On the night of January 30, 1979, a Boeing 707-323C aircraft took off from Narita International Airport in Japan and began heading to its destination of Los Angeles International Airport. The plane was operated by Varig Cargo.
About 20 minutes into the flight, the crew contacted Narita tower for a routine check-in. At that time, they were approximately 300 miles from the Japanese coast.
When the crew failed to check in again 40 minutes later, controllers in the tower tried to contact the aircraft for over an hour. Then, they declared an emergency.
The Navy and Air Force searched for the plane for eight days, but they found no signs of the crew or aircraft anywhere. That night, the flight crew consisted of six people, including an experienced pilot named Captain Gilberto Araujo da Silva.
He was 55 years old and had more than 23,000 flying hours under his belt.
He had even survived a crash landing of a Boeing 707 in 1973. He was flying the aircraft from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when a fire broke out in one of the lavatories. The flight crew quickly put on oxygen masks, but the smoke made it impossible to fly the plane properly.
So, the captain decided to land the plane in an onion field, away from populated areas. Unfortunately, the smoke had already taken the lives of 123 passengers, but Captain Araujo da Silva was still deemed a hero for his skills and quick thinking.
But even with all his experience, he and his crew disappeared over the middle of the Pacific Ocean on Varig Cargo Flight 967 in 1979.
Aside from the six crew members, the plane was also carrying 53 original paintings by a famous Japanese-Brazilian painter named Manabu Mabe. The paintings were featured in a special exhibit in Tokyo and were worth $1 million.
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One of the main conspiracy theories regarding Varig Flight 967 is that the aircraft was hijacked for the valuable paintings. However, the paintings were never found, and no one has claimed to have seen them since the disappearance.
Another theory is that the plane was shot down by the Soviets, just like Korean Airlines Flight 902 was a year earlier. The Soviets had a brand-new, top-secret fighter jet, the MiG-25.
A Soviet deserter, Viktor Belenko, flew it to Hakodate, where it was analyzed and taken apart at a nearby Japanese Air Force Base. The pieces were sent back to the Soviet Union in 40 boxes, but at least 20 pieces were missing.
The most realistic and widely believed theory is that the plane suffered a catastrophic depressurization immediately after takeoff, and it wasn’t noticed by the crew until it was too late.
The crew would have slowly lost consciousness and suffocated to death. The aircraft would have kept flying over the Pacific Ocean on autopilot after the crew died, until it finally ran out of fuel.
Then, it would have crashed thousands of miles outside of the search area, which explains why its wreckage was never discovered.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
