Malaysia 370: All Right, Good Night

Something about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is utterly captivating. Pings off of a geosynchronous satellite tell us that the plane was last on one point of a vast arc that covers a significant fraction of the globe, including both the wilds of central Asia, and one of the emptiest stretches of deep ocean in the world. That’s the last we know.

Before 1999 turned to 2000, people believed that even TV remotes wouldn’t work after a mysterious bug in its and all electronics’ programming took hold in the moments we rang in the new year. Many were confident that the whole world would fall into chaos as power plants shut, traffic lights went dark, and phones went dead. Whatever happened or didn't happen, none of those beliefs mattered once the event came and went. In the hours after 9/11, people believed it was right-wing crazies, left-wing nuts, radical vegetarians, or terrorists. We all wanted to know, “what are their demands?” though that seems beside the point in light of the continuous war that must have been the real demand of all sides concerned.

Sitting where I am in time, I know that Malaysia 370’s fate will probably be known someday soon, even if ten days seems like a long time for a jumbo jet to remain missing. It may return as some horrific vehicle of destruction at the center of a terrorist plot. It may be at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. But right now, nobody knows. It’s during times like these, before all the mysteries are revealed, that capturing thinking on what happened is of underappreciated importance. In our era of information collection few new mysteries are made. Too little is not captured in some database or closed-circuit camera. Once all is known, conjecture collapses into cold fact; the stories end, and the remaining carcass of truth is picked apart by analysts.

For this window of time before all is known about such a globally witnessed event, there is a space for public imagination, and that in itself is valuable to people in the future who want to understand the veins of thought at work in today’s collective unconscious. Some groups with high profiles, have raised the possibility of alien abduction. Many look at the potential flight paths to central Asia as a reason to suspect that the plane touched down safely in some mountain redoubt to be repurposed for something terrible. Maybe it’s the Uighur separatists-- the East Turkestan Liberation Front. The Chinese say no.  Then there’s the Malaysian Al Qaeda informant who spoke of a 9/11-style plot back in 2012. Or maybe it’s pirates, intent on taking the 777-ER to a chop-shop in some non-aligned state, or selling it at a markup to someone who prefers not to order directly from Boeing.

For myself, I'm pretty confident that the plane crashed somewhere in the south Indian Ocean, after an electrical fire or some other cataclysm onboard led the pilots to make a sharp turn for a nearby runway, and take their communications offline to isolate an errant circuit. Autopilot could have been programmed and engaged before the pilots lost consciousness and the plane would then have continued on a southern heading for many hours until its tanks went dry and it fell into an unimaginably massive expanse of unpatrolled ocean, somewhere in the lonely landlessness west of Australia and north of Antarctica. I also want to believe anything but that simple, sad likelihood. 

   

We want to believe that the 239 people onboard that plane are somehow still alive, held captive by terrorists or pirates, to be released when the time is right. Others want their beliefs confirmed that it’s Muslim terrorists as usual. A few want to ascribe the plane’s disappearance to aliens, benevolent or otherwise.  These are the thoughts that are in today’s mass psyche; the thoughts that will be mothballed and forgotten in internet archives once the truth is almost inevitably known. There’s a value to those ideas, a sense of how people in a given moment respond to something that hasn't yet reached its conclusion, or perhaps never will.

As time compresses with our expanding capacity to capture and analyze everything everywhere, these mysteries will shorten in their duration or disappear altogether. Would Amelia Earhart still remain missing if she had set out today? Would people still be free to imagine her living out her days on some desert island these past 75 years?

Mystery, even when couched in tragedy, is a rare, precious thing. We should all try to remember what we used to think before we knew everything. It's the key to understanding belief.