January 20, 2023 • 66 mins
More than a century since the Wright brothers made history at Kitty Hawk, aircraft still seem like a stunning, new -- and potentially terrifying -- invention. It's no wonder that flight, like so many other forms of transit, has become embedded in the the human psyche. In today's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel delve deep into stories of 'haunted' aircraft.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 My Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They call
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul,
Mission Control decond. Most importantly, you are you. You are here,
and that makes this the stuff they don't want you
to know. As we are flying headlong into twenty twenty three,
we looked around at each other and we said, we're
(00:48):
overdue for a solid episode on ghost on the Paranormal
and earlier, if you'll recall, uh, Matt, you had asked
whether we had a ice one and done topic. You know,
we get we get bogged down rightly so in continuing
geo political events. And as soon as you asked this question, Matt,
(01:12):
the answer came back instantly. What was that? What did
we come up with when you asked about a solid
one and done paranormal episode? Yeah, I I asked about
that because you know, sometimes we do two partners, right,
and we want to release the episodes on usually a Wednesday,
and Friday, so you get to hear them in the
same week. But we were doing this one today because
(01:35):
Ben shot back immediately haunted airplanes and yeah, you know,
like the spruce goose or the Spirit of St. Louis. No,
not that, but I've always thought the Spirit of St.
Louis and kinda well, it's a great name, whichever one
we were talking about. Just the phrase alone made us
all go yes, So here we go. Wheels up. Please
(01:57):
make sure your lap belts are are fastened. Trading tables up,
make sure your seat is not reclined. Here are the facts. Okay, look,
airplanes are amazing, all right, take that birds we got
(02:18):
up there too, says humanity. Uh, they're also airplanes are
not quite as new fangled as we might assume. You know,
I think for a lot of people, you may you
have probably seen or driven or rode in a vehicle
(02:40):
on the ground of some sort. Uh, But airplanes still
are a thing that not all eight billion plus people
are going to experience directly. They you might see it
in the sky, right. Uh, it's rarefied air to ride,
and why it's even more rare for someone to pilot one.
(03:04):
But they're not really that new like Carl Binz of
Mercedes Benz fame. UH is often cited as we have
to be careful with inventions. Here often cited as the
first person to get a gas powered automobile to the
(03:25):
commercial market, and that happened in eighteen five, less than
twenty years after that, there were some really focused nerds,
let's be honest, the Right brothers, and they made a
pretty cool proof of concept. They had a powered flight
at a place called Kittie Hawk in the United States
(03:47):
in nineteen o three, and they hit on something right.
They hit on that screw you birds energy, right, Like
for centuries people have dreamed of flying. There's old far
Side cartoon about the caveman seeing a bird fly and
deciding between inventing a flight machine of its own or
(04:10):
inventing a bow and arrow and then just shooting the bird. Well,
you know, anyone that's uh either shooting birds or saying
bird screw you to birds is all right with me.
So I fully support this, you know, because birds are
for the birds. But so we're like airplane prototypes that
don't always get the job done. There there are a
(04:30):
lot of really cool ideas that just didn't work out.
There There are a lot of people who died attempting flight.
A lot of human beings throughout history try to invent
(04:50):
ways to fly and did not meet with the same
success of the Right Brothers. And it's weird because the
human species has thought of fly and mortality often in
the same cognitive breath like death in so many religions
is portrayed as this ascendant experience. Your your body is gone,
(05:13):
your soul rises to the heavens or the sky. And
there's there's something so primal about the idea, right, the
idea that every ground lane will have. Why am I
up here? Why am I in this tube? How fast
is this going? Are we okay? Call me down, Give
(05:33):
me some peanuts or some pretzels, you know what I mean?
Maybe more coffee? Sorry, taking out, taking taking out of
the ball game. This is an America's American as baseball
or or apple pie or dying in a test plate.
Oh boy, that's good. Also, you know some people who
(05:58):
are listening today, some of our fellow listeners love being
on planes. Some people absolutely hate it. Now, Matt and
Nolan and I have been in situations where we get
a call or some sort of communicate that requires us
to be wheels up pretty quickly, and so we are
(06:20):
familiar with planes, perhaps uh more so than the average
person who is not in the aviation industry. But I
keep thinking about this very American fascination with planes in general. Right,
motorized flight invented in the US. Uh. And then also
(06:41):
one of the most iconic Twilight Zone episodes ever. Yeah,
it's William Shatter freaking out at the window seat of
a plane. Well, and like you know, despite how corny
it looked to this day, it's still captures and capitalizes
on I think of fear that a lot of people
still have. I think maybe the three of us take
(07:01):
for granted a little bit that we can fly without
experiencing existential terror. But I think we all have friends
that that that cannot just the act itself of being
in the sky. Matt's raising his hand there, uh and
not a fan. Um. Some people just it's it's it's
nothing to him, and some people you gotta take a
dramamine or you're gonna be clutching the walls like bugs. Bunny.
(07:22):
In that parody of said Twilight Zone episode that Looney
Tunes did where there's a gremlin terrorizing bugs bunny on
a on a fighter plane. Yeah, I think the fear
that a lot of people have is a lack of control.
You you, when you're in a vehicle driving around, if
you're the driver, you at least feel as though you
(07:42):
are in control, even though your control is based on
the actions of all the people around you. But when
you're in a you know, plane, there's two people up there,
literally two people, and they're the ones if anything happens
to them. Sorry, yeah, well three, there's a flight engineer,
(08:03):
you know, there's there's a whole team of there's air
traffic controllers, some of the most stressed out people I
have ever met in over a long period of meeting humans.
But there's two on the plane that know how it
works really really well. Yeah. I mean, you don't want
just one person, right, you want two people. You want
(08:27):
some checks and balances. And for a lot of our
fellow conspiracy realist, this idea of tying religious or spiritual
or paranormal significance to a vehicle. It might sound weird,
but if we pull back and we look at the
larger context, we see that there are many urban legends,
(08:49):
There are many pieces of folklore that take place in transit,
you know, like ghostly hitchhikers before that, ghost riders in
this guy, you know, all that stuff, and then of
course haunted ships, Mary Celeste and so on for a
(09:13):
lot of people. Still, despite all the stuff you here,
you might find plane travel untrustworthy. And it's strange because
we see the discrepancy between intellectually knowing something, being aware
of facts and statistics, versus experientially encountering something. Like you said, Matt,
(09:41):
you know, you might be someone hopping on a plane
and you might be very, um, very weirded out on
a primal level. Right, some party or reptilian brain is saying,
I'm not supposed to be this high up unless I've
got a mountain under my feet. Uh, And I don't
care what the statistics say, even though you know multiple
(10:05):
studies have proven that flying is in fact way safer
than driving or riding in a car. Well, I love
you mentioned that reptile brain thing because Matt and I
think experienced that in person, or at least Matt tried
to get me to do one of these VR headset
things where like you walk out on a plank. When
(10:25):
he first got his oculus or whatever, a couple of
years ago, and I in my living room. I couldn't
do it, Like, I was so arrested by the you know,
the whole three dimensional kind of immersiveness of it that
I couldn't bring myself to it. I eventually, you know,
got up the courage and did it once I got
one of my own, but that very not I like
refused to do it despite knowing that I was standing
(10:45):
on my carpet and the graphics aren't even that good,
like kind of like SIMS level graphics, you know. But
despite the fact that if you are actually in a
plane flying through the air, your feet not strapped down
to anything that's attached to the earth in a very
few unnatural feeling way, it is much safer. As you said, Ben,
because do you want to talk about the odds. Yeah,
(11:07):
let's do the odds. Let's you know, let's roll the dice.
Let's see. Okay, So we have a quote here from
Harvard study that found the odds of being in an
accident during a flight is one in one point two million,
one in one point two million, and the chances of
that accident being fatal are one in eleven million. That's
(11:29):
pretty good. Those are good chances. So what about if
you're driving a car one in five thousand in the
European Union, Australia, and the United States. Also there's there's
a weird thing. Planes seem to be getting safer over time.
You know, think about it. If you're one of the
big car manufacturers of the world, you can work around
(11:52):
the clock to improve the safety of vehicles. You can
try your best to build a viet Gold that will
keep the passengers alive if something goes sideways, But you
can't really do anything when that vehicle gets on the
road right and people are driving around ad plus miles
(12:13):
an hour with the weird system of painted lines that
we have pointed out our cartoon UH in previous episodes.
With planes, because there are far fewer planes than there
are cars, flying is statistically safer. Your road trip is
(12:36):
more dangerous than your flight. That's just the truth. Yeah,
Your your safety isn't just dependent on the choices of
that person next to you or those you know, five
hundred three thousand other people on that same highway you're on. UH,
it's based on the pilots and as you said, Ben,
(12:57):
the control system, the the seriously accurate, intense control system
that is used to know where flights are at all
at any given time, right even though sometimes it does
fail for just a couple of hours, so a big,
massive chain reaction when that thing happened, and it was
just you know, a lot of these systems are kind
(13:19):
of antiquated, you know, in terms of the the front
end systems, the actual computer software and the hardware that
frankly is a little bit out of date along with
the planes themselves. I mean we've seen, you know, planes
that still have cigarette ashtrays, you know, in the seat
arms and you know things like that that just why
are these still here? It makes you kind of scratch
your head a little bit because of all these fleets
(13:40):
are are serious need of update, agreed, and you can
see this in flight safety standards across the planet, which
are not uniform. We would be remiss if we did
not mention very recent plane crash in the poll. And
this is a fatal crash. It has currently resulted in
(14:03):
the deaths of at least sixty eight people. It was
the most deadly plane crash in thirty years for Nepal. Additionally,
a lot of people are avoiding flights or thinking twice
about it. Because they've heard the news about things like
(14:23):
the Boeing seven thirty seven max. Uh. This this resulted
in some heavy financial consequences for Boeing. Of course, it's
hundreds of lives lost. Yeah, yes, and hundreds of people died.
And also none of the people of Bowing are going
(14:45):
to jail. Well. And there was a recent story I
think from January maybe of this year about the the
flight to Hawaii that experienced intense turbulence. Do you remember
hearing about that? Guys? There was a recent story out
of NBC News. It was talking about this very strange
(15:05):
plume of turbulent essentially cloud of cloud that was extremely
turbulent and caused a bunch of injuries on the flight,
which is has nothing to do with the plane and
how it's built and its safety features. It was more
like just an atmospheric phenomena that occurred that caused a
problem horrific bottom. You're you're sitting in your seat, right
(15:30):
and maybe you ignored the little light that comes on
that tells you to wear your seatbelt, and all of
a sudden you are in some non consensual chiropractic appointments
with a roof. Yeah. Well, in that situation. It was
between one and three seconds between visually seeing the plume
that shot up like in front of the plane and
(15:52):
being able to alert everybody on board. It was it's
just nuts. That's that scares me, guys. Yeah, it should
also the cruise of commercial airlines as well as military
airlines are or aircraft, I should say, are holding safety
as the number one priority in the cases. You know,
(16:16):
those flight attendants who have to put up was so
much trash from so many people. Their number one function
is safety. It's not to give you peanuts or even
cracker jacks. But but then there there are other things
that scare you if you don't love airplanes. The idea
that planes famously go missing. The world is big, the
(16:41):
ocean is most of it. Sometimes stuff just disappears. We
talked about this previously. Malaysia Airlines flight MH three seventy
is probably one of the most famous recent examples. Uh
The cause of the crap or disappearance is still not
(17:04):
officially confirmed. There are various theories regarding it. But that
was just in not too long ago, and uh I
found a found a a piece from a British tabloid
called The Mirror about how people were still finding debriefe
from that craft as recently as ten piece of it
(17:28):
was being used as an ironing board. Well, that's the
kind of thing. I mean. Ships, planes, even some vehicles
have been have gone missing. There are at least legends
of those kinds of disappearances that persist often, and that
is certainly the one that I think about the most,
ben But we're gonna talk about at least one other
(17:50):
one in this episode that just kind of baffles you
for a little while at least. Right, Uh, it's spooky,
you know what I mean. If you are hopping onto
a plane and you have no control over the craft,
you are a lot like people hopping onto a boat,
(18:11):
right and going off towards some blue horizon. You might
feel a little better if you have some superstitions, you know,
you might like, have you ever been on a plane
and someone collaps when the plane lands? Yeah, that's a
little unnerving, isn't it. It's I mean, it's yeah, at
that point, it's like, obviously all good, but it's sort
(18:32):
of like, was this a surprise? Are we surprised about this? Yeah,
it's true. There are all sorts of superstitions in the world.
