Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
On 8 March 2014 a Boeing 777 flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard lost contact near the IGARI waypoint and vanished; it has never been found.
2014 CE · 6.93, 103.59 · status: official
The account
Satellite data showed the aircraft turned back across the Malay Peninsula and flew for hours into the southern Indian Ocean. Debris later washed up in Africa and on Indian Ocean islands. Malaysia's 2018 safety report could not determine the cause.
The sceptical view
The disappearance spawned many unfounded theories, including paranormal ones. Investigators consider it an aviation mystery of the physical world: the wreck lies somewhere in the deep southern Indian Ocean.
The researched reading
An aviation mystery of the physical world. Satellite data and washed-up debris show the aircraft flew for hours and ended in the southern Indian Ocean; the likeliest cause is a deliberate act on the flight deck, with an onboard emergency as the main alternative.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Perception, memory or mind | 40% | The flight path, turned off from the cockpit at the handover between air-traffic regions and then steered around Malaysia and south into the ocean, points to deliberate control by someone on the flight deck; investigators found a similar simulated route on the captain’s home flight simulator. A human decision, not a mystery of physics, is the most likely story. |
| A known natural phenomenon | 24% | An onboard emergency (fire, decompression and crew hypoxia, then a long “ghost flight”) is a physical-world accident that would explain silence and a straight run to fuel exhaustion, though the deliberate turn back and the switching-off of transponder and ACARS fit it poorly. |
| Secret human technology | 14% | Hijacking by a third party, remote take-over or a covered-up military shoot-down are all argued in books; none explains the seven hours of satellite handshakes ending over the southern ocean better than a crew action, but the cause is officially undetermined. |
| Undetermined | 12% | The share a generic explanation had beyond what has been shown for this case: it fits many cases like this one, but has not been demonstrated for this one. |
| Something known, misidentified | 4% | A minority view holds that the Inmarsat handshake data were misread and the aircraft lies outside the searched arc; the debris found on Réunion and East African shores fits drift from the southern Indian Ocean, so this is unlikely. |
| Genuinely anomalous | 3% | Paranormal and “wormhole” theories spread online; the physical record (handshakes, debris, drift modelling) leaves no gap that needs them. |
| A hoax or fabrication | 2% | Claims that the disappearance was staged and the plane landed in secret have no support in the satellite data or the recovered debris. |
| A poorly understood natural phenomenon | 1% | No unexplained atmospheric or geophysical cause has been proposed by any investigator. |
Official position: Malaysia’s 2018 safety investigation could not determine the cause and did not exclude unlawful interference; the wreck has not been found.