HIDDEN CASE FILES

  MH370 Is Back in the News: The Search Has a New Deadline, But the Plane Is Still Missing Some mysteries survive because nobody has enough evidence. MH370 is different: it survives because investigators have too much evidence pointing in different directions, and the one object that could connect it all—the aircraft itself—has still not been found. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared on 8 March 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. It carried 227 passengers and 12 crew members. The aircraft was a Boeing 777, one of the world’s most recognizable long-haul passenger jets, moving through a heavily monitored era of satellite communication, radar, and global tracking. Yet the plane vanished into one of the planet’s largest and most difficult search environments. Now the case has a fresh hook. Malaysia has extended its agreement with the deep-sea exploration company Ocean Infinity, giving the search a new 12-month window from July 2026 to June 2027. The search is not a vi...

  The Flannan Isles Lighthouse Keepers: Three Men Vanished Into a Winter Sea A lighthouse is built to make absence impossible. Its beam warns ships that land is near. Its keepers maintain the lamp, record the weather, and answer when a vessel arrives. So when the relief boat reached the Flannan Isles in December 1900, the first strange detail was not that the lighthouse was dark. It was that nobody came to meet the ship. The remote lighthouse stood on Eilean Mòr, one of the Flannan Isles off Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. Three men were assigned to the station: James Ducat, the principal keeper; Thomas Marshall, the second assistant; and Donald McArthur, an occasional keeper who was filling in for an absent colleague. On 26 December, the lighthouse tender Hesperus arrived for the routine relief. The crew sounded the ship’s horn. They fired a rocket. There was no response. When relief keeper Joseph Moore climbed toward the station, he found the doors closed and the lighthouse empty. Th...