By: CARMEN GAEBE
Staff Writer
In July of 1955, Pan Am flight 914 left New York City airport en route to Miami; however, the flight never made it to sunny Florida. No distress signal was ever sent out and none of the pieces of the wreckage were ever recovered. The plane and its 57 passengers seemingly vanished into thin air. As the years went by no signal of the missing plane was ever found; people began to assume that they had all died and that the mystery would never be solved. Then 37 years later the impossible happened. One morning in 1992 at an airport in Caracas, Venezuela air traffic control noticed something strange, even though their radars showed an empty sky they could see a plane hurdling in the direction of the runway. As it got closer they noticed that the plane looked out of date and was propeller-driven, a model that had not been used in years. After attempting to make contact with the pilot and asking them to identify themselves the pilot replied that “this was flight 914 ready to touch down in Miami”. When air traffic controllers informed the mystery pilot that this was an airport in Venezuela they said his demeanor changed completely. He was 1200 miles away from his intended destination. When the plane landed witnesses could see passengers pressed up against the window, they were dressed in old-fashioned clothes and staring at the modern aircraft on the tarmac in confusion. In a hoarse voice, the pilot of the plane asked him to confirm the date, after sharing that it was May 21, 1992, the pilot began frantically waving away the ground crew screaming that he needed to leave as he was yelling a paper flew out of the cockpit window. He then flew away with the mystery plane leaving everyone on the tarmac confused. A security guard picked up the fallen piece of paper left by the pilot, it was a calendar dating back to 1955. Aviation Officers were able to surmise that the unexpected runway visitor was indeed the mysterious flight 914 that had disappeared back in the 50s.