I remember a Discovery Science or American Heroes Channel show covering ghost ships and ghost aircraft recently. This is one of the aircraft they covered.
One of my favorite "ghost aircraft" stories is the
Stardust crash from the late 40s. Not because of the details of the crash itself but because of the asinine speculations UFO "investigators" engaged in for the next 50 years or so. If you ever need a good example of how credulous, irrational, and wild eyed even the seemingly normal members of the UFO investigating community are look no further than the
Stardust crash.
The airliner was crossing the Andes at night in poor weather. It sent a radio message in Morse to the airfield expecting it. The message included an ETA and ended with a garbled final word;
stendec(IIRC). The airfield asked the airliner to repeat the message and the same message with the same odd word was sent again. The airliner never arrived, the subsequent searches never spotted any wreckage, and the "researchers" in the UFO community lost their collective minds for the next half century.
The official reports used known facts and Occam's Razor to suggest plausible conclusions. The then little understood jet stream meant the airliner wasn't where the crew thought it was and the poor weather meant visibility was next to nil, so a "controlled flight into terrain" occurred. No wreckage could be found because the impact triggered an avalanche which covered it. The odd final word in the message was either misheard by the receiver, a key slip by the sender, or an odd WW2 acronym being used by a crew which had served in WW2.
The conclusions arrived at by UFO "researchers" and "investigators" using the same facts started off as crazy and went right on out the other side over the next 50 years. You can't even hope to summarize them as one crazy "theory" fed another and another and another almost
ad infinitum. Believe me, there's a doctoral dissertation for some grad student waiting in the byzantine history of the UFO stories involving the "disappearance" of
Stardust.
Late in the '90s climbers came across various bits and pieces which had to belong to an aircraft. They reported their find and an official expedition was sent out. The wreckage was found in a glacier which had been moving for the last 50 years and melting for a shorter period of time. The bits of aircraft and bits of people recovered all belonged to
Stadust. More importantly, the evidence all those bits provided proved that the 50 year old conclusions in the official report were correct.
That garbled final word can never be explained because it's another example of human nature. It's that guy at the FP&L construction site stepping outside the safety rails 7 stories up for "just a minute". There is no explanation and can be no explanation because there was is no rational explanation for it occurring. Yet it still happened.