The Disappearance of Jose Pagan Santos

Two pilots were flying from the Dominican Republic towards Puerto Rico in 1980 when they began transmitting distress calls: three Maydays in all, describing a luminous object harassing the aircraft and forcing it off its intended course. The calls reached the ground by relay, picked up and passed on by an Iberia jetliner in the area. Then the transmissions stopped. A large search drawing on more than one country followed and no trace of the aircraft or of Jose Pagan Santos and Luis Maldonado Torres was ever found.

What is on the record

The archive resolves three claimants here across two videos from a single reporting channel. The first telling is the flight itself: the Maydays, the relay, the disappearance and the failed search. That part of the account is the sober end of the file, and it is also the part the archive can least support, because there are no documents in the entry. No air traffic transcript, no accident report and no search record sits here. What the archive holds is a source describing those things.

The second telling belongs to a different class again. It reports that the pilot's parents said he later materialised in front of them in a flash of light, wearing a metallic green suit, and told them he had been taken by beings to an underwater base in the San Juan Trench. That is a family's claim relayed through one channel. It does not corroborate the flight account and the flight account does not support it, and the file makes no attempt to reconcile the two.

The three claimants are the two men aboard, Jose Antonio Pagan Santos and Luis Maldonado Torres, and the pilot's parents. The men aboard reach the record only through the relayed Maydays.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L3, the archive's independent-testimony tier. It rests on testimony alone, from one channel, with no paperwork behind it, and the two tellings pull in different directions. What happened to that aircraft is not resolved here.