Terrorism, Aliens, Vile Vortices: The Mysteries of Missing Flight 370

Mysteries love theories. Unknown gaps in data call for speculations. We are seeing it happen this weekend.

Malaysia Airlines MH370, a Boeing 777, has gone missing. Airline officials lost contact with the plane, which was carrying 239 passengers, two hours into the Kuala Lumpur-to-Beijing flight, on Saturday, March 8, at 2:40 a.m. local time (18:40 GMT). It is thought it went missing off the coast of Vietnam, but that is pure speculation.

This photo provided by Laurent Errera taken Dec. 26, 2011, shows the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER that disappeared from air traffic control screens Saturday, taking off from Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport in France. The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 carrying 239 people lost contact with air traffic control early Saturday morning, March 8, 2014 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and international aviation authorities still hadn't located the jetliner several hours later. (Photo Credit: Laurent Errera)

Who was on board? A delegation of painters and calligraphers, a group of Buddhists returning from a religious gathering in Kuala Lumpur, a three-generation family, nine senior travelers and five toddlers.

Most of the 227 passengers on board missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 were Chinese, according to the airline's flight manifest. The 12 missing crew members on the flight that disappeared early Saturday were Malaysian.

Other passengers were from India, Indonesia, Australia, the United States, France, New Zealand, Ukraine, Canada, Russia and the Netherlands, the airline said.

Keller, Texas native, 50-year-old Philip Wood, was on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 when it disappeared over the Gulf of Thailand in the South China Sea. Philip Wood works as a technical storage executive at IBM Malaysia and was transferred to a job from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, where the flight originated.

Terrorism

A Boeing 777 goes missing. Is someone playing a numbers twilight game?

Was it terrorism? Two people named on the manifest -- an Austrian and an Italian -- whose passports had been stolen were not aboard the plane. But speculation is they were just trying to immigrant, yes, illegally, from Iran. There are questions about a third, Chinese, passport, but word of that has disappeared from the media.

Freescale, Motorola, Lear, UFOs

On March 8th, the Austin, Texas-based Freescale Semiconductor confirmed that 20 employees were passengers on Flight 370. Twelve are from Malaysia and eight from China, the company said.

The history of Freescale Semiconductor is intriguing. Freescale was one of the first semiconductor companies in the world, having started as a division of Motorola in Phoenix, Arizona in 1948, according to the company's own historical data. In 1955, a Motorola transistor for car radios was the world’s first commercial high-power transistor. It was also Motorola’s first mass-produced semiconductor device. It was in 2004, a mere decade ago, when it became autonomous by the divestiture of the Semiconductor Products Sector of Motorola.

Motorola? 1948 for this division? In Phoenix? Who came up with the name Motorola? It turns out most credit for the name is given to William "Bill" Lear, in 1930, the investor/inventor who would go on to produce such items as the 8-track music cartridge and the Lear Jet. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that the mystery of UFOs date to such events as Roswell in 1947, in nearby New Mexico. 

Some folks take the notion of "Reverse-Engineering Roswell UFO Technology" very seriously. In that paper, computer company chief Jack Shulman argues that the transistor could never have been invented so suddenly at AT&T in late 1947 without input from top secret Government projects, that some have identified to him as being from alien spacecraft.

And then there is Bill Lear's son, John, who is an accomplished pilot, former CIA operative, and Ufologist. He is noted in the latter field for promoting a variety of conspiracy theories which are based, he claims, on information obtained from military contacts.

Lear is a controversial figure in Ufology, to say the least, for many of his statements.

Lear believes that any number of flying discs 'fell' into our hands when they crashed in the southwest in the late 1940's and early 50's.
Lear's scenario also includes the suspicion that the government has made secret deals with the 'aliens', actually exchanging humans for advanced technological data. Source.

Will we be hearing that aliens are behind the disappearance of Flight 370?

Ooops. I guess some sites are already writing about this form of speculation.

Missing Planes and Sanderson's Vile Vortices

Did Flight 370 vanish off Vietnam into a Devil's Triangle-like area, like the one found off Japan? Who knows, but this is not an area recognized in Fortean literature for such disappearances. Indeed, examining Ivan T. Sanderson's traditional map of "Vile Vortices" around the globe does not show one in this location.

But an airliner is missing, and answers are wanting about what happened.

Update March 12. It has been confirmed by military radar, and missed by civilian radar, that the plane's transponder was turned off as 370 neared the Vietnam coast. The flight then turned around and fly over the Malay Peninsula. 

Late on March 12, the Chinese authorities announced they have new images of 79" by 72" object in the ocean that they think is 370 debris.

Or was Flight 370, like Flight 19, the way into one of Ivan's Vile Vortices?

