- [opening narration]
- Narrator: This object, should any of you have lived underground for the better parts of your lives and never had occasion to look toward the sky, is an airplane. Its official designation: a DC-3. We offer this rather obvious comment because this particular airplane, the one you're looking at, is a freak. Now, most airplanes take off and land as per scheduled. On rare occasions, they crash. But all airplanes can be counted on doing one or the other. Now, yesterday morning this particular airplane ceased to be just a commercial carrier. As of its arrival, it became an enigma, a seven-ton puzzle made out of aluminum, steel, wire, and a few thousand other component parts, none of which add up to the right thing. In just a moment, we're going to show you the tail end of its history. We're going to give you ninety percent of the jigsaw pieces, and you and Mr. Sheckly, here of the Federal Aviation Agency, will assume the problem of putting them together, along with finding the missing pieces. This we offer as the evening's hobby, a little extracurricular diversion which is really the national pastime - in The Twilight Zone.
- [closing narration]
- Narrator: Picture of a man with an Achilles' heel, a mystery that landed in his life and then turned into a heavy weight dragged across the years to ultimately take the form of an illusion. Now, that's the clinical answer that they put on the tag as they take him away. But if you choose to think that the explanation has to do with an airborne Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship on a fog-enshrouded night on a flight that never ends, then you're doing your business in an old stand - in The Twilight Zone.
- Grant Sheckly: Gentlemen, this is not a formal hearing. It's more in the nature of a preliminary meeting. As your Operations Chief noted, we're here to unearth as many facts as we can. I'd appreciate hearing from you only facts. You can save us all a lot of time if you'd avoid personal hypotheses, so we can keep the air clear and not clutter it up with six dozen theories. Theories happen to be my business. In the 20-odd years I've been with the FAA I've got a pretty good record in putting together jigsaw puzzles. Maybe some of them haven't been as abnormal as this one, but I'll lay my betting average on the line any hour of the day. All right? Let's get down to business.
- Grant Sheckly: Did you notice anything abnormal?
- Robbins: No, she came in right on the button. She followed my signal up the ramp. She stopped right on the mark where I told her to. She cut her engines when I gave her the signal.
- Grant Sheckly: Gentlemen, I have a theory. Unfortunately, the only way I can prove it or disprove it is going to put me in considerable jeopardy. Any one of you ever hear of mass suggestion?
- Paul Malloy: So?
- Grant Sheckly: I think that's what we're dealing with now - a kind of hypnosis. To put it more bluntly or perhaps a little less believably, I don't think this airplane is really here. I think every one of us had a little hypnosis performed on him, a little suggestion. Someone somewhere told us that a DC-3 is inside this hangar and that it landed this morning. That's what they said, so every one of us had pictured in his mind a DC-3 as he knows one. Therefore, one of us sees the seats as blue, another sees them as brown, still another sees them as red. I read one number off the tail. Two other guys read two others. Don't you understand what I'm trying to say? This particular aircraft doesn't exist. It really isn't here at all.
- Airline Executive Bengston: This is Paul Malloy, our public relations man.
- Grant Sheckly: How much public, and what kind of relations are you poor guys going to have after this one? I got 22 years in this saddle and I've never been licked yet. Oh, some of them take a long time. Couple of tons of metal spread over 50 square miles of countryside. Sometimes, all it is is a misplaced air scoop or maybe a loose bolt in the elevator hinge or... once in a blue moon, a pilot with a psychosis. But it's always something. And that something always shows up.
- Airline Executive Bengston: Look, boys... we've have been theorizing for six solid hours. I'm just a simple-minded vice president in charge of operations, but I've got a passel of newsmen out there bugging me to death as to what kind of haunted operations we are running here.
- Paul Malloy: Tell them to keep their shirts on.
- Airline Executive Bengston: That's what you should be telling them or a reasonable facsimile of an explanation.
- Paul Malloy: Then you better get me another head and a couple of sets of arms, because I've been on that phone for six hours. I've had every news service, every television network, and a couple of professional mind readers trying to figure out what the great big mystery is we're supposed to be hiding in here. And you know how long I can keep it up, Mr. Bengston? Maybe another 15 minutes and then the whole thing is going to pop wide open and we're going to be stuck with rotten egg on our face. And Sheckly, and the government, are going to take our franchise away from us. Incompetence, mental instability, and and you name it, you can have it!
- Grant Sheckly: Have you checked out every one of the names on this passenger manifest?
- Airline Executive Bengston: No, I have not.That's all I need now is to have a small army of relatives from upstate New York clutching at my lapels, asking me for a definitive statement as to where their loved ones are who took Flight 107 out of Buffalo this morning.
- Robbins: ... they jumped out, for a gag or something, I guess.
- Paul Malloy: Well, that's brilliant. That's just brilliant. And what about the pilots, Mr. Holmes? Or is that part just elementary?