The ongoing search for a missing Boeing 777 has become just about the strangest story I’ve ever heard.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/14/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

A jetliner takes off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing. It flies less than an hour then radio and radar contact is lost. The assumption is that the plane crashed into the Gulf of Thailand. The search begins for wreckage. None is found. Not only that, no one can account for why the plane lost contact. There was no may-day signal sent out.

Now it seems that everyone on the planet has theories about what happened to Malaysia Air Flight 370 and the 239 people on board.

My goodness, this story is giving me a serious headache.

The loved ones of those aboard need closure but authorities are now more confused than ever about the fate of the plane.

* If it plunged into the ocean at 500 mph, it would have broken up and something would have floated to the surface. Those “flotation devices” the passengers sit on would be seen.

* If it crashed on land satellites could have seen the wreckage from space. Lord knows Earth orbit has enough surveillance craft circling the globe.

* If someone deliberately turned off the transponder tracking signal, then for whom is that individual working?

* If someone hijacked the airplane and landed it in, say, Pakistan or Afghanistan, how does someone keep secret the presence of a massive transcontinental jetliner?

* Doesn’t someone almost always take “credit” for hijacking an airplane?

The hijacking theory is starting to get some traction from “experts” who claim to know such things. Of all the theories out there, the hijacking seems the least plausible. “They could have landed it in the middle of nowhere,” a colleague told me this morning. My response was that there really is no such thing these days as the “middle of nowhere.” Technology enables the entire planet to be seen by someone.

The U.S. Navy has joined the search, along with ships from India, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand. Air crews from the United States and China are looking over many tens of thousands of square miles of territory — over land and water alike.

This mystery is deepening and is getting downright scary.