Maybe it's you think it is in your head. If you're just a passenger and you look at the the fun images that you see, or you watch the video of the Delta Maa, you know, it's a little different. Well, I've never been in that situation. Have you guys ever been in an emergency plane situation? I've never emergency?
Yes, water slide no, No.
But there are of course crafts that are designed to land on water that have those little bumper thingies you know, yeah, puddle jumpers. They're literally designed too. They have these inflate not inflatables, but like floatation things. That are kind of built in, and that's perfectly normal, it's part of protocol. But a giant jumbo jet, you know, literally flying under just nothing but its own weight, you know, with no engines and no ability to hit a runway correctly with
the wheels. I mean, that would be a massive impact, wouldn't it. It's not as rosy as as the video presentations at all.
Two things First, particularly with what you're bringing up about the delta, the instructions that play on a plane or that are acted out in smaller planes. One thing that always astonishes me about those is, okay, first off, flight attendants are there for safety and they bust their humps. They're very unappreciated. And one of the strangest, most impressive things is how they learned to stay smiling no matter
what they're saying. You know what I mean. It's like no smoking and I don't know how like it's a it's a specific type of smile. You are taught in those in that profession. But the second thing is I was trying to remember the name of this what's the what's the pop culture term for when people just act like idiots and an airplane I swear to God, there's one, you know, when people start freaking out, makes it like
sort of like affluenza airplane bad behavior. Yeah, yeah, I but there is I feel like there is a term.
If there's not there, damn well should be because it certainly is a thing.
But also flight fury.
There you go, Ben, that makes absolute sense. And I was just on a ten hour flight.
And the only way to get through those, if you're not lucky enough to have some sort of sedative is like they dim the lights, they make it as placid as possible, they make it as mellow as bottle, because let's face it, guys, we're in a giant metal tube careening through the air with nothing but like science to
colding us up there. And not to say the science isn't a very important, powerful force, but it requires a little suspension of disbelief to not be terrified, you know, of being in that situation, especially for ten hours over the ocean, open ocean.
But guys, can we I want to bring something up which is one of the more terrifying things that I can imagine happening on a plane, and it has to do with the fact that the main problem occurred thirty eight minutes after takeoff with MH three seventy, which some experts believed pointed to depressurization of the cabin early on
as it reached altitude. So as it got up, there was something wrong in the plane to where it didn't pressurize correctly, oxygen wasn't flowing correctly for both passengers and people in the cockpit, and it caused everybody on the plane to basically lose consciousness. They before they could the masks changed, well, yeah, before they could change things or repressurize the cabin or get back down to a lower altitude.
Right after they also after they had spoken with ATC with air Traffic Control and things looked like they were on the literal up and up. It's also I don't want to lose flight fury. I think I'm onto something with that that was not already a term.
But ben, isn't that depressurized situation when the masks drop, doesn't it detect to change in cabin?
Probably?
Sorry, I'm just regurgitating all the stuff I've learned from the in flight video.
But maybe once again, that's not enough.
Maybe it's not necessarily right. It depends on I mean, are those sensors working. That's one of the first questions, right, how what is the rate of depressurization? You know, does it feel like also thirty eight minutes in, we don't know if that had already done the thing where you did in the lights, right, and you start maybe people start falling asleep, and you think they're just settling in for the flight.
Well, to quote Tyler Dirdin from Fight Club, oxygen gets you high, makes you docile, you accept your fate.
Like again, you have to wonder.
Is this something that's actually designed to save you or is it something that's just designed to take the sting out of your ultimate demise or just make you kind of like you know this fase.
Well, the thought is it would keep you alive until the pilots could get the plane back to a place where it needed to be.
Right, I'm being a doommonger.
I apologize.
I don't think it's doom mongering. I think of that every time, you know, I see those old school drills where it's like, in case of a nuclear attack, get under your desk, right, or what's the old joke about the crash position thesis teach you on planes put your head between your legs. So you can kiss your askoby. I mean like it's still it is better than nothing. The idea depressurization attorney creating a zombie flight is unfortunately plausible.
Autopilot could keep going for some time, you know, most modern I'd say the majority of modern commercial airliners do use autopilot.
But surely the pilots wouldn't depend on some sort of autosystem deploying. They would probably have free you know, freestanding oxygen masks they could put their hands on and then they know what was going on they put that thing on, you know. I think that the pilots would have more specific equipment to deal with something like that, and then they wouldn't necessarily be in the exact same boat as
the passengers. Some got a cockpit redundancy, I would think, so like like a literal mask, they could just then they have right there in the cockpit. They don't have to wait for someone to deploy.
