From the editor: Explaining the unexplainable

What to make of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, missing for more than a week?

Theories take hold for a few days—the flight crew landed it on some uncharted island for no known reason, it scorched Kazakhstani earth with blazing exhaust from just 5,000 feet, it plunged into the Indian Ocean—before being contradicted by the very Malaysian officials who offered up the hypotheses in the first place.

It’s difficult to gauge their competence. With nothing to go on, they turn to such reliable regional governments as China, Pakistan and Myanmar for assistance. When the U.S. released information regarding pings from the Boeing aircraft’s engines, Rolls Royce in England reportedly dismissed the notion. In the absence of real information, television networks do what they do best, which is to report the latest guesswork. Meanwhile, the fate of a few hundred people teeters in the balance.

For many, the most intriguing—or perhaps disturbing—revelation brought to light by the disappearance of flight 370 is that something as substantial as a giant jetliner can drop off the map. Why invest in expensive stealth technology when a couple of pilots can pull a David Copperfield?

This set has an undue faith in technology. Satellites track every vehicle, down to the license plate. The NSA listens in on every phone call, even from the most remote locations. On a more benign level, OnStar and Siri help us find coffee shops in Calcutta and the best doughnuts on Guam … or so this particular crowd believes.

But keep in mind, a slew of dedicated researchers (and cranks, to be honest) have yet to locate the last whereabouts of Amelia Earhart. And there there are those mysterious ghost ships that haunted mariners over the centuries, the Mary Celeste being perhaps the most famous.

Things aren’t always that easy to figure out. Modern generations, however, expect to tap something into Wikipedia and find the answer.

Keeping in mind there are families and lives fretting each hour without resolution, the saga is still somehow awe-inspiring. No matter how much we try, the world continues to resist full conquest by humanity. Vast stretches the size of the United States are not covered by satnav, radar or high definition satellite—or so the governments say.

Perhaps those charged with researching the matter expect data to lead them. In the absence of it, humans must expand their minds into the unknown and set to work finding something plausible.

The entire exercise brought to mind a grad school assignment. Thucydides wrote a history of the ancient Peloponnesian War and, naturally, did so without mentioning dates. In the years BC, after all, people didn’t sit around reminiscing about that thing that happened in a numbered year. They did not check their sundials and ask “is it AD yet?” Instead, they might remember the reign of a certain king or the raid that occurred during a grandfather’s lifetime.

Our assignment was to determine chronology from a book without dates.

Yep—we were searching for something that existed in reality sometime back. Unfortunately, hard data had been swallowed up by millennia.

Something in me says that patience was expected back then, especially when mysteries were woven to Homeric lengths. When ancients came across the unexplained, they made up stories to compensate. For example, when they unearthed mastodon bones they conjured up races of giants to make sense of the discovery.

For those of us born into an era of instant gratification and instant information, however, the lack of detail causes no such fantastic alarm. Instead, we turn to rumor and speculation. Add a touch of international paranoia and planes began zooming over disputed territory at ground level, with the deft touch granted in Hollywood films.

Now we know. Until, of course, the truth comes out.