On January 30, 1979, a Boeing 707-323C cargo aircraft with the registration PP-VLU took off from Narita International Airport (NRT) en route to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Around 20 minutes into the flight, the crew contacted Narita tower for a routine check-in and said they were around 300 miles from the Japanese coast.

When the next check-in some 40 minutes later never happened, controllers in the tower tried for an hour to contact the aircraft. They then declared an emergency, dispatching the Navy and Air Force to look for the plane. They searched the area where they thought the plane would be for the next eight days but found no wreckage or signs of the crew.

The Captain was an experienced pilot

With no distress message, wreckage, or crew found, conspiracy theorists started to speculate why the aircraft had vanished. Before we get into possible reasons why the plane might have disappeared, it's worth pointing out that the Captain of the flight was a highly experienced pilot - 55-year-old Brazilian Captain Gilberto Araújo da Silva had over 23,000 flying hours and had previously survived a crash landing of a Boeing 707 outside Paris in 1973.

Varig Flight 820 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris-Orly was inbound when a fire broke out in one of the plane's lavatories. Smoke quickly spread throughout the cabin and into the cockpit, and despite the flight crew wearing oxygen masks, they could not read the instruments. Declaring an emergency, Araújo da Silva decided to land the plane in an onion field to avoid crashing in a populated area.

Sadly, most of the plane's 123 passengers had already died of smoke inhalation by then. Araújo da Silva and other crew members, and one passenger sitting in the front of the aircraft survived. Despite the tremendous loss of life, Araújo da Silva was labeled a hero for not crashing into a built-up area.

The conspiracy theories

Now to the conspiracy theories... Onboard flight Varig Flight 967 was a collection of at least 50 paintings by Japanese-Brazilian artist Manabu Mabe that were valued at over a million dollars. This led some people to speculate that the aircraft was hijacked for the paintings. Meanwhile, others believed that the plane had wandered into Soviet airspace and was shot down, just like Korean Airlines Flight 902 a year earlier.

The most interesting of the theories, though, was that there was a dismantled MiG-25 aircraft along with the paintings. A few years earlier, Soviet Air Force pilot Viktor Belenko made the headlines when he flew his top-secret Foxbat to Hakodate Airport (HKD) in Japan. At the time, the MiG-25 was the Soviet Union's most advanced aircraft and something the Americans wanted to get their hands on.

Viktor Belenko was subsequently granted political asylum in the United States, but the Japanese were reluctant to hand over the plane, fearing reprisals from the Soviet Union. However, they allowed the Americans to do ground tests on the engines before dismantling the aircraft and packing it in crates to be shipped back to the Soviets. In November 1976, the dismantled plane was sent to Vladivostok aboard a Russian cargo ship.

When they opened the crates, they discovered that around 20 aircraft components were missing. People speculated that these missing parts were aboard Varig Flight 967 and that the Soviet Union intercepted the Boeing 707 and forced it to land somewhere in Russia. All three of these theories seem highly unlikely.

The investigation

An investigation into the disappearance of Varig Flight 967 concluded that the most likely cause of the plane going missing was a sudden depressurization. The flight crew would then have lost consciousness and suffocated to death, while the plane would have continued flying on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. However, extensive searches did not discover a single piece of wreckage from the aircraft, hence the speculation about other possible explanations.

Do you have any theories about what might have happened to Varig Flight 967? If so, please tell us about them in the comment section.