Video does not show mythical aircraft that ‘vanished for 37 years’

Published on July 17, 2024 at 12:51
2 min read
By James OKONG'O, AFP Kenya

The tale of Pan Am Flight 914 that purportedly disappeared in 1955 and reemerged in 1992 is a recurring legend as sensational as it is fictitious. A TikTok video shared thousands of times claims to depict the mythical aeroplane and says “what was found inside shocked the entire world”. However, the aircraft shown at the start of the clip is an old Boeing converted into a home in Oregon, United States. AFP Fact Check has debunked a similar claim in the past.

The video has been shared more than 5,700 times on TikTok since it was posted on June 25, 2024.

Screenshot showing the false post, taken on July 12, 2024

“This missing plane landed 37 years later but what was found inside shocked the entire world,” reads a text box in the video.

The clip’s audio claims that “the plane took off from New York in 1955 with 57 passengers aboard and was supposed to go from Florida to Miami”.

It continues: “It was a normal flight for everyone on the plane until something astonishing happened, a miracle that was going to change lives forever. All of a sudden the plane disappeared from the radar screen and no one was able to contact the pilot. It was almost as if the plane had never existed.”

Various images of control towers and crashed planes are shown in the video. “But in 1992, 37 years later, Venezuelan air traffic controllers detected something strange in their radars,” the clip concludes. “It was indeed the missing plane, but when it landed, what the authorities found inside shocked the world.”

What this shocking discovery might be is not revealed but, for “part two”, viewers are asked to follow the account.

The video was also shared on Facebook here and here before the posts were deleted.

A myth

A previous debunk by AFP Fact Check found that the story about the missing Pan Am flight is completely made up.

An earlier claim, from 2021, used different images to illustrate the hoax, which was traced to a bogus story published in May 1985 in the Weekly World News, an American print-based tabloid that was in circulation between 1979 and 2007, before relaunching online in 2009.

Screenshot showing one of the hoax articles published in May 1985

At the time, AFP Fact Check established there were no records of a Pan Am flight 914, nor was there a missing plane matching the story’s description of it.

Unrelated photo

The latest online reincarnation of the myth uses an image of a plane that was turned into a home.

Using the verification tool InVID-WeVerify, we conducted a reverse image search on keyframes from the TikTok video and found a news report on the CNBC YouTube channel from a year ago containing the same picture (archived here).

According to CNBC, the Boeing 727-200 was converted into a home in Oregon on a forested piece of land owned by engineer Bruce Campbell, who lives in Hillsboro, about 30 minutes away from Portland.

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