The missing Malaysian flight has by now become not just a massive tragedy in the making, but is also providing grist for conspiracy mills of all colours. One reason the mystery is more shocking than any other contemporary tragedy is how, in an age when everyone everywhere is wired and connected, could a few hundred people and millions of dollars worth of sophisticated equipment vanish without a trace.
This kind of unseemly mystery would have been less anachronistic half a century ago, when most of the disappearances at the so-called Bermuda Triangle occurred, a time when travel technology was nascent and unexplained phenomena still capable of occurring. And what does one call a situation where aircraft passengers' cellphones were still receiving calls long after Flight 370 went off the radar? Receiving calls, yes, but no was picking them. That's the kind of mystery even the Bermuda Triangle did not feature back in the day.
Among the pirates, radical hijackers (modern bogeymen for every event), sea monsters and such, the good old alien abductor has seen a return among conspiracy fans. This gentleman, from planet unknown and for reasons best known to him, has been accused of being behind diverse phenomena from ship disappearances to crop circles, for reasons best known to him. But what is striking is one of the best-known alien abductions in the comics world, that of Tintin's adventure in Flight 714.
In this, one of Herge's later works, Tintin and Captain Haddock are in the same neighbourhood as the very real Flight 370 twelve days ago, and land in Jakarta on their way to Sydney. They happen to meet an eccentric millionaire, Carreidas, and find themselves on his new supersonic jet. The jet is hijacked and it turns out two of the pilots are part of the conspiracy. Of course, Tintin has to rescue the whole party on a little-known island in the area. At this point they come across aliens, who (spoiler alert, in case you've mysteriously resisted Tintin all these years) take Tintin's group back to civilisation and make sure the human abductors get what's coming to them.
True, in this case the aliens do not take the aircraft, they just step in for a rescue act. And why not? Once in a while, aliens deserve to play the good guy. But what with mysterious flights out of South-East Asia, unknown islands, uncharted flight paths, suspicious crew members and utter confusion, the script for Flight 370 could have come from Herge's fertile mind.
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