Airplanes That Mysteriously Vanished

If the mystery of this lost 727 were turned into a movie, it would begin at sunset. "May 25, 2003: Luanda, Angola" would unroll across the bottom of the screen, and the shadowy outline of flight engineer Ben Charles Padilla would rise from the bottom, accompanied by his helper John Mikel Mutantu. The two men would mysteriously board a Boeing 727, tail number 844AA, and then — without clearance — taxi erratically down the runaway and take off over the Pacific Ocean. The plane would disappear into the clouds, never to return, and the rest of the film would depict Homeland Security, the CIA, the FBI, and Ben's sister, Benita Padilla-Kirkland, desperately hunting for answers.

Of course, this happened in real life, and according to Air & Space Magazine, to this day no one knows why 844AA was stolen.

Before the theft, Padilla and Mutantu had been fixing up the plane, but neither men had the skills or experience to fly it. The bizarreness of it all and the fact that it happened just a few years after 9/11 sent U.S. intelligence scrambling for answers, terrified it might be another terrorist attack. What did they find? If they found anything, they haven't revealed details, but Padilla's sister said in 2010 that she hoped Ben might still be hiding away somewhere.

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