Help debunking ghost story

[Reivax]

Has anyone heard about the Ghosts of Flight 401? I need some help debunking this one. I'm struggling to come up with a good explanation for this. I am thinking that maybe there was some exaggeration or sentimentalization involved. Does anyone have any suggestions?


Thanks in advance

 

[Aepervius]

Not enough detail. All I can say is that tehre was a book and two film from roughly the same time period (1972 crash - 1976 book - 1978 tv film - I even saw that one where you can see the reflection of a pilote or copilote in an oven door and the hostess freak out , they finally exorcize all the stuff and remove it from the plane or whatever) and it is hard to separate self delusion from anything so long after. A friend ex GF started seeing spooky things everywhere after my friend told he got the flat cheap because somebody had suicided in it. The things is, he was a jerk and it did not happen. Now multiply that by who-know-how-many people which upon learning the stuff was used in the plane for reparation they started seeing spooky stuff. Real ? probaby not. But there is no way to say either way now.

ETA: NUll hypothesis / preponderence of evidence says that people self deluded into freaking out.

 

[eight bits]

It's not 100% clear what statments you're trying to respond to.

According to your link, people in a position to know the maintenance history of the aircraft they were assigned to (that is, airline employees), took to "seeing" former colleagues on planes which were using salvaged parts from the crashed plane.

This seems altogether natural to me. Some people experienced their thoughts, on a subject made salient for them by the airline's maintenace policy, as visual events. There may also have been a "dead man's gun" element (a reluctance to use equipment of someone who fatally failed in their mission, whether or not the equipment was causally related to the failure) which added to the emotional force of the situation.

 

[Apathia]

Fiction.

 

[Pixel42]

Has anyone heard about the Ghosts of Flight 401? I need some help debunking this one.

There's nothing to debunk. Just stories (which may or may not be accurate accounts) about people (who could have been telling the truth, lying or honestly mistaken) who say they saw things (which may or may not have really been there).

There might have been a way to investigate the validity of the stories whilst they were still being reported, but there's no way of doing so now.

 

[Hokulele]

This was brought up recently, and decent rebuttals were posted here:

Here we go. Eastern Airlines Flight 401.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_401#The_Ghosts_of_Flight_401

The site doesn't have nearly as much detail as the book, so I'm going to quote a somewhat lengthy passage and wait for the mods to hand slap.

... Faye Merryweather, a flight attendant, saw Repo's face looking out at her from an oven in the galley of Tri-Star 318. Understandably alarmed, she fetched two colleagues, one of whom, the flight engineer, had been a friend of Repo's and recognized him instantly. All three heard Repo warn them to "Watch out for fire on this airplane". The plane later encountered serious engine trouble and the last leg of its flight was cancelled. It is interesting to note that the galley of Tri-Star 318 had been salvaged from the wreckage of Flight 401."

Compelling, isn't it? Yet when I look at the bibliography of the book, the source of that information is John G. Fuller's 'Ghost of Flight 401'.

http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Flight-401-John-Fuller/dp/0425062341

(BTW, the publication date of his books on Amazon is COMPLETELY wrong for reasons unknown. It was actually published in 1978.)

Funnily enough, the author is married to his researcher for the book.

Additionally, John G. Fuller has written books about alien abduction, mediums, and psychic surgery - all of which he believes in.

If you scroll to the bottom of this article, Martin Gardner responds to Fuller regarding the psychic surgery book:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1974/jul/18/trick-or-treatment/

So, all that in mind, my response to Fuller is "Cool story, bro." What is yours?

(Link provided since the Quote function doesn't preserve nesting.)

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=8683844#post8683844

and here:

.
At the time of that crash, just after the L-1011 entered service, we in Flight Test were quite interested in it...
We determined the best fix for the problem was an aural as well as visual indication that the autopilot had changed to control-wheel steering mode.
The beep alerted the flight crew.
As for parts of that airplane being reused... from the photos we had of the crash, there was little of anything major not destroyed. The galley would be scrap metal.
The story of ghosts on planes with recycled parts was probably just an urban myth begun by someone at Eastern.