Of aviation, just like there are in maritime exploration. You know, like,
of course, some of it's very basic. You're a pilot
in a cockpit. Hey, don't make jokes about plane scrashing.
(18:55):
That's just bad taste. But it gets really specific, and
if you look at the folklore of it, a lot
of those aviation superstitions tend to date back to World
War Two. Planes were making the scene in a big way,
and they were also way less reliable. And you know, fine,
(19:17):
everybody listening to this is statistically speaking, alive. So there's
nothing wrong with a little superstition if it makes you
feel better, right. It reminds me a lot of professional
athletes who have some small thing they do before every
game or the day before a game, or you know,
when they go like a a basketball player that does
(19:39):
a specific dribble, you know, before they shoot a free throw,
and it reminds me of that kind of ritualization. Um,
but man, Ben, you found a list that has some
stuff in there. What do we gott? Did you? Did
you like any Oh? I like a lot of them.
There's there's one quote, it's number seven on the list
that you sent, and it's an air force fight four
(20:02):
pilot who would always duck under the intake and exhaust,
so like the engines when he's going around doing his
pre flight check in. His quote was that if you
let the engines see you, it will kill you. You
don't like but making the plane a thing like a creature,
right that you she? I mean, you know, it is
(20:26):
kind of a respect thing. I think with any large
vessel there's a certain amount of deference that's paid and
superstition that goes into those kinds of things. You know,
It's like the moment you take it for granted, it
will chew you up and spit you out. And that's
an article from Carly Courtney over Disciples of Flight dot com.
This yeah, this is this is a real thing. And again,
(20:48):
if you are not hurting anyone, then you're just you're
doing your thing that makes you comfortable, just like an athlete. Right,
That's what a pilot is in many ways. And the
question is how far does this belief in the paranormal
or this practice of superstition go When you're up there
(21:11):
in the clouds and any one thing going wrong can
reaquate you with the ground in a way that might
not be advantageous to you, are any planes carrying more
than mortal passengers? Are any airplanes actually haunted? We're gonna
(21:32):
pause for a word from our sponsors. Just your safety belts,
and please remember to put the oxygen mask on yourself
before you put it on your neighbor. Uh. In the meantime,
will be right back. Here's where it gets crazy. All right,
(21:57):
anybody been on a haunted airplane? I think so? Yeah? Yeah, no, yeah,
I love the optivism. Well, it turns out that there
are there are haunted airplanes, depending on the people that
you ask. There's like you teased earlier, Matt, there's one
(22:18):
plane in particular that's very popular for being haunted, or
not quite haunted. It's it's treated as sentient. It reminded
me of the objects in that video game Control. Uh, Matt,
you're the one who hit me to the game control NOL.
Have you played that game? No? I think it's one
(22:39):
that you guys have talked about and sounded incredibly appealing. Um.
Isn't it sort of like a timey wymy weird like
parallel universe thing involving some psychic powers. It's been talking
about objects of power. Man corrupted his corrupted objects of
power p s. Yeah, I'm I'm gonna check into that
(23:03):
right after we finished. But no, this, yeah, this is
right up my wheelhouse, up my wheelhouse, in my wheelhouse,
up my alley, whatever you wanna call it, in your
flight deck tender what you know? We are not ourselves aviators.
None of us have a pilot license, although I think
at one point Matt had a pretty slick pair of
(23:25):
aviator sunglasses. I can't remember. Uh, I have friends that
have pilot's licenses. Oh wow, okay, nice, I don't need one.
I don't need making the aviator to look cool. Yeah yeah, yeah,
those are just for me. I don't know. No, Matt,
Matt looks like, not not to profile you here, but
(23:46):
it looks like you're the type of dude with the
right sunglasses that if you strolled into a regional airport
with a confident air, I think could get getting a cockpit.
I think, yeah, I think you could just suit like
a lapel or whatever they put on there. Yeah, but
(24:08):
we can make it work, right. We're always planning subsort
of heist. Uh the the We'll get to this weird
object of power or this weird purportedly sentient plane. But First,
we've got to look at the non supernatural, real instances
of what are called ghost flights or ghost planes, because
(24:30):
they are two very real street games for some very
strange things. So there are a couple of technical terms.
I guess you could call them for these things. We've
got ghost plane or ghost flight, which is a term
that's used in commercial aviation circles to describe a formerly
(24:51):
pretty rare practice in which an airline conducts a regularly
scheduled flight with a plane containing less than ten percent
of the flight's total capacity. What what what a what
a treat that would be? I imagine ben these are
just tests or or like, uh, what's the point of these?
It seems like that, you know, fuel being so expensive.
(25:11):
I understand why these would be rare, but what is
the what is the purpose? Doesn't seem like there's anything
fishy or supernatural going on here. They got to keep
their spots at airports. Commercial airliners have to, like they
have to still land a plane to stay in the
whatever in the kiddie, I guess, yeah, that's interesting. And
(25:32):
I guess during COVID, when nobody was flying this maybe
had a little bit of an uptick just so Yeah,
and you may think, why would you still send a
plane all the way across the ocean or something that
if it's only got ten percent capacity. The company isn't
making money, right, You're still paying everybody, You're still paying
for all the fuel. That doesn't make sense, as you
(25:54):
guys said, it makes sense to you know, for the
company for other reasons. The other problem is that plane
is spewing all that exhaust up into the atmosphere and
people don't like that. Yeah, ghost flights accelerated during a
well increased maybe it would be the best word. Uh,
during the pandemic and these airlines who were you know,
(26:20):
they were hemorrhaging money they needed to maintain they're regularly
scheduled flights. That's why outfits like Delta in the United
States started carrying freight, right because they needed to hold
that spot. Just as you said, Noel, there's another very
(26:42):
real and very uncool thing that the phrase ghost plane
or flight describes. It's a specific type of crash and
it is thankfully not a crash that happens often, but
has occurred more couple times. Yeah, it's because these planes
have very sophisticated autopilot systems and This term describes what
(27:09):
happens if an entire flight crew, as well as maybe
even passengers on board a plane, all are incapacitated in
one way or another, often by hypoxia, where the cabin
of the plane is um depressurized in a way that
there's not enough oxygen for everybody to breathe. And when
(27:31):
that happens, it's not good. So if you imagine a
ghost flight or a ghost plane that's still full of
passengers and a flight crew, but everybody in there is
a sleep or you know, dying essentially, but the plane
is still aloft, flying around, maybe doing a circle over
a city, waiting to land. Uh, yeah, that's that's really
(27:51):
that's really disturbing and creepy. Did y'all watch that show
Station eleven thought it was called? Uh it was about
kind of a post apocalyptic kind of thing about like
a virus. Uh. That dude, Hero Marai directed a bunch
of it and not just thought it was really fabulous.
But there's a situation where there's a ghost plane kind
of it's a plane full of people infected with this
(28:14):
plague and they essentially are not allowed to leave the plane. Um,
so it's a different kind of ghost plane. Yeah. Yeah,
and and and it's not too far away from a
possible future, um Matt. One thing that I really appreciate
that you point out was the Helios flight five h
(28:37):
That again, this is the ghost flight hypoxias stuff has
occurred in multiple instances and continues to occur in the
recent day. Could you tell us a little bit about Helios, Yes, Ben,
this is a flight. It was Helios Airways flight five
two two two. It occurred on August four, two thousand five,
(29:02):
and it was a situation where the plane went up,
cabin was depressurized, not enough oxygen inside. The crew was
unable to stop it from happening. And it goes back
to that situation put your mask on, like you said, Ben,
on yourself before your you know, your loved ones or
anybody else. Um. They were just unable to do anything,
(29:23):
and the flight ended up circling over a city until
the fuel ran out. Basically, so the whole thing is
on autopilot and nobody could do anything about it. The
military even scrambled jets to check on the thing, and
they could see that there was nobody in the pilot seat,
or at least they couldn't see anyone in the pilot seat.
But they could see the co pilots slumped over the controls,
(29:45):
and a couple of windows were open, and there were
people with the masks down that see. They looked like
they were incapacitated. And that's all they could see in
the flights, just going around and around and around. Shout
out to everybody listening to this episode on a plane. Uh,
I hope you're having a great time. Also, also we'll
(30:09):
get to we'll get to some of the uh, paranormal
stuff as well. We needed to establish that there are
real things, real events that you will here described as
ghost planes or ghost flights. If you go to the
idea of haunted planes, you'll see tons of apocryphal stories,
you know, the perfect kind of like unsolved mystery time
(30:32):
life presents, legends told tales about ghosts. You know, there
are stories of kids, like ghostly ghostly children voices talking
out for the radio to wear traffic control. Uh. And
then there their stories of passengers who are not on
a manifest just appearing and then saying something cryptic or
(30:57):
heartwarming to someone on the crew or someone alive from
the restroom, and then they're like, hey, go tell the
passenger in seven A that you know, she was right,
I'm sorry, I love her, and then they vanish or there.
This is one of the most interesting ones in decades
past stories of planes that disappear only to return decades later,
(31:24):
hundreds of miles away from their destination. And these are
some of the legends that I think, uh, I think
we're treated as fact by a lot of people when
they first read about this. Some of them sound like bunk.
I mean, straight out of the Weekly World News, which
spoiler they were, yeah, or the National Enquirer. This one,
(31:47):
as you said, been actually the Weekly World News and
actual tabloid. Was there a picture associated with this story,
because those are always the best when they have a
like poorly photoshopped image, you know, massive le printed and
clearly forged. And Elvis Presley is pregnant. Bat Boy refuses
to pay alimony. Yeah, oh Jesus, mat boy caught in
(32:11):
night out horror show. All right, well, let's tell the
tale of PanAm flight. That's right. PanAm Flight nine fourteen
was a Douglas DC four with fifty seven passengers and
six crew members bound for Miami, Florida on July two.
Nine takes off from New York City. The flight was
(32:33):
scheduled last just a couple of hours, that's a short flight.
But it never arrived in Miami. Instead, the story goes,
it showed up unannounced and invisible to radar on March nine,
nineteen eighty five, thirty years later in Caracas. You know,
(32:54):
like air traffic controllers are are going wait what what? Uh?
So for a few years after this story hits the news,
uthologists and various fringe researchers love to go back and
forth with this what happened? You know, why won't Uncle
(33:15):
Sam or Venezuela really talk about pan AM flight nine
one four? Uh? Because it never happened. It's a story.
