In January 2026, a post on Facebook (archived) shared a three-minute clip seeming to show podcaster Joe Rogan telling a story of a plane that disappeared while flying between Germany and Argentina in 1962 and reappeared in 1991, 29 years later, landing at a Chilean airport.
According to the story, it was a routine commercial flight for 92 passengers and six crew members for the plane’s first three hours in the air. The pilot’s final transmission was apparently “We see something ahead” — which the Rogan in the video erroneously said was six words — before going silent and disappearing. There were search operations on the Atlantic Ocean and in parts of South America before authorities determined the plane to be lost at sea. On Oct. 3, 1991, Chilean air traffic controllers noticed a radar signature that matched an outdated plane model that hadn’t flown for decades, although the exact model wasn’t named. After its landing, authorities went inside the aircraft to find everything inside dated back to 1962, even though none of the passengers or crew appeared to have aged at all. All the passengers apparently insisted the plane had been in the air for only a few hours.
The same video appeared on TikTok (archived) several minutes after the original Facebook post. A shorter version with a slightly different script also popped up elsewhere on Facebook (archived).
This was not a true story, and we’ve rated the claim false. Not only did the story lack evidence, but it was also eerily similar to past fictitious stories about the reappearance of missing aircraft.
The social media posts were the only sources Snopes could find for the story of the plane that reappeared after going missing for 29 years. However, there are plenty of similar fictional stories of planes disappearing and reappearing varying amount of years later.
Most prominent among these stories was one of a plane that apparently disappeared in 1955 and reappeared 37 years later, which Snopes fact-checked previously. That urban legend was based on three identical stories Weekly World News, a tabloid, published in 1985, 1993 and 1999 about the supposed disappearance of “Flight 914.” In 1989, Weekly World News published a story about the reappearance of a different missing plane, this one vanishing in 1954 and reappearing 35 years later, supposedly landing perfectly at an airport in Brazil even though all 92 occupants of the plane were skeletons.
Weekly World News has a reputation for publishing fictious stories, particularly with a supernatural bent. On its about page, Weekly World News calls itself “the authority on aliens, mutants, conspiracy theories, biblical prophecies, health cures, and wayward politicians.” That same page claims Weekly World News began as a print publication in 1683; in actuality, it began publishing in 1979, according to the Library of Congress.
The video shared on social media resembled various aspects of these Weekly World News stories. In the Flight 914 story, the passengers and crew were alive and seemingly confused that they landed in a different year from when they took off. The plane in that story landed in Venezuela despite originally flying from New York City to Miami. In the other story, the 92 skeletons echoed the Facebook video’s 92 passengers.
Half a month prior to posting the video about the plane disappearing for 29 years, Easy PodCast, the Facebook page that first posted the video, shared another video of a similar story (archived) that also echoed the Weekly World News stories. In that video, a flight from Miami to Los Angeles disappeared only to land in Venezuela 37 years later.
The Rogan voiceover, as well as the script itself, was likely generated by artificial intelligence tools. The video’s Rogan spoke with an unnatural, stilted cadence that didn’t match the way the real Rogan speaks. The script itself included factual errors that suggested AI generation. The most obvious of these mistakes was the video’s Rogan referring to the four-word transmission in the story as six words long.
Another part of the script that seemed to be an AI error was the description of the search for the missing plane. The video claimed that the aircraft disappeared three hours into a flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to Buenos Aires, Argentina, but also that the search for the missing flight was concentrated in the Atlantic Ocean and parts of South America. Based on a modern flight path, plane three hours into a flight from Frankfurt to Buenos Aires would likely be in the ocean just south of Portugal, in Europe. Therefore it would make no sense to search parts of South America but not southwestern Europe or northwestern Africa, closer to where the plane would have been at the time it disappeared.
Fictional stories of planes going missing and reappearing at a different time aren’t uncommon. The premise is the basis for a 1961 episode of “The Twilight Zone” and the NBC television series “Manifest.”
Credits: Fact Check
