On the evening of November 9, 1957, an airliner — Pan Am Flight 944 — was on the first leg of a round-the-world journey that began earlier that day in San Francisco. Its next stop was to have been Honolulu, but the Boeing 377 never arrived. It appeared to have just vanished. What followed was the biggest air-sea search since the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. Just days later, the floating wreckage of Flight 944 was discovered about 1,000 miles northeast of Honolulu. All 44 people onboard were dead. Three anomalies confounded NTSB investigators: (1) There was no decipherable distress call received from the flight; (2) the location of debris showed that the plane was well off course and headed away from a Coast Guard ship that could have helped; and (3) elevated levels of carbon monoxide were found in several of the bodies that were recovered. Other things were puzzling as well, like the fact that 14 of the 19 bodies recovered were wearing life vests but no shoes, indicating that some preparation had been made for ditching. Floating fragments of the fuselage and cabin indicated that the airplane hit the ocean with the nose slightly down and the right wing lowered. Although several of the bodies exhibited “impact trauma,” the fact that most died from drowning suggests that the plane’s final plunge into the sea wasn’t completely controlled. Pan Am and the FBI suspected foul play, but in January 1959, after an unusually long investigation, baffled NTSB officials found “no probable cause” for the crash and formally closed their inquiry.