It's completely fictional. I know. It was published in Weekly
World News in ve the same year that that paper
claimed this flight had mysteriously reappeared. And then further as
(33:41):
as we can see, Weekly World News published basically the
same story two times in the nineteen nineties, and they
switched it up a little bit and they said, Okay,
this flight did disappear in nineteen fifty five, just like
you said, NOL, but this time it landed in complication. Yeah, dang,
(34:08):
that may be so excited because it would be a
real wormhole situation, guys, And I've been longing for a
real wormhole situation every time, every time I'm on a
flight edit lands. If I ever fall asleep on a plane,
then you guys know how rarely sleep. If I ever
fall asleep on a plane, I'm just hoping that when
it lands, I'll be in a totally different you know,
(34:30):
like timeline. Right. If you guys ever read Yes by
Stephen King, Yeah, there's that's a cool plane time traveling
timey whinmy kind of story. I've been listening to a
podcast quick Shadows called Just King Things, and it's these
two really smart fellows that are going through every single
(34:50):
one of Stephen King's book books in publication order. And
I'm listening to something even if I haven't read the books,
but many of them I have. And they point out
that King often men Shin's the Bermuda triangle and then
the idea of like weird stuff happening over that part
of the ocean. Not to mention Ben, I think of
a favorite trope of yours with King. Um is haunted
(35:12):
or sentient or haunted inanimate objects, uh, specifically vehicles. You know,
whether it be you know, Christine with a with a
Car or the Mangler, which was about a haunted laundry machine. Um.
I don't know. I just think it's an interesting trope
in in sci fi. The King kind of spearheaded and
sort of made it a thing. I don't know. I
(35:32):
think it's neat makes me wonder if he, you know,
took any inspiration for many of these stories that we're
talking about today. I'm sure he read the weekly World News.
Come on, you know, Stephen King had that You imagine
all the cool stories that you could find and glean
from that stuff. And another example would be Santiago flight
five thirteen. What happens with his Santiago flight? Well, it's
(35:57):
nineteen fifty four and according to the story you guys,
this Santiago Airlines flight number five thirteen. It took off
from Germany on its way to Brazil and it disappeared
while flying over the Atlantic. Okay, I mean that's horrifying
and terrible, that would make the news. But what happened
(36:18):
next is truly supernatural. Yes, it did eventually land in
Brazil in nineteen eighty nine, and when the ground crew
at the Brazilian airport approached this flight. They found the
plane intact, but it looked weathered, and every seat inside
(36:42):
had a skeleton in there, dried and desiccated, as though
eons had passed. Spoiler, they did not use the word
aions because that's two out of balance for the vocabulary
of the Weekly World News, which also made up this story.
So it was like, you know, a lot of the
(37:06):
protections that the Weekly World News and Joy that allows
them to just print whatever. Both, you know, they like, yeah,
but I mean, like, you know, there's also laws against
screaming fire, you know, in a in a crowded space.
I mean, not that that's the journalist equivalent what they're
doing exactly, but I guess it must be just it's
(37:27):
so beyond the bounds of credibility that you know, who
who would believe it? And also another reputation of the publication.
But I don't know, it's suppost to be the same
thing that allows the onion to operate. You know what.
It reminds me of Ben, the first episode of Fringe
that you made me watch and then I ended up
watching the whole dang thing. People don't make people do things.
People should. You have choices? Are your own but the
(37:52):
h Yeah, you know, I was thinking of fringe as well.
I mean, humanity has always been captivated the idea of transit, right,
and so a new form of transit must seem somehow magical,
especially if it's something you cannot do on your own. Sorry,
(38:13):
human beings. Currently none of you can fly unaided. Uh.
There are some people who are good at gliding, and
they also inevitably end up on the grounds of them. Uh.
There's another story, though, that is not from the Weekly
World News. It's a story that is illustrative of the folklore, right,
(38:38):
the modern folklore surrounding the concept of haunted airplanes and aircraft.
It's the story of Eastern Airlines Flight four zero one.
I don't know about you all, but I had not
heard of this one at all until we started digging
into this episode. And to keep it a hun percent here,
(39:01):
I'm surprised I didn't hear about it because it was
quite a big deal in pop culture, which becomes part
of the problem. But it was a real flight, and
it was a genuine tragedy, and Miami comes up again
in this story. We're talking specifically about Eastern Airlines Flight
four oh one, which departed from New York for Miami
(39:22):
on December between ninth, nineteen seventy two. This was a
Lockheed L ten eleven UM which crashed in I R
L into the Florida Everglades, which, as we know, is
full of creepy Crawley's they can eat human remains UM.
Both pilots and the flight engineer died, along with two
(39:42):
out of the ten flight attendants and ninety six out
of the dred three passengers aboard, with seventy five survivors UM.
A researcher by the name of John Fuller actually wrote
a book about this came out in nineteen seventy six
called The Ghost of Flight four oh one, and he
said that the crash was only the beginning of of
this tragedy. Yeah, because the tragedy it was, But some
(40:05):
of the parts from that crash we're still functioning and
able to be taken you away from where from the
crash site and placed into another vehicle that needed servicing,
needed a spare part or something. Um. It's it's a
strange thing, guys. I didn't know that was even a
practice like once a flight had crashed. I don't know
(40:29):
if it is. It feels ghoulish, doesn't it, especially you're
a commercial airliner. Military different calculation. But but yeah, the
idea that you would find this crash and the plane
was found and there were survivors. Uh, the idea that
you would say, Okay, now that the news has died down,
(40:52):
let's you know, let's look around, let's see is this
seat still good? Can we put this seat on another
semi identical plane? Uh? That's still goes through such a
large forensics uh time period right where they're recreating the
crash site and all of that stuff within a hangar somewhere,
(41:13):
and they just spend years with it, analyzing it, and
just to then take it afterwards and repurpose. Yeah, you're
it's weird. Yeah, coolish Again, if you guys ever heard
the delightfully idiotic question, or maybe it's just a meme
of why don't they make the whole plane out of
the stuff they make the black box out of? Well,
then it wouldn't fly. Oh yeah, Yeah, it's a good question,
(41:38):
and it's it's it is. It's funny, but it's also
silly because I mean, obviously to make an impervious, you know,
lock box of of information that would survive being in
a crash and hit by you know, heavy arms probably
have to be made, some pretty serious stuff that would
probably sink a plane. The whole thing was made of it.
In the end, we're very squishy, and if we're inside
(42:01):
something as impenetrable as we want it to be, we
are pretty squishy. No, we're squished. Yeah, you always when
they're like, it's that moment when you realize, oh, I'm
supposed to wear a seatbelt on a plane in case
it takes a serious dive, and then my meat body
just flies up against the ceiling and all my bones
get crushed. Like why are they harping on the seatbelt
(42:24):
so much? Or like how or like how Tony Stark
in the Iron Man suit never seems to bump against
the interior of the suit the whole time. It's a
it's a huge plot hole and magical technology they haven't
exactly know. It's beautiful. It's beautiful to have heroes. That's cool.
So over the over the following years, the story goes
(42:48):
there were rumors this aircraft three eighteen technically in three
one a e A that had some of these salvaged
parts from this horrific crash. It became home to ghost
and passengers and crew alike on these Eastern Airline flights
would see folks like the flight engineer or the captain
(43:13):
or dead passenger sitting on the plane, moving around and again.
According to legend, Eastern Airlines eventually said, you know what,
We're going to remove these salvaged parts from three eighteen
and when they did, the hauntings stopped. The souls had
(43:38):
been put to rest. This became a part of popular culture.
I'm so surprised that none of us heard about this.
I certainly didn't before we went on air today we
played a brief trailer of a made for TV film
by NBC starting Ernest boor nine, called the Ghosts of
(44:00):
Flight four oh one, based off that author's book, And
then I didn't even know about this. There was a
guy named Bob Welch who was a member of Fleetwood
Mac for a time, but not not like a long
term member, and he recorded a song about Flight four
oh one on his solo album three Hearts from nineteen
(44:25):
seventy nine. I'm being too radio DJ about it. We're
not going to play the song. We can't afford it.
We can't afford it. But you know, even today, despite
the story of the spare parts being replaced, you know,
ceasing the haunting, there are still reports from like about
this thing happening and people seeing ghosts on planes flying
(44:49):
over the Everglades, specifically ghosts from flight four oh one.
And this was mentioned in UH non fringe research circles.
Flight Safety Foundation, a trade newsletter mentions the crash in
UH an issue they put out in nine four. This
(45:10):
is a publicity nightmare for this airline. UH. We found
a we found a book called From the Captain to
the Colonel, An Informal History of Eastern Airlines, written by
a guy named Robert J. Sterling. And in this book,
the the CEO of Eastern Airlines at the time, a
(45:33):
former astronaut by the way named Frank Borman, says these
ghost stories are garbage. And you can also find a
little bit of back and forth about people deciding whether
or not to sue each other. Side note that Robert
Sterling guy older brother of Rod Sterling who went on
to the Twilight Zone. Yeah so I think I think
(45:57):
when we see aviation episodes of Twilight Zone, maybe checked
with Rod about Robert. Also, people are out here still
naming their kids with the same first letter. It just
I guess it's convenient, you know what I mean, Bob
and Rod. Actually that sounds really cool. No, I retract
(46:18):
my earlier comment. That is a good plan. So in
this book, Robert Sterling, not Twilight Zone Rod Sterling, Old
Robbie says no wreckage from flight four o one ever
made it onto another plane, and no one at Eastern
(46:41):
Airlines could find anyone crew or passenger who genuinely claimed
to see a ghost firsthand. It's always a story I
heard from someone who met someone who saw something, you
know what I mean. And this is where we have
to give a shout out to Brian Dunning over at
(47:02):
the Skeptoid podcast, who who believes that he's traced the
the pop culture growth of this to a very bad,
off color joke about aircraft three a team making an
emergency landing in Mexico City. It's still like you mentioned earlier,
(47:26):
NOL is still an L to an eleven. It's just
a different iteration. And this pilot joked about this emergency
landing and said it was scary. For a minute, I
thought Don Repo's ghost was on the plane. Don Repo
was the flight engineer for the ill fated four oh one.
He perished in the crash. So maybe that's how this
(47:50):
folklore starts, right, someone makes a joke, That joke gets
taken seriously and accelerates people and bellish it, maybe to
make a buck, maybe because they don't have all the facts.
And now you get into these increasingly surreal situations. Speaking
of surreal, we did promise you that we would introduce
(48:13):
you to one crazy, crazy guy. So we're gonna take
a pause for a word from our sponsors and will return.
What better way to land the episode than to talk
about Deli Mike and we're back. So then Deli Mike.
(48:37):
Is this a guy that makes sandwiches? What are we
talking about? Deli Mike. We're talking about Deli Mike or
Deli Mayek. It's like a Jersey Mike kind of situation.
It would be so cool, right we we probably one
of our fellow listeners might have the street named Deli Mike.
And Mike, if you're hearing this, we want to we
want to figure out what your sandwich situation is. We're
(48:59):
gonna be on the road or to stop at your
deli uh in in Turkish uh Delhi met means crazy Mike.
