More than a decade after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished, a new conspiracy theory has picked up serious momentum online: that the Boeing 777 was teleported by three glowing orbs operated by the US military. There's just one problem. The videos backing it up look like they were assembled from stock footage.
First, the facts that aren't in dispute. MH370 left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 227 passengers and 12 crew. The aircraft stopped communicating, turned back across Malaysia, and apparently flew on for hours until, satellite data suggests, it ran out of fuel somewhere over the southern Indian Ocean. A wing piece washed up on Réunion in 2015, and debris has since appeared along western Indian Ocean shores. The main wreckage has never been found — and that void is exactly where theories like this one grow.
The teleportation narrative is championed by Ashton Forbes, a healthcare technology consultant from St. Paul, Minnesota, who has built an audience of over 300,000 on Twitter and 100,000 YouTube subscribers since 2023. His version of events: secret US fusion-powered orbs manipulate space-time, circle the plane, and whisk it away — supposedly as a show of strength aimed at China. The story has been profiled skeptically in Rolling Stone and given more than two and a half hours of airtime by commentator Candace Owens, whose interview with Forbes drew over 1.7 million views. As the story has grown, so have its claims: a battery fire as the trigger, Diego Garcia as the destination, passengers quietly returned home, plus hidden breakthroughs in superconductivity and unlimited energy.
Skeptics have picked the footage apart. Analyst Mick West found that the flash in the supposed thermal recording matches a shockwave effect from a 1990s effects library called Pyromania. The satellite-view background appears to be a stock cloud image from Textures.com, shot over Japan in 2012 — the cloud formations line up exactly. There are also compositing errors, wobbly contrails, and duplicated distorted frames masquerading as a second camera angle. Forbes's response to the stock-image problem is telling: he argues intelligence agencies planted those images to discredit the videos. In other words, evidence of a fake becomes evidence of a cover-up. Even would-be allies have backed away — Joe Rogan reportedly cancelled a booked interview after looking into it, and Kim Dotcom has distanced himself.
Why does any of this matter to someone who flies? Because MH370 remains the defining mystery of modern aviation, and the gap between what investigators know and what families have been told leaves room for whatever story fills the silence. The mainstream investigative conclusion — that the turn-back was likely made manually, pointing toward the flight deck — is grim but grounded in satellite pings and physical debris. The orb videos, by contrast, appear to be special effects stacked on stock photography. If you come across the footage on your feed, you now know what's behind it.
