“There is only one explanation” my 7 year old son told me with all the seriousness he could muster “the aliens have abducted the plane.” I couldn’t really pooh-pooh him away, for it is almost a week now and apparently, “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” have failed to come up with even a plausible answer, leave alone find the missing airliner, or its debris, or whatever.
“Don’t you remember how Tintin’s Flight 714 was hijacked to a remote island” he went on, “that too, near the same area where this plane has gone missing?” A big time fan of Ben Tennyson, the hugely popular cartoon character, he was also heavily into “Ancient Aliens” (which I have always felt was too “heavy” for his years) and his obvious, even obsessive interest in all matters alien was showing.
We were watching the news on TV and what he told me next, jittered me out of my complacency. “The Strait of Malacca is like the Bermuda Triangle and has a history of strange things happening to vessels” said the young one, trying hard to impress me with his knowledge of the exotic. He was correct, for I recalled having read about the strange case of a death ship that had vanished without a trace in the region, once upon a time, long, long ago…
This is the story of Dutch flag carrier SS Ourang Medang, dates backs to 1947 when many a passing ship had picked up a chilling distress call for help that also claimed most of the crew, including the Captain was dead. The source of the call was pinpointed and the first to reach the ship was a conscripted American liner called the Silver Star. When all efforts of communication failed, the crew from the American ship boarded the vessel – to stumble upon a gruesome scene. The deck was littered with the dead seamen- their eyes almost bursting out of the sockets, their arms seemingly jostling with the unseen assailants, their ghastly faces telling the tale of death, brought about by excruciating, unbearable pain.
All the men had died an agonizingly painful death that had dawned on them suddenly: the Captain at his post, the communications officer, his fingers touching the keys of the radio, though there were no signs of the assailants who had unleashed the massacre. What was more, the members of the boarding party had felt and extreme chill in the hold of the ship, even though the outside temperature was scorching to put things mildly. But that was not the end of the strange saga.
No sooner had the ship been secured with an intention of towing it to the nearest port, that an equally eerie explosion rocked it and sank it into the unknown depths. Till date, there is no plausible explanation of either the cause of the mass deaths on board or the explosion that rocked the ship. What is even more baffling is the fact, that repeated attempts to investigate and bring the truth to light have drawn a blank as if by some “divine” ordain, the records erased for posterity, consigned to a watery grave.
Naturally, conspiracy theories abound. From Alien Abduction, undersea methane outburst to an unknown plague unleashed by a local Godzilla. Equally creepy is the theory that the ship was actually carrying, clandestinely, the chemical warheads that were developed during the World War II by the notorious “Unit 731” (also known as the Tango Unit / Den of Cannibals) – founded by the brilliant, but misguided Japanese Bacteriologist Shiro Ishii – and confiscated by the Americans, who had granted Ishii and his associates indemnity in exchange of access to the weapons they had developed.
The story of SS Ourang Medang remains one of the most baffling, unexplained yarns of horror. Let’s hope the passengers and crew on board the Malaysian Airline Flight 370 had, continue to have, a more peaceful fate. May God reunite them with their near and dear ones.
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