This is the street name of an infamous airbus, A
three forty Uh probably the most famous quote unquote haunted
playing in the world today. Yeah, um, Deli Mike or
(49:25):
Delhi Mike, m a y k or Mike, you know,
like we would spell shorthand for Michael or crazy Mike
in Turkish what that translates to. Became a part of
the Turkish Airlines fleet in nineteen um It was designed
and intended to operate long haul flights out of Turkey
from nineteen to twenty nineteen. Deli Mike was kind of
(49:48):
This had his reputation almost Ben you described it, uh
beautifully as sort of being like a bit of a
bad boy of the skies with a little bit of
an edge, right, Yeah, prank love eccentric. This is an
object of power for anybody familiar with Control the video
game or familiar with SCP lore on the internet. Mike
(50:13):
seemed to have random technical issues. Sometimes cabin lights would
turn on seemingly of their own volition, and then the
crew would come to investigate and they turn off, like, Uh,
you didn't give me yet, all right, you know, tech
not it or whatever? Uh. The crew. Also, apparently there's
(50:34):
a bunch of lore around this, and a lot of
it's mainly in Turkish media. The crew would get tendant calls,
you know, you hit the little cole uh flight attendant
button and they would be sent to the wrong seat
ha ha classic mike uh. Or a passenger would try
(50:55):
to turn on their reading light and they would see
another light turn on for a different seat. Now, for
a lot of us familiar with electrical wiring, this sounds
like maybe somebody just got their wires crossed, right. It
sounds an awful lot like that, almost exactly like that.
(51:17):
In fact, well there's but there's weirder stuff too. There's
one situation where the emergency lights you know that are
on the floor, uh, those had a tendency to begin
like they're off. Imagine they would begin to turn on
in a wave, so from the back of the plane
sweeping football the way to the front and in almost
(51:41):
playful manner or like a staged manner. We're athropomorphizing a
little bit, but you kind of have to to really
enjoy it, right. It's like, you know, if you've ever
been at a stadium during a game and people do
the wave on mass in a crowd. You know, you
want to be part of it. You want to be cool.
So uh, apparently flight attendants took this to mean crazy
(52:07):
Mike Deli. Mike was in a good mood. Uh. The
most famous stories about this plane hinge on flight instruments.
Apparently there was an emergency signal emitted in the cockpit
a edit me here, Paul, A kind of signal that
would indicate an ocean moment. And this terrified some of
(52:29):
the newer crew members. But the old hands that people
who have been with this plane for a while said,
you know, it's just class. You know, it's Mike. Just
give him a second, let him take a breather, give
him ten, give him ten, we'll get off this runway.
Don't worry. Don't you worry about it. Uh. And then
we've got my I think, at least for me. You guys,
(52:51):
this is my favorite story about crazy Mike. It's a
story of an old engineer who apparently knew Mike quite well.
So one day there was an instrument malfunction UM and
the crew could not get the plane back online UM
or couldn't get it back to its you know specs.
It's it's baseline kind of standards legend has it, They
(53:15):
called in an old technician familiar with Mike, was very
intimately familiar. The old fellow knocked on the cockpit door,
walked in and said, what happened to you, big man?
Then the old tech hung out with the pilots for
a bit before strolling away into the sunset, never physically
(53:35):
working on the plane, never actually touching the component. And
good question the malfunctioning component. And apparently the conversation was
plenty pleasant because right after that everything went right back
to normal. All of the haywire kind of readouts started
to level out, didn't They Almost as though this man
(53:56):
was calming to the plane. He coaxed it into behaving
correctly again. And crazy Mike's back in the sky. You know,
I love I love this idea. This is again apocryphal,
but there are people in Turkish airlines who will swear
by it. I love this idea that you could. You
can walk in and kind of have this moment off air, Matt,
(54:19):
you brought up something that I had forgotten about our
one time fearless leader and a mentor to us. Uh
regularly spoke with finicky machines. Yes, much in the same
way as this story. If there was a problem that
(54:40):
let's say, just for instance, I assumed it was a
software issue, maybe even a hardware issue, when something was
malfunctioning with my Mac and I just couldn't get things
to work right, I'd get frustrated and try and figure
out and solve the problem, like again via software hardware,
and Roxanne would stroll in just be like just gently
put her hand on the machine, be like, oh, it's okay,
(55:01):
it's okay, buddy, be all right, it's all right. Let's
just take a minute, just relax a little bit and
talking to my computer, not to to me. Right, Yes, yeah,
I remember that I've seen similar moments. What I what
I also recall is that the temperature would drop down
a few degrees fahrenheit during those conversations, which that well,
(55:28):
that was my that was my perception. But uh, but
perhaps my perception is incorrect. Yeah, people, a lot of
our fellow listeners right now, if you work around machinery,
especially complex machinery, then you you may also find yourself,
you know, maybe muttering under your breath, like come on,
(55:51):
just not today, don't do this to me today, tyson
or whatever. You call whatever your name for your sheen
is UH. And again, if it's a superstition, it's not
hurting anyone, you're fine, You're good to go. But is
it possible that talking to Uh an inanimate object, right
(56:15):
or a nonsentient thing, may have some sort of result.
A lot of people believe something like that. Low key,
A lot of people believe that. And Mike here, our
pal Mike, is treated less like a quote unquote haunted
plane and more like a friendly, quirky sentient object. You know.
(56:39):
It's like if it's a ghost, it's like Slimmer and Ghostbusters,
and it is a mischievous, little little pinch of the cheeks,
but not out to actually harm anyone. I don't know, man,
he was a little chaotic in the movie. He was
a little more of a familiar in the real Ghostbusters cartoon.
But I always found him horrifying in the In the
first Ghostbusters movie, he's kind of comes at you, drooling
(57:01):
all the while. Yeah, and he does slime people, hence
the name. You know. I always wondered about his background too,
like is he was he ever a human being? That guy,
Oh my gosh, there's this guy. Landis Max Landez, who
I think got kind of canceled um for some bad
male behavior. But he he did do an interesting YouTube
(57:23):
video I think before this happened, where he talked about
his Ghostbusters sequel where it explains Slimmer's backstory. So if
you're interested, just look up Max Lande's Ghostbuster sequel. He
does have a pretty clever pitch for what what Slimmer's
backstory was nice, but but Mike in this case was
not like Slimmer in that way. He was very it
didn't harm anybody. I just want to bring this up
(57:45):
right before we end here, guys. I was reading about
a an accident that Deli Mike got into at some
point in twos. They called it a what do they
call They call it an excursion. I believe it's where
on the plane lands, it goes off the runway just
a bit. But nobody was harmed in that, I guess incident.
(58:10):
But it did, you know, cause some pretty significant damage
to the landing gear when it occurred, and then you
know that landing gear, that piece of Deli Mike had
to get replaced. And there's a story I can't remember
which link it was in. Ben was one of the
links you shared. There's a story that all of the
component parts of Delhi Mike's electronics over the years had
(58:34):
been replaced completely because because the ship of thesis. Yes,
because the engineers were like, well, clearly there's something wrong
with the wiring that we're just not able to see,
so let's replace this entire thing, every component, and it
still did. It's weird stuff. Yeah, I get him, Mike.
(58:54):
This uh that that is I read about the landing
gear as well, and this idea of slowly replacing every
component of a thing, and if that idea of the
thing is still the same, it's it's fascinating. It's fascinating.
And also we have to ask about the nature of
(59:15):
perception and observation. To what degree does the human mind
interfere with something when it observes that thing right, that action,
that activity, that relationship. Folks, you can see all sorts
of again, quirky fun reports about our guy crazy Mike
(59:36):
are playing. I should say, uh, and the hijinks that
my that is attributed to this air bus. But a
lot of those have what I would call big slow
news day vibes. You know, they're they're there, Hey, look
at that kind of things they're not what does this mean? Reports?
(59:57):
We want to end on a good note, so ultimately
our pal and hopefully yours, Crazy Mike Delhi. Mike was
retired and stored in Johanna, Johannesburg, South Africa. And just
last month, as we record this, in December of twenty two,
(01:00:19):
Crazy Mike and a couple other air buses, all from
Turkish Airlines retired. We're flown out to Uzbekistan on December
Christmas Eve for the Christians and they got trailed. They
made an emergency landing in Tehran, and Dutch media speculates
(01:00:41):
that Iran may have done this on purpose to get
around the Western sanctions for buying new aircraft. So right
now our pal Crazy Mike is uh living it up
in Tehran. He's on another adventure bro crazy stuff you know. Uh,
(01:01:08):
well that's our that's our episode on haunted airplanes. And
I think none of us have encountered ghostly stuff on airplanes,
but we've all been in surreal situations on airplanes. You
meet people in a weird liminal space. I'm curious, Matt Noel,
do you do you think we might have anybody listening
(01:01:29):
to the show today or tonight who has a paranormal
experience on aircraft. There's also a really good um heavy
Metal segment and the heavy Metal animated film, not the
more recent one, the Heavy Metal two thousands something, but
the one from like the eighties where there's like a
warship piloted by the zombie skeletons, which is just a
(01:01:53):
really cool, you know, a little horror horror story. UM.
I don't know, it's interesting because we we do. I
think typically think more of ghost chips, you know, and
like either ships found a drift or ships where everyone
has died because they were marooned or something like that. Um,
So I do think it's interesting to kind of take
that concept to the sky. I mean, it takes all kinds.
(01:02:13):
I imagine there's somebody that's seen something. I think the
creepiest thing I've seen on airplane is like, um, I
guess when the temperature differential is just right, sometimes when
the air gets pumped through, it kind of looks like
a gas where it's like you can see it like
you know, vapor and almost looks like the way it
looks in movies when like they pump poisonous gas through
the ventilation systems. So I definitely got freak testing that
(01:02:36):
one time. But that's about it for me. I don't
know about you all, but I'm tired of these mother
flipping spirits on this mother flipping yeah, and all this
mother flipping cocaine and these mother flipping bears. You know
what's up with that? It's just, you know, I remember
when tornadoes were just wind and debris and houses an
(01:02:59):
unfortunate children in Kansas and Nebraska. It was way be
carried the magical way before they started putting sharks and
all that stuff. You know, there's a there's a tornado
culture war. Uh don't believe big shark. Uh also snakes
on a plane. That's how. That's how you know you
(01:03:19):
got a good title for something. We want to hear
your stories. We have a lot of people who are
listening now, fellow conspiracy realist who work in the aviation industry,
have a pilot's license or have or have been on
a plane and encountered something that is inexplicable. We would
(01:03:41):
love to hear your thoughts. If you are listening to
this and you happen to have a connect with our
pal Crazy Mike, we'd love to We'd love to do
a podcast hanging out with Crazy Mike. Let us know
we try to be easy to find online. Oh, indeed,
check us out on the internet where we are conspiracy
(01:04:03):
stuff on YouTube, um on Facebook, or we have a
group called Here's where it Gets Crazy and on Twitter,
on Instagram or conspiracy stuff show also on TikTok were
conspiracy stuff right show show boom TikTok as well. Lots
of fun stuff popping off on Instagram and TikTok these days. Uh,
(01:04:24):
catch us on TikTok before it gets out laud right then?
Oh yes, yes, car pai deum Uh. And if you
also like to live in the now, but you don't
care for sipping the social meads, perhaps you're taking a
dry january from the various online forms of communication and
(01:04:45):
you want to go old school. You have a story
to tell, Well, we want to hear it, and we
don't want social media to get in the way. Please
do give us a phone call. You can use your
telephonic device UH to hit the following numbers one, eight
th three, SD d W y t K. You'll hear
a familiar voice. Hopefully you'll hear a beep like so beep.
