No, missing ‘Santiago Flight 513’ didn’t land after 35 years with skeletons on board

The story goes like this: Brazil-bound Santiago Airlines Flight 513 departed from West Germany Sept. 4, 1954, and reached its destination 35 years later on Oct. 12, 1989. By that point, though, the plane’s passengers were skeletons. 

An image styled to look like a newspaper’s front page recounted this tale on Facebook.

"Did plane missing for 35 years fly through time warp?" read a question along the top of the image shared Nov. 4. Beneath that, a much larger headline font proclaimed: "1950s airliner lands with 92 skeletons on board." 

The image showed an article written by "Irwin Fisher," that quoted "paranormal researcher Dr. Ceslo Attelo" as having said that the flight "almost certainly entered a time warp and just flew out."

Along with the image, the Facebook poster wrote, "Santiago Flight 513: The missing plane that landed after 35 years with 92 skeletons on board!"

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

(Screenshot from Facebook)

If the story of Santiago Flight 513 sounds too outlandish to be believed, that’s probably because the tale is fictional. 

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A woman holds a sign that says, “I want my daughter to have the right to abortion that I didn’t have.”

A flight’s reappearance after 35 years would be newsworthy — as would a plane arriving at its destination carrying human remains rather than passengers. However, when we searched using Google, Newspapers.com and the Nexis news archive, we found no credible reports or information supporting claims that "Santiago Flight 513" had landed in Brazil in 1989 after 35 years. We also found no evidence or credible reports that a plane landed carrying 92 skeletons on board. 

Other details recounted in the image posted on Facebook do not withstand scrutiny. For example, we found no evidence that "Santiago Airlines" ever existed.

This time-warp tale has also been debunked repeatedly.

In 2019, Snopes reported that a tabloid known for pushing fiction, Weekly World News, first published this story. Using a Google Books search, we found that Weekly World News had in November 1989 printed the same newspaper-style image shared to Facebook. 

In 2007, The Washington Post reported that Weekly World News "covered events that seemed to occur in a parallel universe, a fevered dream world where pop culture mixed with urban legends, conspiracy theories and hallucinations." 

The University of Pennsylvania’s library resource The Online Books Page, an index of books freely available online, described Weekly World News as an "illustrated American publication of weird and curious stories." 

"While presented as news, the stories do not necessarily reflect reality," The Online Books Page said.

We rate a Facebook post’s claim that Santiago Flight 513 "landed after 35 years with 92 skeletons on board" Pants on Fire!

PolitiFact Staff Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.