You know. Another I don't know, I'm just done wondering. Another Another theory they think captured people's minds for quite some time was the idea of a quote unquote rogue pilot that someone had a that someone was having personal issues that may have led to them for one reason or another, deliberately trying to crash the plane, which would
have made it a criminal act. Well, yeah, remember that pilot that took mushrooms five days prior to his flight and then totally lost his mind, you know on the flight that remember that story on that plane. Now, I'm sorry, that's right, but what Okay? But he was able because he's a pilot. He was able to get there. Yeah, he was able to so havoc. And so the pilot that's accused of being a rogue actor Zahari Ahmad Shah.
The idea here is that still like you were saying, Matt, depressurization occurred, but that he purposely depressurized the plane, causing that hypoxia, and then lowered the plane to three thousand feet And probably the more cinematic, very much unproven theory that people were floating around was that when he lowered the plane to three thousand feet altitude, he parachuted out to meet his mistress in a boat a dinghy. I don't buy it. I don't know that is real specific, y'all.
It seems like they're better ways to make a splash. Sorry, no pun intended than that. I can't imagine what a I mean, Yeah, I don't know. That seems very elaborate. Well, then what if the plane was hijacked? As a matter of fact, why don't we take a pause for a word from our sponsors, because now I think that's the line of getting into the crazier theory. That's right, and
we've returned, all right. So we have to be careful with the term expert when it's thrown around in the news, because people can be experts of one thing and it doesn't necessarily make them experts on another thing. You know, you could say I am an expert on physics, but that does not make you an expert on vulcanology, whether that's the study of magma or the study of vulcans in Star Trek. I think, no, you know what, We're
going to keep it in. But just to be fair, I feel like there's a lot of overlap between STEM experts and Star Trek fans. I feel like those two worlds go together.
What are STEM experts science.
Technology, engineering, mathematics experts?
Yeah, I think you're right.
Tell us if we're wrong, tell us if you're if you are if you're a hard science professor. You just hate star Trek and don't get it. But look, the reason I'm saying the thing about the experts is that aviation experts have claimed that Russia specifically had the means and the motive to hijack Malaysia Flight or Malaysia Air three seventy, and that we only think of it as a crash because things went wrong.
But to what end?
I guess typically, like, if there's a hijacking, it's usually almost like a hostage taking situation, and you usually have demands and there's some kind of communication that takes place. Are you saying that that stuff might have been covered up or I guess yeah, I'm intrigued.
Okay, the possible methods are interesting because Russia does have a lot of aerospace sophistication, right, They're very good at it. But it breaks down when this guy is talking about the motive, the aviation expert in particular, we're talking about guy named Jeff Wise, and so Jeff Wise says Russia's motive for hijacking or attacking three seventy was to quote distract from the annexation of Crimea or to respond to sanctions imposed by the us. I don't know. That seems
kind of like a roundabout. I feel like that just a cost benefit calculation. If you tried to blow up a plane or hijack a plane for that reason to distract from CRIMEA, you would just be further in the news as a super villain. Right for me, that doesn't hold up.
Yeah, I remember there was a lot of scuttle but at the time about the passengers on the plane who were I know there was like an IBM former executive or actually an actual executive from IBM, and a couple other people who are pretty high up in the tech world as well as there were rumors about certain objects that were on the plane that were basically prototypes technology. But again, a lot of that stuff I didn't see fully substantiated. I don't know if you guys found anything about that stuff.
Yeah, I appreciate the use of the word scuttle, but because that's a lot of what it is, and these things seemed either somewhat misrepresented, some of the tales about the passengers because again it's two hundred and thirty nine passengers and crew, So if you are connecting conspiratorial dots, it would be very easy and dangerously tempting to find one of those connections, you know what I mean, or you can find something that seems like a connection.
Yeah, there was a lot made about this company called free Scale that makes microchips and they do a lot of defense industry work, which I think, at least in my mind, was the unspoken connection that was made there when officials were thinking about Russia, you know, as a possible culprit for some reason or another takeout the microchips meant for some defense purposes for other countries mm hmm.
And then going to the idea of secret cargo, right, four tons of top secret stuff. These stories begin departing the realm of fact and entering the land of folklore. And maybe this is where we talk about the probably the most far out there. We weren't sure if we're gonna mention it on air today, but the Stargate theory. Yeah,
I mean, it's certainly I'm so sci fi pilled. I guess that my mind immediately goes to like the plots of TV series like Lost, you know, or like an airplane disappears and goes to another dimension or something like that, or as abducted in.