(01:05:06):
You have three minutes, go crazy, go nuts with it.
Give yourself a nickname. Tell us what's on your mind.
Tell us if we can share your story with your
fellow conspiracy realists. Most importantly, don't edit yourself. If you
have other stuff to say, if you have some links
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(01:05:27):
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(01:05:53):
Don't want you to know is a production of I
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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 My Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They call
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul,
Mission Control decond. Most importantly, you are you. You are here,
and that makes this the stuff they don't want you
to know. As we are flying headlong into twenty twenty three,
we looked around at each other and we said, we're
(00:48):
overdue for a solid episode on ghost on the Paranormal
and earlier, if you'll recall, uh, Matt, you had asked
whether we had a ice one and done topic. You know,
we get we get bogged down rightly so in continuing
geo political events. And as soon as you asked this question, Matt,
(01:12):
the answer came back instantly. What was that? What did
we come up with when you asked about a solid
one and done paranormal episode? Yeah, I I asked about
that because you know, sometimes we do two partners, right,
and we want to release the episodes on usually a Wednesday,
and Friday, so you get to hear them in the
same week. But we were doing this one today because
(01:35):
Ben shot back immediately haunted airplanes and yeah, you know,
like the spruce goose or the Spirit of St. Louis. No,
not that, but I've always thought the Spirit of St.
Louis and kinda well, it's a great name, whichever one
we were talking about. Just the phrase alone made us
all go yes, So here we go. Wheels up. Please
(01:57):
make sure your lap belts are are fastened. Trading tables up,
make sure your seat is not reclined. Here are the facts. Okay, look,
airplanes are amazing, all right, take that birds we got
(02:18):
up there too, says humanity. Uh, they're also airplanes are
not quite as new fangled as we might assume. You know,
I think for a lot of people, you may you
have probably seen or driven or rode in a vehicle
(02:40):
on the ground of some sort. Uh, But airplanes still
are a thing that not all eight billion plus people
are going to experience directly. They you might see it
in the sky, right. Uh, it's rarefied air to ride,
and why it's even more rare for someone to pilot one.
(03:04):
But they're not really that new like Carl Binz of
Mercedes Benz fame. UH is often cited as we have
to be careful with inventions. Here often cited as the
first person to get a gas powered automobile to the
(03:25):
commercial market, and that happened in eighteen five, less than
twenty years after that, there were some really focused nerds,
let's be honest, the Right brothers, and they made a
pretty cool proof of concept. They had a powered flight
at a place called Kittie Hawk in the United States
(03:47):
in nineteen o three, and they hit on something right.
They hit on that screw you birds energy, right, Like
for centuries people have dreamed of flying. There's old far
Side cartoon about the caveman seeing a bird fly and
deciding between inventing a flight machine of its own or
(04:10):
inventing a bow and arrow and then just shooting the bird. Well,
you know, anyone that's uh either shooting birds or saying
bird screw you to birds is all right with me.
So I fully support this, you know, because birds are
for the birds. But so we're like airplane prototypes that
don't always get the job done. There there are a
(04:30):
lot of really cool ideas that just didn't work out.
There There are a lot of people who died attempting flight.
A lot of human beings throughout history try to invent
(04:50):
ways to fly and did not meet with the same
success of the Right Brothers. And it's weird because the
human species has thought of fly and mortality often in
the same cognitive breath like death in so many religions
is portrayed as this ascendant experience. Your your body is gone,
(05:13):
your soul rises to the heavens or the sky. And
there's there's something so primal about the idea, right, the
idea that every ground lane will have. Why am I
up here? Why am I in this tube? How fast
is this going? Are we okay? Call me down, Give
(05:33):
me some peanuts or some pretzels, you know what I mean?
Maybe more coffee? Sorry, taking out, taking taking out of
the ball game. This is an America's American as baseball
or or apple pie or dying in a test plate.
Oh boy, that's good. Also, you know some people who
(05:58):
are listening today, some of our fellow listeners love being
on planes. Some people absolutely hate it. Now, Matt and
Nolan and I have been in situations where we get
a call or some sort of communicate that requires us
to be wheels up pretty quickly, and so we are
(06:20):
familiar with planes, perhaps uh more so than the average
person who is not in the aviation industry. But I
keep thinking about this very American fascination with planes in general. Right,
motorized flight invented in the US. Uh. And then also
(06:41):
one of the most iconic Twilight Zone episodes ever. Yeah,
it's William Shatter freaking out at the window seat of
a plane. Well, and like you know, despite how corny
it looked to this day, it's still captures and capitalizes
on I think of fear that a lot of people
still have. I think maybe the three of us take
(07:01):
for granted a little bit that we can fly without
experiencing existential terror. But I think we all have friends
that that that cannot just the act itself of being
in the sky. Matt's raising his hand there, uh and
not a fan. Um. Some people just it's it's it's
nothing to him, and some people you gotta take a
dramamine or you're gonna be clutching the walls like bugs. Bunny.
(07:22):
In that parody of said Twilight Zone episode that Looney
Tunes did where there's a gremlin terrorizing bugs bunny on
a on a fighter plane. Yeah, I think the fear
that a lot of people have is a lack of control.
You you, when you're in a vehicle driving around, if
you're the driver, you at least feel as though you
(07:42):
are in control, even though your control is based on
the actions of all the people around you. But when
you're in a you know, plane, there's two people up there,
literally two people, and they're the ones if anything happens
to them. Sorry, yeah, well three, there's a flight engineer,
(08:03):
you know, there's there's a whole team of there's air
traffic controllers, some of the most stressed out people I
have ever met in over a long period of meeting humans.
But there's two on the plane that know how it
works really really well. Yeah. I mean, you don't want
just one person, right, you want two people. You want
(08:27):
some checks and balances. And for a lot of our
fellow conspiracy realist, this idea of tying religious or spiritual
or paranormal significance to a vehicle. It might sound weird,
but if we pull back and we look at the
larger context, we see that there are many urban legends,
(08:49):
There are many pieces of folklore that take place in transit,
you know, like ghostly hitchhikers before that, ghost riders in
this guy, you know, all that stuff, and then of
course haunted ships, Mary Celeste and so on for a
(09:13):
lot of people. Still, despite all the stuff you here,
you might find plane travel untrustworthy. And it's strange because
we see the discrepancy between intellectually knowing something, being aware
of facts and statistics, versus experientially encountering something. Like you said, Matt,
(09:41):
you know, you might be someone hopping on a plane
and you might be very, um, very weirded out on
a primal level. Right, some party or reptilian brain is saying,
I'm not supposed to be this high up unless I've
got a mountain under my feet. Uh, And I don't
care what the statistics say, even though you know multiple
(10:05):
studies have proven that flying is in fact way safer
than driving or riding in a car. Well, I love
you mentioned that reptile brain thing because Matt and I
think experienced that in person, or at least Matt tried
to get me to do one of these VR headset
things where like you walk out on a plank. When
(10:25):
he first got his oculus or whatever, a couple of
years ago, and I in my living room. I couldn't
do it, Like, I was so arrested by the you know,
the whole three dimensional kind of immersiveness of it that
I couldn't bring myself to it. I eventually, you know,
got up the courage and did it once I got
one of my own, but that very not I like
refused to do it despite knowing that I was standing
(10:45):
on my carpet and the graphics aren't even that good,
like kind of like SIMS level graphics, you know. But
despite the fact that if you are actually in a
plane flying through the air, your feet not strapped down
to anything that's attached to the earth in a very
few unnatural feeling way, it is much safer. As you said, Ben,
because do you want to talk about the odds. Yeah,
(11:07):
let's do the odds. Let's you know, let's roll the dice.
Let's see. Okay, So we have a quote here from
Harvard study that found the odds of being in an
accident during a flight is one in one point two million,
one in one point two million, and the chances of
that accident being fatal are one in eleven million. That's
(11:29):
pretty good. Those are good chances. So what about if
you're driving a car one in five thousand in the
European Union, Australia, and the United States. Also there's there's
a weird thing. Planes seem to be getting safer over time.
You know, think about it. If you're one of the
big car manufacturers of the world, you can work around
(11:52):
the clock to improve the safety of vehicles. You can
try your best to build a viet Gold that will
keep the passengers alive if something goes sideways, But you
can't really do anything when that vehicle gets on the
road right and people are driving around ad plus miles
(12:13):
an hour with the weird system of painted lines that
we have pointed out our cartoon UH in previous episodes.
With planes, because there are far fewer planes than there
are cars, flying is statistically safer. Your road trip is
(12:36):
more dangerous than your flight. That's just the truth. Yeah,
Your your safety isn't just dependent on the choices of
that person next to you or those you know, five
hundred three thousand other people on that same highway you're on. UH,
it's based on the pilots and as you said, Ben,
(12:57):
the control system, the the seriously accurate, intense control system
that is used to know where flights are at all
at any given time, right even though sometimes it does
fail for just a couple of hours, so a big,
massive chain reaction when that thing happened, and it was
just you know, a lot of these systems are kind
(13:19):
of antiquated, you know, in terms of the the front
end systems, the actual computer software and the hardware that
frankly is a little bit out of date along with
the planes themselves. I mean we've seen, you know, planes
that still have cigarette ashtrays, you know, in the seat
arms and you know things like that that just why
are these still here? It makes you kind of scratch
your head a little bit because of all these fleets
(13:40):
are are serious need of update, agreed, and you can
see this in flight safety standards across the planet, which
are not uniform. We would be remiss if we did
not mention very recent plane crash in the poll. And
this is a fatal crash. It has currently resulted in
(14:03):
the deaths of at least sixty eight people. It was
the most deadly plane crash in thirty years for Nepal. Additionally,
a lot of people are avoiding flights or thinking twice
about it. Because they've heard the news about things like
(14:23):
the Boeing seven thirty seven max. Uh. This this resulted
in some heavy financial consequences for Boeing. Of course, it's
hundreds of lives lost. Yeah, yes, and hundreds of people died.
And also none of the people of Bowing are going
(14:45):
to jail. Well. And there was a recent story I
think from January maybe of this year about the the
flight to Hawaii that experienced intense turbulence. Do you remember
hearing about that? Guys? There was a recent story out
of NBC News. It was talking about this very strange
(15:05):
plume of turbulent essentially cloud of cloud that was extremely
turbulent and caused a bunch of injuries on the flight,
which is has nothing to do with the plane and
how it's built and its safety features. It was more
like just an atmospheric phenomena that occurred that caused a
problem horrific bottom. You're you're sitting in your seat, right
(15:30):
and maybe you ignored the little light that comes on
that tells you to wear your seatbelt, and all of
a sudden you are in some non consensual chiropractic appointments
with a roof. Yeah. Well, in that situation. It was
between one and three seconds between visually seeing the plume
that shot up like in front of the plane and
(15:52):
being able to alert everybody on board. It was it's
just nuts. That's that scares me, guys. Yeah, it should
also the cruise of commercial airlines as well as military
airlines are or aircraft, I should say, are holding safety
as the number one priority in the cases. You know,
(16:16):
those flight attendants who have to put up was so
much trash from so many people. Their number one function
is safety. It's not to give you peanuts or even
cracker jacks. But but then there there are other things
that scare you if you don't love airplanes. The idea
that planes famously go missing. The world is big, the
(16:41):
ocean is most of it. Sometimes stuff just disappears. We
talked about this previously. Malaysia Airlines flight MH three seventy
is probably one of the most famous recent examples. Uh
The cause of the crap or disappearance is still not
(17:04):
officially confirmed. There are various theories regarding it. But that
was just in not too long ago, and uh I
found a found a a piece from a British tabloid
called The Mirror about how people were still finding debriefe
from that craft as recently as ten piece of it
(17:28):
was being used as an ironing board. Well, that's the
kind of thing. I mean. Ships, planes, even some vehicles
have been have gone missing. There are at least legends
of those kinds of disappearances that persist often, and that
is certainly the one that I think about the most,
ben But we're gonna talk about at least one other
(17:50):
one in this episode that just kind of baffles you
for a little while at least. Right, Uh, it's spooky,
you know what I mean. If you are hopping onto
a plane and you have no control over the craft,
you are a lot like people hopping onto a boat,
(18:11):
right and going off towards some blue horizon. You might
feel a little better if you have some superstitions, you know,
you might like, have you ever been on a plane
and someone collaps when the plane lands? Yeah, that's a
little unnerving, isn't it. It's I mean, it's yeah, at
that point, it's like, obviously all good, but it's sort
(18:32):
of like, was this a surprise? Are we surprised about this? Yeah,
it's true. There are all sorts of superstitions in the world.
