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Three and a half decades later, on October 12, 1989, the Porto Alegre airport in Brazil spotted an unauthorised aircraft circling around the airbase. The air traffic controllers tried contacting the pilot but got no response.
PEGASUS REPORTERS, LAGOS | SEPTEMBER 7, 2023
The story of the puzzling incident that allegedly happened to Santiago Flight 513 between 1954 and 1989 has been making rounds among the believers of the ‘supernatural’ for decades now and still, people aren’t sure of what to make of it.
A summary of the story for the uninitiated: Fact-Checking: Is This Story True?
According to an article published by tabloid Weekly World News in 1989, Santiago Airlines Flight 513 took off on September 4, 1954 from Aachen, West Germany and was scheduled to arrive in Porto Alegre, Brazil 18 hours later.
However, the aeroplane simply disappeared mid-flight over the Atlantic Ocean. At the time of the disappearance, authorities believed that the plane had crashed and for the years to follow, multiple search parties were formed in order to look out for the remains of the passengers or the plane but nothing was found.
Time went by and decades passed. Santiago Airlines had already run out of business in 1956, just two years after the alleged disappearance and after failing to find even a single trace of evidence of a plane-crash, the search was called off.
Three and a half decades later, on October 12, 1989, the Porto Alegre airport in Brazil spotted an unauthorised aircraft circling around the airbase. The air traffic controllers tried contacting the pilot but got no response.
Eventually, the plane came close to the runway and stuck a perfect landing. It looked in a well-maintained shape and the engines were still up and running even after the plane touched base.
Once the airport authorities approached the plane cautiously, they opened the doors from the outside and what they say, chilled their bones to the core.
They found 92 perfectly-preserved skeletons of the people onboard (88 passengers and four crew members) “safely” buckled into their seats. When they opened the cockpit doors, they saw that the plane’s pilot, Captain Miguel Victor Cury, also in a skeletal form, still had his hands on the controls.
Fact-Checking: Is This Story True?
Broadly speaking, there are three reasons why the story is widely considered to be false.
Reason One: The Ill-Reputation Of The Tabloid
Weekly World News was infamous for publishing ‘fictional stories’ in their tabloid more often than not. Four years before releasing the story on Flight 513, they had published yet another story of Pan Am Flight 914, which went missing for 37 years before reappearing and landing unscathed.
Reason Two: The Story Seems… Familiar
The mysterious story of Santiago Flight 513 seems uncannily similar to an episode of 1961 show The Twilight Zone titled ‘The Odyssey of Flight 33’ in which the aircraft “somehow, someway” travels back in time to 1939.
Reason Three: Lack Of Evidence
No credible source of news from 1954 could be traced back to, in order to confirm that the flight did indeed vanish into thin air. All we have is the newspaper clipping from 1989 to believe.
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