Philippines fisherman claims he found ghost flight MH370

Police in the Philippines are checking out a seemingly impossible story that a fisherman has found on a remote island the mostly intact Malaysian Airlines flight that has been missing for 20 months.

"It seems unlikely" that the fisherman's tale is true, that he found the wreckage of MH370 with the skeleton of the pilot still strapped into his seat, said Jalaluddin Abdul Rahman, the police chief of Sabah state, the closest Malaysian location to Tawi Tawi.

But authorities are intrigued, and not just by the claim that the plane is the long-missing Malaysian flight. "We have no reports of any aircraft that have gone down in the area," said a Philippines police officer in the Maguindanao region."

Tawi Tawi is almost directly east of MH370's flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, over the Gulf of Thailand. But based on all available evidence, the mystery flight turned to the west.

Last month, an islander found a large part of Flight MH370's wing, washed up on a beach in Reunion, west of Australia. That is the general area that experts have predicted the flight crashed into the ocean, and where it may eventually be found.

MH370 had 239 people aboard when it took off from Malaysia on a routine red-eye flight to Beijing, where it was scheduled to make an early morning landing. Shortly before midnight the plane vanished from radar. There was no indication of trouble on board, but the plane was seen on military radar making a sharp left-hand to the west just before it finally vanished from all view.

Speculation on the cause of its disappearance, apart from conspiracy theories, including massive and sudden loss of pressure, as well as terrorism.

Because its disappearance is such a total mystery, authorities now take seriously any possible explanation, which is why police were on their way to Tawi Tawi to check out the fisherman's tale.