Of aviation, just like there are in maritime exploration. You know, like,
of course, some of it's very basic. You're a pilot
in a cockpit. Hey, don't make jokes about plane scrashing.
(18:55):
That's just bad taste. But it gets really specific, and
if you look at the folklore of it, a lot
of those aviation superstitions tend to date back to World
War Two. Planes were making the scene in a big way,
and they were also way less reliable. And you know, fine,
(19:17):
everybody listening to this is statistically speaking, alive. So there's
nothing wrong with a little superstition if it makes you
feel better, right. It reminds me a lot of professional
athletes who have some small thing they do before every
game or the day before a game, or you know,
when they go like a a basketball player that does
(19:39):
a specific dribble, you know, before they shoot a free throw,
and it reminds me of that kind of ritualization. Um,
but man, Ben, you found a list that has some
stuff in there. What do we gott? Did you? Did
you like any Oh? I like a lot of them.
There's there's one quote, it's number seven on the list
that you sent, and it's an air force fight four
(20:02):
pilot who would always duck under the intake and exhaust,
so like the engines when he's going around doing his
pre flight check in. His quote was that if you
let the engines see you, it will kill you. You
don't like but making the plane a thing like a creature,
right that you she? I mean, you know, it is
(20:26):
kind of a respect thing. I think with any large
vessel there's a certain amount of deference that's paid and
superstition that goes into those kinds of things. You know,
It's like the moment you take it for granted, it
will chew you up and spit you out. And that's
an article from Carly Courtney over Disciples of Flight dot com.
This yeah, this is this is a real thing. And again,
(20:48):
if you are not hurting anyone, then you're just you're
doing your thing that makes you comfortable, just like an athlete. Right,
That's what a pilot is in many ways. And the
question is how far does this belief in the paranormal
or this practice of superstition go When you're up there
(21:11):
in the clouds and any one thing going wrong can
reaquate you with the ground in a way that might
not be advantageous to you, are any planes carrying more
than mortal passengers? Are any airplanes actually haunted? We're gonna
(21:32):
pause for a word from our sponsors. Just your safety belts,
and please remember to put the oxygen mask on yourself
before you put it on your neighbor. Uh. In the meantime,
will be right back. Here's where it gets crazy. All right,
(21:57):
anybody been on a haunted airplane? I think so? Yeah? Yeah, no, yeah,
I love the optivism. Well, it turns out that there
are there are haunted airplanes, depending on the people that
you ask. There's like you teased earlier, Matt, there's one
(22:18):
plane in particular that's very popular for being haunted, or
not quite haunted. It's it's treated as sentient. It reminded
me of the objects in that video game Control. Uh, Matt,
you're the one who hit me to the game control NOL.
Have you played that game? No? I think it's one
(22:39):
that you guys have talked about and sounded incredibly appealing. Um.
Isn't it sort of like a timey wymy weird like
parallel universe thing involving some psychic powers. It's been talking
about objects of power. Man corrupted his corrupted objects of
power p s. Yeah, I'm I'm gonna check into that
(23:03):
right after we finished. But no, this, yeah, this is
right up my wheelhouse, up my wheelhouse, in my wheelhouse,
up my alley, whatever you wanna call it, in your
flight deck tender what you know? We are not ourselves aviators.
None of us have a pilot license, although I think
at one point Matt had a pretty slick pair of
(23:25):
aviator sunglasses. I can't remember. Uh, I have friends that
have pilot's licenses. Oh wow, okay, nice, I don't need one.
I don't need making the aviator to look cool. Yeah yeah, yeah,
those are just for me. I don't know. No, Matt,
Matt looks like, not not to profile you here, but
(23:46):
it looks like you're the type of dude with the
right sunglasses that if you strolled into a regional airport
with a confident air, I think could get getting a cockpit.
I think, yeah, I think you could just suit like
a lapel or whatever they put on there. Yeah, but
(24:08):
we can make it work, right. We're always planning subsort
of heist. Uh the the We'll get to this weird
object of power or this weird purportedly sentient plane. But First,
we've got to look at the non supernatural, real instances
of what are called ghost flights or ghost planes, because
(24:30):
they are two very real street games for some very
strange things. So there are a couple of technical terms.
I guess you could call them for these things. We've
got ghost plane or ghost flight, which is a term
that's used in commercial aviation circles to describe a formerly
(24:51):
pretty rare practice in which an airline conducts a regularly
scheduled flight with a plane containing less than ten percent
of the flight's total capacity. What what what a what
a treat that would be? I imagine ben these are
just tests or or like, uh, what's the point of these?
It seems like that, you know, fuel being so expensive.
(25:11):
I understand why these would be rare, but what is
the what is the purpose? Doesn't seem like there's anything
fishy or supernatural going on here. They got to keep
their spots at airports. Commercial airliners have to, like they
have to still land a plane to stay in the
whatever in the kiddie, I guess, yeah, that's interesting. And
(25:32):
I guess during COVID, when nobody was flying this maybe
had a little bit of an uptick just so Yeah,
and you may think, why would you still send a
plane all the way across the ocean or something that
if it's only got ten percent capacity. The company isn't
making money, right, You're still paying everybody, You're still paying
for all the fuel. That doesn't make sense, as you
(25:54):
guys said, it makes sense to you know, for the
company for other reasons. The other problem is that plane
is spewing all that exhaust up into the atmosphere and
people don't like that. Yeah, ghost flights accelerated during a
well increased maybe it would be the best word. Uh,
during the pandemic and these airlines who were you know,
(26:20):
they were hemorrhaging money they needed to maintain they're regularly
scheduled flights. That's why outfits like Delta in the United
States started carrying freight, right because they needed to hold
that spot. Just as you said, Noel, there's another very
(26:42):
real and very uncool thing that the phrase ghost plane
or flight describes. It's a specific type of crash and
it is thankfully not a crash that happens often, but
has occurred more couple times. Yeah, it's because these planes
have very sophisticated autopilot systems and This term describes what
(27:09):
happens if an entire flight crew, as well as maybe
even passengers on board a plane, all are incapacitated in
one way or another, often by hypoxia, where the cabin
of the plane is um depressurized in a way that
there's not enough oxygen for everybody to breathe. And when
(27:31):
that happens, it's not good. So if you imagine a
ghost flight or a ghost plane that's still full of
passengers and a flight crew, but everybody in there is
a sleep or you know, dying essentially, but the plane
is still aloft, flying around, maybe doing a circle over
a city, waiting to land. Uh, yeah, that's that's really
(27:51):
that's really disturbing and creepy. Did y'all watch that show
Station eleven thought it was called? Uh it was about
kind of a post apocalyptic kind of thing about like
a virus. Uh. That dude, Hero Marai directed a bunch
of it and not just thought it was really fabulous.
But there's a situation where there's a ghost plane kind
of it's a plane full of people infected with this
(28:14):
plague and they essentially are not allowed to leave the plane. Um,
so it's a different kind of ghost plane. Yeah. Yeah,
and and and it's not too far away from a
possible future, um Matt. One thing that I really appreciate
that you point out was the Helios flight five h
(28:37):
That again, this is the ghost flight hypoxias stuff has
occurred in multiple instances and continues to occur in the
recent day. Could you tell us a little bit about Helios, Yes, Ben,
this is a flight. It was Helios Airways flight five
two two two. It occurred on August four, two thousand five,
(29:02):
and it was a situation where the plane went up,
cabin was depressurized, not enough oxygen inside. The crew was
unable to stop it from happening. And it goes back
to that situation put your mask on, like you said, Ben,
on yourself before your you know, your loved ones or
anybody else. Um. They were just unable to do anything,
(29:23):
and the flight ended up circling over a city until
the fuel ran out. Basically, so the whole thing is
on autopilot and nobody could do anything about it. The
military even scrambled jets to check on the thing, and
they could see that there was nobody in the pilot seat,
or at least they couldn't see anyone in the pilot seat.
But they could see the co pilots slumped over the controls,
(29:45):
and a couple of windows were open, and there were
people with the masks down that see. They looked like
they were incapacitated. And that's all they could see in
the flights, just going around and around and around. Shout
out to everybody listening to this episode on a plane. Uh,
I hope you're having a great time. Also, also we'll
(30:09):
get to we'll get to some of the uh, paranormal
stuff as well. We needed to establish that there are
real things, real events that you will here described as
ghost planes or ghost flights. If you go to the
idea of haunted planes, you'll see tons of apocryphal stories,
you know, the perfect kind of like unsolved mystery time
(30:32):
life presents, legends told tales about ghosts. You know, there
are stories of kids, like ghostly ghostly children voices talking
out for the radio to wear traffic control. Uh. And
then there their stories of passengers who are not on
a manifest just appearing and then saying something cryptic or
(30:57):
heartwarming to someone on the crew or someone alive from
the restroom, and then they're like, hey, go tell the
passenger in seven A that you know, she was right,
I'm sorry, I love her, and then they vanish or there.
This is one of the most interesting ones in decades
past stories of planes that disappear only to return decades later,
(31:24):
hundreds of miles away from their destination. And these are
some of the legends that I think, uh, I think
we're treated as fact by a lot of people when
they first read about this. Some of them sound like bunk.
I mean, straight out of the Weekly World News, which
spoiler they were, yeah, or the National Enquirer. This one,
(31:47):
as you said, been actually the Weekly World News and
actual tabloid. Was there a picture associated with this story,
because those are always the best when they have a
like poorly photoshopped image, you know, massive le printed and
clearly forged. And Elvis Presley is pregnant. Bat Boy refuses
to pay alimony. Yeah, oh Jesus, mat boy caught in
(32:11):
night out horror show. All right, well, let's tell the
tale of PanAm flight. That's right. PanAm Flight nine fourteen
was a Douglas DC four with fifty seven passengers and
six crew members bound for Miami, Florida on July two.
Nine takes off from New York City. The flight was
(32:33):
scheduled last just a couple of hours, that's a short flight.
But it never arrived in Miami. Instead, the story goes,
it showed up unannounced and invisible to radar on March nine,
nineteen eighty five, thirty years later in Caracas. You know,
(32:54):
like air traffic controllers are are going wait what what? Uh?
So for a few years after this story hits the news,
uthologists and various fringe researchers love to go back and
forth with this what happened? You know, why won't Uncle
(33:15):
Sam or Venezuela really talk about pan AM flight nine
one four? Uh? Because it never happened. It's a story.