Other Mysteries

As the search for the aircraft continues, the rescuers are bumping into other mysteries. Take this Sunday, March 9th, CNN report:

'Strange object' not debris from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 

The mysteries surrounding the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, and the true identities of some of its passengers, are as deep as the South China Sea waters where a multinational search team is searching for the jet.
One promising lead has turned out to be a dead end. A "strange object" spotted by a Singaporean search plane late Sunday afternoon is not debris from the missing jetliner, a U.S. official familiar with the issue told CNN on Sunday.
A U.S. reconnaissance plane "thought it saw something like debris but it was a false alarm," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

If all those on board Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 are found to have died, it will rank as the deadliest airline disaster since November 12, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed into a New York neighborhood, killing all 260 people on board and five more on the ground. Many recall that crash with horror, as it followed so closely after the events of 9/11 in New York City.

Year of Lear: Benedict, Thatcher, Ferguson

This piece is historical and prophetic in a synchromystic fashion we are accustomed to here at Twilight Language.

Today something special: A guest essay from writer Thomas McGrath. He wants to share some insights from across the pond, having watched the United Kingdom experience interesting times.

"Football" in Europe, of course, is what we call "soccer" in America. To say it is popular is an understatement. Football in the UK is taken very seriously, and major changes in leadership are felt on a societal level.

McGrath tackles the resignation of Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager of the well-known and honored team, Manchester United.

Before launching into McGrath's contribution, let me just add a note or two about Alex Ferguson's name, etymologically.

Alexander is derived from the Greek "Αλέξανδρος" (Aléxandros), meaning "defending men" or "protector of men", a compound of the verb "ἀλέξω" (alexō), "to ward off, to avert, to defend" and the noun "ἀνδρός" (andros), genitive of "ἀνήρ" (anēr), "man." Alexander is an example of the widespread motif of Greek (or Indo-European more generally) names expressing "battle-prowess," in this case the ability to withstand or push back an enemy battle line.

Ferguson is a Scottish-Irish surname and given name. The surname is a patronymic form of the personal name Fergus. The name Fergus is derived from the Gaelic elements fear ("man") and gus ("vigor", "force", or "choice"). Thus the name "Ferguson" literally means the "son of a man of force/vigor" (the "male offspring of a strong powerful father").

The combination of the two names make for a powerful mix.

Now the item for your consideration:

Year of Lear: Benedict, Thatcher, Ferguson

by Thomas McGrath © 2013

In perhaps the most famous opening scene of all, King Lear divests himself of power and divides his kingdom, so that he might “unburdened crawl towards death.” 
Didn’t quite work out like that, of course, Lear’s attempt to separate who and what he was. His story, though, is one with plenty of relevance to 2013, which is emerging as a kind of Year of Lear.

First, Pope Benedict XVI retired. Which felt like a kind of paradox. People made sympathetic faces, but beneath these, there was often a little discernible disappointment, and even contempt. It was as if, in the great mystery play of Roman Catholicism, the lead part had simply decided to break character, ruining the illusion for some, and the illusion of the illusion for everyone else. No wonder lightning struck St Peter’s Basilica. 
Then there was the death of Thatcher.

In her case, death itself was a kind of afterthought. Her real demise, as is well known, occurred on the Conservative Party’s own Night of the Long Knives in 1990, when it took turns to stab at her political power, a virtual assassination that nonetheless seemed to kill the actual woman, leaving behind a shell whose subsequent longevity sounded less a retirement than a surreal waltz on the border between two worlds.

Unlike a Pope, a Prime Minister is only meant to borrow the robes of office, not take them to the casket. But just as Benedict XVI was unable to go on existing with the burden of his role, Thatcher (more Caesar than Lear) was unable to go on existing without hers.

What, then, of Alex Ferguson – can a mere football manager (those quintessential kings-for-a-day) fit this pattern? Of course, because Ferguson was different. 
In recent years, I often thought of Ferguson as an embodiment of humanity's quirky relationship to the grave. It is one thing to see a twenty-five-year-old player roar and raise a trophy high into the air, celebrating a victory dependent upon a vast suspension of disbelief, but the absurdity is always that much more stark when the man with his arms in the air is of an age where, in ancient Japan, you were expected to shave your head and prepare for eternity.
Ferguson, it was clear, was hiding from death in the make-believe world of sport (itself only a diorama of our own, wider world of make believe). He admitted as much himself. Now, this self-made Pope of the Red Devils has retired too, causing at least as much shock (in the UK, anyway) as his Catholic counterpart. 
“All perform their tragic play,” Yeats wrote in “Lapis Lazuli,” along with Shakespeare imagining history as unfolding upon a grand stage, “There struts Hamlet, there is Lear.” The players, at present,  seem to be shifting. Whoever will be next, I wonder, to take their bow?