How do these things get started, anyway? I suspect they begin with a grain of truth…

Back when I was working for the navy, I was the Contract Compliance Inspector for the fuel operation at the big naval air station in the middle of San Diego Bay. We had a number of satellite facilities around the city to which I would drive in order to perform the necessary checks. But one of them was on one of the Channel Islands about 90 miles offshore, and as I never figured out how to get the company truck out there, I had to fly out and back on a small airliner that the navy contracted for the purpose.

Each time the contract changed hands, the aircraft type naturally changed to whatever example the current contractor was flying at the time, and one of them operated the Convair 340 Metropolitan, an airliner from the early 1950s meant to be an improvement on the classic DC-3.

This particular aircraft carried fifty passengers, and commonly made a trip out in the morning, and returned with whoever was out there for a single day at about 4:00 in the afternoon, a group that included me. The only little problem with that was that the job I did out there took an hour tops, usually less, and all that was left to me then was to sit in the terminal and read a book until it was time to come back in. It seemed wasteful, but it needed to be done, and I was the one who did it.

But on one particular trip, an unexpected factor made itself known. See, back in the day, the navy allowed the Boy Scouts to operate a wilderness camp out there, and it just so happened that I made the trip out on a day when a second airliner brought a Boy Scout troop out for their week-long campout. I had no idea this was happening, and I drew a vehicle from the pool and drove off to do my inspections. I was surprised but only mildly curious when I returned to the terminal to find a second Metro parked out front. Being none of my concern, I claimed the most comfortable seat in the building and got out the book I had brought to while away the hours.

About thirty minutes after I had made myself at home, the flight crew of the second plane walked through the terminal where the captain took a look at me and asked, “Are you going back?”

When I affirmed that indeed I was, he told me I could ride back with them. Thrilled at evading what promised to be a boring and wasted day, I eagerly joined them, taking a seat near the door of this fifty-passenger airliner. It started up, rolled out, and in the settled, late-morning air, I enjoyed one of the smoothest flights I ever experienced on that particular route.

But, looking around that big ol’ empty airplane, I got to thinking… What if this plane goes down? I mean, it happens; this was the plane that killed half of Lynryd Skynyrd, after all. Airline crashes make the news, and what would the headline read?

CHARTERED AIRLINER DOWN AT SEA. FLIGHT CREW AND PASSENGER LOST.

I’m sure the “passenger,” singular, wouldn’t have gone unnoticed for long, and this is just the sort of thing that the yo-yos and wingnuts among us seize upon. Why was a civilian aboard a chartered flight to a navy weapons testing facility? Why did he rate his own aircraft and flight crew, including a flight attendant? Whatever was he doing out there? Sure, the navy’s going to say that I was just a low-level inspector hitching a ride on a convenient plane, but the counter, which sounds logical on the face of it, would be, “Low-level inspectors don’t rate their own airplane complete with a goddamn stewardess! Now, what’s going on, really?” I’ve always imagined that they would eventually settle on the narrative that I was out there to test-fly the captured alien spacecraft.

Oh, yeah, the conspiracy nuts live for this kind of stuff, and I have a feeling that this is how about 99% of conspiracy theories originate. Sure, even a blind dog trips over a rabbit once in a while, but for the most part, it’s amazing how uninformed people can look at a simple situation and see the most outrageous events in progress.

Which gets me to my point: This is a site where we deal with the dark and creepy. Conspiracy theories are certainly dark and creepy. Do any of them fuel your writing? Your preferred reading? What if there really had been a captured alien craft out there? What a story that would be, huh? There wasn’t, of course, but we deal in fiction here, and our motto is, or should be, never let the truth get in the way of a good story; The conspiracy theorists never do!

Happy reading…