It's completely fictional. I know. It was published in Weekly
World News in ve the same year that that paper
claimed this flight had mysteriously reappeared. And then further as
(33:41):
as we can see, Weekly World News published basically the
same story two times in the nineteen nineties, and they
switched it up a little bit and they said, Okay,
this flight did disappear in nineteen fifty five, just like
you said, NOL, but this time it landed in complication. Yeah, dang,
(34:08):
that may be so excited because it would be a
real wormhole situation, guys, And I've been longing for a
real wormhole situation every time, every time I'm on a
flight edit lands. If I ever fall asleep on a plane,
then you guys know how rarely sleep. If I ever
fall asleep on a plane, I'm just hoping that when
it lands, I'll be in a totally different you know,
(34:30):
like timeline. Right. If you guys ever read Yes by
Stephen King, Yeah, there's that's a cool plane time traveling
timey whinmy kind of story. I've been listening to a
podcast quick Shadows called Just King Things, and it's these
two really smart fellows that are going through every single
(34:50):
one of Stephen King's book books in publication order. And
I'm listening to something even if I haven't read the books,
but many of them I have. And they point out
that King often men Shin's the Bermuda triangle and then
the idea of like weird stuff happening over that part
of the ocean. Not to mention Ben, I think of
a favorite trope of yours with King. Um is haunted
(35:12):
or sentient or haunted inanimate objects, uh, specifically vehicles. You know,
whether it be you know, Christine with a with a
Car or the Mangler, which was about a haunted laundry machine. Um.
I don't know. I just think it's an interesting trope
in in sci fi. The King kind of spearheaded and
sort of made it a thing. I don't know. I
(35:32):
think it's neat makes me wonder if he, you know,
took any inspiration for many of these stories that we're
talking about today. I'm sure he read the weekly World News.
Come on, you know, Stephen King had that You imagine
all the cool stories that you could find and glean
from that stuff. And another example would be Santiago flight
five thirteen. What happens with his Santiago flight? Well, it's
(35:57):
nineteen fifty four and according to the story you guys,
this Santiago Airlines flight number five thirteen. It took off
from Germany on its way to Brazil and it disappeared
while flying over the Atlantic. Okay, I mean that's horrifying
and terrible, that would make the news. But what happened
(36:18):
next is truly supernatural. Yes, it did eventually land in
Brazil in nineteen eighty nine, and when the ground crew
at the Brazilian airport approached this flight. They found the
plane intact, but it looked weathered, and every seat inside
(36:42):
had a skeleton in there, dried and desiccated, as though
eons had passed. Spoiler, they did not use the word
aions because that's two out of balance for the vocabulary
of the Weekly World News, which also made up this story.
So it was like, you know, a lot of the
(37:06):
protections that the Weekly World News and Joy that allows
them to just print whatever. Both, you know, they like, yeah,
but I mean, like, you know, there's also laws against
screaming fire, you know, in a in a crowded space.
I mean, not that that's the journalist equivalent what they're
doing exactly, but I guess it must be just it's
(37:27):
so beyond the bounds of credibility that you know, who
who would believe it? And also another reputation of the publication.
But I don't know, it's suppost to be the same
thing that allows the onion to operate. You know what.
It reminds me of Ben, the first episode of Fringe
that you made me watch and then I ended up
watching the whole dang thing. People don't make people do things.
People should. You have choices? Are your own but the
(37:52):
h Yeah, you know, I was thinking of fringe as well.
I mean, humanity has always been captivated the idea of transit, right,
and so a new form of transit must seem somehow magical,
especially if it's something you cannot do on your own. Sorry,
(38:13):
human beings. Currently none of you can fly unaided. Uh.
There are some people who are good at gliding, and
they also inevitably end up on the grounds of them. Uh.
There's another story, though, that is not from the Weekly
World News. It's a story that is illustrative of the folklore, right,
(38:38):
the modern folklore surrounding the concept of haunted airplanes and aircraft.
It's the story of Eastern Airlines Flight four zero one.
I don't know about you all, but I had not
heard of this one at all until we started digging
into this episode. And to keep it a hun percent here,
(39:01):
I'm surprised I didn't hear about it because it was
quite a big deal in pop culture, which becomes part
of the problem. But it was a real flight, and
it was a genuine tragedy, and Miami comes up again
in this story. We're talking specifically about Eastern Airlines Flight
four oh one, which departed from New York for Miami
(39:22):
on December between ninth, nineteen seventy two. This was a
Lockheed L ten eleven UM which crashed in I R
L into the Florida Everglades, which, as we know, is
full of creepy Crawley's they can eat human remains UM.
Both pilots and the flight engineer died, along with two
(39:42):
out of the ten flight attendants and ninety six out
of the dred three passengers aboard, with seventy five survivors UM.
A researcher by the name of John Fuller actually wrote
a book about this came out in nineteen seventy six
called The Ghost of Flight four oh one, and he
said that the crash was only the beginning of of
this tragedy. Yeah, because the tragedy it was, But some
(40:05):
of the parts from that crash we're still functioning and
able to be taken you away from where from the
crash site and placed into another vehicle that needed servicing,
needed a spare part or something. Um. It's it's a
strange thing, guys. I didn't know that was even a
practice like once a flight had crashed. I don't know
(40:29):
if it is. It feels ghoulish, doesn't it, especially you're
a commercial airliner. Military different calculation. But but yeah, the
idea that you would find this crash and the plane
was found and there were survivors. Uh, the idea that
you would say, Okay, now that the news has died down,
(40:52):
let's you know, let's look around, let's see is this
seat still good? Can we put this seat on another
semi identical plane? Uh? That's still goes through such a
large forensics uh time period right where they're recreating the
crash site and all of that stuff within a hangar somewhere,
(41:13):
and they just spend years with it, analyzing it, and
just to then take it afterwards and repurpose. Yeah, you're
it's weird. Yeah, coolish Again, if you guys ever heard
the delightfully idiotic question, or maybe it's just a meme
of why don't they make the whole plane out of
the stuff they make the black box out of? Well,
then it wouldn't fly. Oh yeah, Yeah, it's a good question,
(41:38):
and it's it's it is. It's funny, but it's also
silly because I mean, obviously to make an impervious, you know,
lock box of of information that would survive being in
a crash and hit by you know, heavy arms probably
have to be made, some pretty serious stuff that would
probably sink a plane. The whole thing was made of it.
In the end, we're very squishy, and if we're inside
(42:01):
something as impenetrable as we want it to be, we
are pretty squishy. No, we're squished. Yeah, you always when
they're like, it's that moment when you realize, oh, I'm
supposed to wear a seatbelt on a plane in case
it takes a serious dive, and then my meat body
just flies up against the ceiling and all my bones
get crushed. Like why are they harping on the seatbelt
(42:24):
so much? Or like how or like how Tony Stark
in the Iron Man suit never seems to bump against
the interior of the suit the whole time. It's a
it's a huge plot hole and magical technology they haven't
exactly know. It's beautiful. It's beautiful to have heroes. That's cool.
So over the over the following years, the story goes
(42:48):
there were rumors this aircraft three eighteen technically in three
one a e A that had some of these salvaged
parts from this horrific crash. It became home to ghost
and passengers and crew alike on these Eastern Airline flights
would see folks like the flight engineer or the captain
(43:13):
or dead passenger sitting on the plane, moving around and again.
According to legend, Eastern Airlines eventually said, you know what,
We're going to remove these salvaged parts from three eighteen
and when they did, the hauntings stopped. The souls had
(43:38):
been put to rest. This became a part of popular culture.
I'm so surprised that none of us heard about this.
I certainly didn't before we went on air today we
played a brief trailer of a made for TV film
by NBC starting Ernest boor nine, called the Ghosts of
(44:00):
Flight four oh one, based off that author's book, And
then I didn't even know about this. There was a
guy named Bob Welch who was a member of Fleetwood
Mac for a time, but not not like a long
term member, and he recorded a song about Flight four
oh one on his solo album three Hearts from nineteen
(44:25):
seventy nine. I'm being too radio DJ about it. We're
not going to play the song. We can't afford it.
We can't afford it. But you know, even today, despite
the story of the spare parts being replaced, you know,
ceasing the haunting, there are still reports from like about
this thing happening and people seeing ghosts on planes flying
(44:49):
over the Everglades, specifically ghosts from flight four oh one.
And this was mentioned in UH non fringe research circles.
Flight Safety Foundation, a trade newsletter mentions the crash in
UH an issue they put out in nine four. This
(45:10):
is a publicity nightmare for this airline. UH. We found
a we found a book called From the Captain to
the Colonel, An Informal History of Eastern Airlines, written by
a guy named Robert J. Sterling. And in this book,
the the CEO of Eastern Airlines at the time, a
(45:33):
former astronaut by the way named Frank Borman, says these
ghost stories are garbage. And you can also find a
little bit of back and forth about people deciding whether
or not to sue each other. Side note that Robert
Sterling guy older brother of Rod Sterling who went on
to the Twilight Zone. Yeah so I think I think
(45:57):
when we see aviation episodes of Twilight Zone, maybe checked
with Rod about Robert. Also, people are out here still
naming their kids with the same first letter. It just
I guess it's convenient, you know what I mean, Bob
and Rod. Actually that sounds really cool. No, I retract
(46:18):
my earlier comment. That is a good plan. So in
this book, Robert Sterling, not Twilight Zone Rod Sterling, Old
Robbie says no wreckage from flight four o one ever
made it onto another plane, and no one at Eastern
(46:41):
Airlines could find anyone crew or passenger who genuinely claimed
to see a ghost firsthand. It's always a story I
heard from someone who met someone who saw something, you
know what I mean. And this is where we have
to give a shout out to Brian Dunning over at
(47:02):
the Skeptoid podcast, who who believes that he's traced the
the pop culture growth of this to a very bad,
off color joke about aircraft three a team making an
emergency landing in Mexico City. It's still like you mentioned earlier,
(47:26):
NOL is still an L to an eleven. It's just
a different iteration. And this pilot joked about this emergency
landing and said it was scary. For a minute, I
thought Don Repo's ghost was on the plane. Don Repo
was the flight engineer for the ill fated four oh one.
He perished in the crash. So maybe that's how this
(47:50):
folklore starts, right, someone makes a joke, That joke gets
taken seriously and accelerates people and bellish it, maybe to
make a buck, maybe because they don't have all the facts.
And now you get into these increasingly surreal situations. Speaking
of surreal, we did promise you that we would introduce
(48:13):
you to one crazy, crazy guy. So we're gonna take
a pause for a word from our sponsors and will return.
What better way to land the episode than to talk
about Deli Mike and we're back. So then Deli Mike.
(48:37):
Is this a guy that makes sandwiches? What are we
talking about? Deli Mike. We're talking about Deli Mike or
Deli Mayek. It's like a Jersey Mike kind of situation.
It would be so cool, right we we probably one
of our fellow listeners might have the street named Deli Mike.
And Mike, if you're hearing this, we want to we
want to figure out what your sandwich situation is. We're
(48:59):
gonna be on the road or to stop at your
deli uh in in Turkish uh Delhi met means crazy Mike.
