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Before the wreckage of this last week’s crash of EgyptAir Flight 804 ended the mystery surrounding what happened to the Airbus A320, cable news immediately jumped on the story. Missing planes are big business. Traveling in the modern age means flying, and flying means getting in a metal cylinder and hurling through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour. For myself, it’s the surrender of control that makes it terrifying. Not that I know how to fly, but I’m at the mercy of the pilot, someone I don’t usually even see. My life is in his or her hands, that’s a lot of trust to place in someone that you don’t know, only reassured by the fact that their lives are in their hands as well and whatever happens to me, happens to them. So that helps. And also knowing that your chances of dying in an airline crash are extraordinarily low, you’ve got a better chance of being struck by lightning or bitten by a shark than going down in a plane.

Now what happened to EgyptAir 804 was probably terror-related (they were already in Cairo airspace when they just turned around for seemingly no reason), but since aviation has only been with us for a little over a hundred years, we have an excellent record of its history. Missing planes are news now because it happens so infrequently. And when it happens, when all the safeguards humans have created to protect themselves during air travel fail, then it’s a big deal. But what if it’s something more than just human or mechanical error, what if it’s something paranormal in nature?

The most recent flight to disappear was Malaysian Airlines Fight 370. Taking off in Kuala Lampur, the flight was supposed to land in Beijing, but never did and was said to have crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The mystery behind that missing plane lasted for months until a piece of wreckage washed up on an island near Africa in the Indian Ocean.

Conspiracies abounded from Flight 370 from North Korea shooting it down to a CIA coverup to the plane being commandeered to land in Russia. Of course, 5% of people even believed that it had something to do with aliens or supernatural activity.  Those people are my favorite. But reliable aviation experts and different authors have challenged the authenticity of the debris, saying it was planted. A new photo that showed up last week has made the veracity of the wreckage more likely, however, and as the public slowly loses interest in the flight, the final mystery might never be solved.

But the most famous place that planes have disappeared has to be the Bermuda Triangle. The three corners are Miami, Florida, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the island of Bermuda in the mid-Atlantic Ocean. Popularized by author Charles Berlitz in his 1974 book, The Bermuda Triangle.

The most famous case of disappearing planes over the triangle comes from December 5, 1945. Flight 19 was a bombing training mission run by Lieutenant Charles Taylor, a flight veteran. Their compasses ended up not working, the planes got lost over the mid-Atlantic and five planes and 14 men were lost at sea and never found. Later, they sent out another plane (a flying boat) to go search for the missing planes.