All right, good night!

Those were the last words reported to have been uttered by one of the two pilots of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH 370 before it vanished into thin air. Almost two weeks later, the world is still searching for the missing plane with 263 people aboard and answers to puzzling questions. With every passing day, the mystery has been deepening: What happened to the Big Bird Boeing 777? How could it disappear without leaving a trace on land or in water?

The aircraft’s disappearance, said to be first in the aviation history, without a clue looks like a real sci-fi episode. It has all the elements of a thriller: A plane takes off from Kuala Lumpur international airport for Beijing in the early hours and after an hour it changes its course and disappears from the radar screens of civilian aircraft monitoring stations on the ground, but shows up on military radars as a blip for some time. The plane’s communication systems, including an automatic one that keeps itself in contact with satellites, goes dead as if it is done deliberately or struck by a bolt of thunder.

Stranger than fiction? It is believed that the plane had wandered in the skies, undetected by military radars, surveillance and monitoring systems in the whole of Asia region. For the last two weeks, dozens of countries have been throwing their civilian and military might behind Malaysia in its search for the missing plane.

But no luck so far; the only hope is a lead the search teams have got from satellite imagery showing a big chunk of debris floating in the southern Indian Ocean. However, the first of five aircraft sent out to the area had reported no sighting of the plane’s wreckage until Friday. Another three were scouting the area and one more was on its way to look for two objects a satellite had detected floating off the southwest coast of Australia, nearly halfway to the remote Antarctic islands.

The search for the mystery objects is so treacherous that it takes four hours in each direction for Australian aircraft to reach the spot, leaving just two hours for assessment whether the MH370 crashed into the sea as some people believe it to be. But considering the vast ocean area and the difficulty in reaching there, it may take days to establish the crash theory and confirm it. Until then the floating objects remain a mystery as the missing plane that has spawned a multitude of theories. While some are ridiculous, others are bizarre.

To know to what lengths people as well as officials have gone to crack the mystery and find out the fate of passengers on the cussed plane, one has to surf the Net. Besides the expert and official versions and search results being put out by the minute, we will come across zillions of reports pointing to possible causes of MH 370 vanishing from the sky.

Here are a few unconventional and irrational ways of trying to zero in on the mystery: A swami tries to hypnotise a man and a woman – not known whether they are in any way related to the travelers on the missing jet – to make them go back in time and find out where the doomed plane is.

Malaysia, after exploring all scientific avenues and facing flak from China for its ‘slow probe,’ turns to witch doctors to spiritually diagnose the baffling problem.

Spoon-bender and psychic Uri Geller is getting dozens of requests from all around the world to use his psychic powers to locate MH 370. If all these are benign in nature with the true intent of finding out the reasons/causes for the plane’s disappearance, there are wild guesses and malignant viruses that have been developed on the basis of MH 370 and unleashed in cyberspace by hackers and spammers.

If one believes in all the alien stuff Hollywood produces year after year, then the Malaysian jet was hijacked by extra terrestrial beings to study Boeing’s flying technology and biology of earthlings, particularly Chinese, who were a majority of air passengers. Sure, an alien civilisation wants to study the rise of China, for possible adaptation of its system!

Another suggestion comes from a doomsayer who thinks that the aircraft was hit by a meteorite, turning it into a ball of fire; so no wreckage could be found. The bizarre scenario was a prequel to the fate of planet Earth (anytime now?).

Manipulating the cockpit instrument panels with a remote control, a technology whose origins and applications nobody seems to know and if such know-how is developed and tested on MH 370, the future of aviation and flying is scary.

Like curiosity kills the cat, Netizens surfing for latest news on the vanishing act can land in trouble if they follow ‘enticing’ leads given by spammers to hack email accounts.

If the abstruse probabilities are set aside, the plausible theories for MH 370’s disappearance revolve around many, from personal to political and religious and from manual interference with transmission data that disabled the communication system to sudden decompression that proved deadly. Amidst dozens of such theories and probabilities, the question remains, “whodunit.”

promedia_madhu@yahoo.co.in