This is the street name of an infamous airbus, A
three forty Uh probably the most famous quote unquote haunted
playing in the world today. Yeah, um, Deli Mike or
(49:25):
Delhi Mike, m a y k or Mike, you know,
like we would spell shorthand for Michael or crazy Mike
in Turkish what that translates to. Became a part of
the Turkish Airlines fleet in nineteen um It was designed
and intended to operate long haul flights out of Turkey
from nineteen to twenty nineteen. Deli Mike was kind of
(49:48):
This had his reputation almost Ben you described it, uh
beautifully as sort of being like a bit of a
bad boy of the skies with a little bit of
an edge, right, Yeah, prank love eccentric. This is an
object of power for anybody familiar with Control the video
game or familiar with SCP lore on the internet. Mike
(50:13):
seemed to have random technical issues. Sometimes cabin lights would
turn on seemingly of their own volition, and then the
crew would come to investigate and they turn off, like, Uh,
you didn't give me yet, all right, you know, tech
not it or whatever? Uh. The crew. Also, apparently there's
(50:34):
a bunch of lore around this, and a lot of
it's mainly in Turkish media. The crew would get tendant calls,
you know, you hit the little cole uh flight attendant
button and they would be sent to the wrong seat
ha ha classic mike uh. Or a passenger would try
(50:55):
to turn on their reading light and they would see
another light turn on for a different seat. Now, for
a lot of us familiar with electrical wiring, this sounds
like maybe somebody just got their wires crossed, right. It
sounds an awful lot like that, almost exactly like that.
(51:17):
In fact, well there's but there's weirder stuff too. There's
one situation where the emergency lights you know that are
on the floor, uh, those had a tendency to begin
like they're off. Imagine they would begin to turn on
in a wave, so from the back of the plane
sweeping football the way to the front and in almost
(51:41):
playful manner or like a staged manner. We're athropomorphizing a
little bit, but you kind of have to to really
enjoy it, right. It's like, you know, if you've ever
been at a stadium during a game and people do
the wave on mass in a crowd. You know, you
want to be part of it. You want to be cool.
So uh, apparently flight attendants took this to mean crazy
(52:07):
Mike Deli. Mike was in a good mood. Uh. The
most famous stories about this plane hinge on flight instruments.
Apparently there was an emergency signal emitted in the cockpit
a edit me here, Paul, A kind of signal that
would indicate an ocean moment. And this terrified some of
(52:29):
the newer crew members. But the old hands that people
who have been with this plane for a while said,
you know, it's just class. You know, it's Mike. Just
give him a second, let him take a breather, give
him ten, give him ten, we'll get off this runway.
Don't worry. Don't you worry about it. Uh. And then
we've got my I think, at least for me. You guys,
(52:51):
this is my favorite story about crazy Mike. It's a
story of an old engineer who apparently knew Mike quite well.
So one day there was an instrument malfunction UM and
the crew could not get the plane back online UM
or couldn't get it back to its you know specs.
It's it's baseline kind of standards legend has it, They
(53:15):
called in an old technician familiar with Mike, was very
intimately familiar. The old fellow knocked on the cockpit door,
walked in and said, what happened to you, big man?
Then the old tech hung out with the pilots for
a bit before strolling away into the sunset, never physically
(53:35):
working on the plane, never actually touching the component. And
good question the malfunctioning component. And apparently the conversation was
plenty pleasant because right after that everything went right back
to normal. All of the haywire kind of readouts started
to level out, didn't They Almost as though this man
(53:56):
was calming to the plane. He coaxed it into behaving
correctly again. And crazy Mike's back in the sky. You know,
I love I love this idea. This is again apocryphal,
but there are people in Turkish airlines who will swear
by it. I love this idea that you could. You
can walk in and kind of have this moment off air, Matt,
(54:19):
you brought up something that I had forgotten about our
one time fearless leader and a mentor to us. Uh
regularly spoke with finicky machines. Yes, much in the same
way as this story. If there was a problem that
(54:40):
let's say, just for instance, I assumed it was a
software issue, maybe even a hardware issue, when something was
malfunctioning with my Mac and I just couldn't get things
to work right, I'd get frustrated and try and figure
out and solve the problem, like again via software hardware,
and Roxanne would stroll in just be like just gently
put her hand on the machine, be like, oh, it's okay,
(55:01):
it's okay, buddy, be all right, it's all right. Let's
just take a minute, just relax a little bit and
talking to my computer, not to to me. Right, Yes, yeah,
I remember that I've seen similar moments. What I what
I also recall is that the temperature would drop down
a few degrees fahrenheit during those conversations, which that well,
(55:28):
that was my that was my perception. But uh, but
perhaps my perception is incorrect. Yeah, people, a lot of
our fellow listeners right now, if you work around machinery,
especially complex machinery, then you you may also find yourself,
you know, maybe muttering under your breath, like come on,
(55:51):
just not today, don't do this to me today, tyson
or whatever. You call whatever your name for your sheen
is UH. And again, if it's a superstition, it's not
hurting anyone, you're fine, You're good to go. But is
it possible that talking to Uh an inanimate object, right
(56:15):
or a nonsentient thing, may have some sort of result.
A lot of people believe something like that. Low key,
A lot of people believe that. And Mike here, our
pal Mike, is treated less like a quote unquote haunted
plane and more like a friendly, quirky sentient object. You know.
(56:39):
It's like if it's a ghost, it's like Slimmer and Ghostbusters,
and it is a mischievous, little little pinch of the cheeks,
but not out to actually harm anyone. I don't know, man,
he was a little chaotic in the movie. He was
a little more of a familiar in the real Ghostbusters cartoon.
But I always found him horrifying in the In the
first Ghostbusters movie, he's kind of comes at you, drooling
(57:01):
all the while. Yeah, and he does slime people, hence
the name. You know. I always wondered about his background too,
like is he was he ever a human being? That guy,
Oh my gosh, there's this guy. Landis Max Landez, who
I think got kind of canceled um for some bad
male behavior. But he he did do an interesting YouTube
(57:23):
video I think before this happened, where he talked about
his Ghostbusters sequel where it explains Slimmer's backstory. So if
you're interested, just look up Max Lande's Ghostbuster sequel. He
does have a pretty clever pitch for what what Slimmer's
backstory was nice, but but Mike in this case was
not like Slimmer in that way. He was very it
didn't harm anybody. I just want to bring this up
(57:45):
right before we end here, guys. I was reading about
a an accident that Deli Mike got into at some
point in twos. They called it a what do they
call They call it an excursion. I believe it's where
on the plane lands, it goes off the runway just
a bit. But nobody was harmed in that, I guess incident.
(58:10):
But it did, you know, cause some pretty significant damage
to the landing gear when it occurred, and then you
know that landing gear, that piece of Deli Mike had
to get replaced. And there's a story I can't remember
which link it was in. Ben was one of the
links you shared. There's a story that all of the
component parts of Delhi Mike's electronics over the years had
(58:34):
been replaced completely because because the ship of thesis. Yes,
because the engineers were like, well, clearly there's something wrong
with the wiring that we're just not able to see,
so let's replace this entire thing, every component, and it
still did. It's weird stuff. Yeah, I get him, Mike.
(58:54):
This uh that that is I read about the landing
gear as well, and this idea of slowly replacing every
component of a thing, and if that idea of the
thing is still the same, it's it's fascinating. It's fascinating.
And also we have to ask about the nature of
(59:15):
perception and observation. To what degree does the human mind
interfere with something when it observes that thing right, that action,
that activity, that relationship. Folks, you can see all sorts
of again, quirky fun reports about our guy crazy Mike
(59:36):
are playing. I should say, uh, and the hijinks that
my that is attributed to this air bus. But a
lot of those have what I would call big slow
news day vibes. You know, they're they're there, Hey, look
at that kind of things they're not what does this mean? Reports?
(59:57):
We want to end on a good note, so ultimately
our pal and hopefully yours, Crazy Mike Delhi. Mike was
retired and stored in Johanna, Johannesburg, South Africa. And just
last month, as we record this, in December of twenty two,
(01:00:19):
Crazy Mike and a couple other air buses, all from
Turkish Airlines retired. We're flown out to Uzbekistan on December
Christmas Eve for the Christians and they got trailed. They
made an emergency landing in Tehran, and Dutch media speculates
(01:00:41):
that Iran may have done this on purpose to get
around the Western sanctions for buying new aircraft. So right
now our pal Crazy Mike is uh living it up
in Tehran. He's on another adventure bro crazy stuff you know. Uh,
(01:01:08):
well that's our that's our episode on haunted airplanes. And
I think none of us have encountered ghostly stuff on airplanes,
but we've all been in surreal situations on airplanes. You
meet people in a weird liminal space. I'm curious, Matt Noel,
do you do you think we might have anybody listening
(01:01:29):
to the show today or tonight who has a paranormal
experience on aircraft. There's also a really good um heavy
Metal segment and the heavy Metal animated film, not the
more recent one, the Heavy Metal two thousands something, but
the one from like the eighties where there's like a
warship piloted by the zombie skeletons, which is just a
(01:01:53):
really cool, you know, a little horror horror story. UM.
I don't know, it's interesting because we we do. I
think typically think more of ghost chips, you know, and
like either ships found a drift or ships where everyone
has died because they were marooned or something like that. Um,
So I do think it's interesting to kind of take
that concept to the sky. I mean, it takes all kinds.
(01:02:13):
I imagine there's somebody that's seen something. I think the
creepiest thing I've seen on airplane is like, um, I
guess when the temperature differential is just right, sometimes when
the air gets pumped through, it kind of looks like
a gas where it's like you can see it like
you know, vapor and almost looks like the way it
looks in movies when like they pump poisonous gas through
the ventilation systems. So I definitely got freak testing that
(01:02:36):
one time. But that's about it for me. I don't
know about you all, but I'm tired of these mother
flipping spirits on this mother flipping yeah, and all this
mother flipping cocaine and these mother flipping bears. You know
what's up with that? It's just, you know, I remember
when tornadoes were just wind and debris and houses an
(01:02:59):
unfortunate children in Kansas and Nebraska. It was way be
carried the magical way before they started putting sharks and
all that stuff. You know, there's a there's a tornado
culture war. Uh don't believe big shark. Uh also snakes
on a plane. That's how. That's how you know you
(01:03:19):
got a good title for something. We want to hear
your stories. We have a lot of people who are
listening now, fellow conspiracy realist who work in the aviation industry,
have a pilot's license or have or have been on
a plane and encountered something that is inexplicable. We would
(01:03:41):
love to hear your thoughts. If you are listening to
this and you happen to have a connect with our
pal Crazy Mike, we'd love to We'd love to do
a podcast hanging out with Crazy Mike. Let us know
we try to be easy to find online. Oh, indeed,
check us out on the internet where we are conspiracy
(01:04:03):
stuff on YouTube, um on Facebook, or we have a
group called Here's where it Gets Crazy and on Twitter,
on Instagram or conspiracy stuff show also on TikTok were
conspiracy stuff right show show boom TikTok as well. Lots
of fun stuff popping off on Instagram and TikTok these days. Uh,
(01:04:24):
catch us on TikTok before it gets out laud right then?
Oh yes, yes, car pai deum Uh. And if you
also like to live in the now, but you don't
care for sipping the social meads, perhaps you're taking a
dry january from the various online forms of communication and
(01:04:45):
you want to go old school. You have a story
to tell, Well, we want to hear it, and we
don't want social media to get in the way. Please
do give us a phone call. You can use your
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th three, SD d W y t K. You'll hear
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(01:05:06):
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Give yourself a nickname. Tell us what's on your mind.
Tell us if we can share your story with your
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