Some way or slips through a portal of time space.
Right, there's a video you can find. It was posted. I saw it on Reddit. I'm sure you guys did too. It appears to show a plane, a passenger jet, up in the sky, photographed by some kind of either infrared or other you know, photography methods. It appears to be encircled I think is the word you might use by three let's say, uap or dots or other objects. Those dots seemed to accelerate in their movement around the plane
until the plane and the dots disappear. And there's absolutely no information concretely linking this video to Malaysia Airlines three seventy.
It is.
There are statements that are made, and it's been reposted a ton of a lot of speculation from you know, a secondary or tertiary poster and just goes down the line as interesting and cool as it was, like, Oh my gosh, maybe that's what happened. That's why they couldn't find it. It disappeared because it was teleported. It does appear to have been pretty fully debunked by France twenty four.
Yeah. Yeah, and that's kind of the That is the typical course that those sorts of claims will take because they happened pretty often in the world of aviation, but also in the world of maritime disaster, right because again, people want an explanation for these things. None of these theories have been conclusively proven, even the most plausible ones.
At this point, we know the plane was there, Things started getting wonky, and then pieces of what very much appears to be the plane washed ashore around the world, around the Indian Ocean. And we go to the head of the safety investigation team from Malaysia, Kuksu Chon, who said all the available evidence and there wasn't much of it, irresistibly pointed in their opinion to unlawful interference, which many took to be a sign or a signal dog whistle
that the plane was hijacked. But there was still no outside of accusations from a few people, there's still no evidence of who might have interfered and why they chose to do so. Luckily, we do have an update. Malaysian officials recently said in a statement just a few days back that the government is ready to launch a new search operation. Ocean Infinity came back to them years later and said, look, we want to we want to do this again. We've got lessons learned, we have better technology,
better techniques. And then alongside that there are people who there are people like the British tech expert Ian Wilson who just last year said I found the plane in a jungle in Cambodia. And the weird thing is that with that is, if the wreckage is in Cambodia, how did all this other stuff wash up from the Indian Ocean? You know what I mean? They're kind of contradictory.
Do we have any other information on that.
On the idea of the Cambodia theory.
It's just like somebody literally saw it on Google Maps and then didn't send a team out to investigate.
Yeah, saw it on Google Maps.
And if you go to, oh my gosh, I'm looking at the picture right now.
Yeah, it's ambitious and optimistic to call it that plane crash in particular. You can read more about that in any number of any number of outfits. Even a lot of British tabloids covered it for a while, like US tabloids. But again there's just no proof. And here's the thing, this is part of this is part of our setup. This will we will probably end up making this a multi episode series going forward, because although MG three seventy was in the news so often, it's back in the
news now. At least eight other craw to have disappeared since that disaster. In many cases we're pretty sure bad weather or mechanical failure led to you know, led to the issue, but some have also disappeared. A lot of these craft or smaller private planes. Like we said at the top, small size makes them easy to miss, especially over a remote area where those kind of planes are
a common method of travel. And I guess the thing is, the reason I think we want to continue these explorations is because until the facts surrounding these disappearances get confirmed, the world is still going to wonder, rightly, is there something they don't want you to know? And shout out to everybody listening to this on a plane right now? Safe travels? Oh yeah, for sure. And I thought about that. Do you ever, do you guys ever save up podcasts and you listen to them when you're on a long
flight or something. I usually just watched the movies. Yeah, I just try to. I find movies are a good way to gauge time. I watched some really hilariously bad movies on this trip. Madam Webb, guys, it is oh boy, it's a good No, that's what the lead actors said said. They said it was bad, but it was I found it delightfully bad. It was fun.
Also, the Ferrari movie was not very good.
It has a run Tomatoes rating of eleven yes.
And earned earned every percentage point. Yeah, I think so. I'm again. I'm waiting for the AI movie Mashups. I want to see Ferrari Web, which is the same characters from Madam Webb. I love it in a car show and also, most importantly, folks, uh you know, jokes aside, Please stay safe out there. We want to hear from you, we want to hear your theories, and we want to be easy to find online.
Boy, Yeah, we want to and we hopefully succeed at being easy to find online. At the handle Conspiracy Stuff, where we exist on Facebook. We have our Facebook group Here's where it gets crazy. Also on you where we have video content rolling out every single week. Got some really fun ones coming your way very soon. Also, finally, that handle is how you can find us on x FKA, Twitter, on Instagram, and TikTok though we're conspiracy stuff show.
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