SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- On March 8, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 went missing with 239 people aboard. Its disappearance from radar without any signs of trouble from the cockpit, combined with revelations about suspicious passengers and conflicting information disseminated by the Malaysian government, have fueled the mystery and countless conspiracy theories. Rescuers canvassed the plane’s likeliest resting places with coordinated aerial searches and the deployment of a Bluefin-21 underwater vehicle that scans the seabed with sonar equipment. But despite the massive and ongoing efforts, no one has yet to locate the gigantic 777 in a confined swath of ocean where black box pings were detected consistently. On Tuesday, frustrated crews announced a radical expansion of the hunt to cover outer space.

“We owe it to the families of those travelers and to the world to find this jet, no matter where it is,” said Clayton Chiclitz, CEO of Yoyodyne, the defense contractor hired for the augmented initiative. Several countries joined forces to look for the missing plane, and each incurred significant costs. Australia, the country leading the search, revealed that it would need to seek bids from private contractors to continue the hunt. Chiclitz said the Galatronics division of Yoyodyne would provide all funding from here on.

“We still haven’t found a single piece of confirmed debris from the plane,” an Australian search leader admitted. “We’ve found a lot of trash from ships, but no wreckage from Flight 370.”

Chiclitz criticized the “appalling lack of imagination and resources” of the multinational crews so far.

“It’s nice to see world powers united and finally working together to accomplish nothing,” he said, “but the fact that a bunch of governments -- with all their satellites and spies and data collection systems -- can’t find a 300,000-ton, 242-foot long hunk of metal in a tiny section of water tells me they’re looking in the wrong place. I mean, did they get their coordinates from a bad copy of the headpiece of the Staff of Ra, like burned into the palm of a prissy Nazi?”

An incredulous Chiclitz said everything about the current recovery efforts defies reason: “Their thinking is too narrow, their tools too limited. One day they tell us they’ve discovered signals from the black box. Those turn out to be dolphins humping or radio interference or a boy on the shore saying ‘Ping’ over and over again. The satellites they used to check the 600 runways in the vicinity for signs of a covert landing? Same ones Google operates. No plane, but you know what you can locate on Google Maps? Pokemon, Middle Earth and the inside of the TARDIS. And why doesn’t the NSA know where the plane is? You’re telling me Boeing engineers came up with code those meddling bastards couldn’t crack? Please. Flight 370 isn’t in liquid space, it’s in outer space.”

According to Chiclitz, the only sensible approach, in keeping with his vow to leave no stone unturned, is to search the discarded junk orbiting the planet for signs of the missing airliner.

“With NASA all but shuttered, who’s going to look in space? China? Russia? Not so much,” Chiclitz said. “Regardless, this hunt must continue -- forever, if necessary. This story is too important. I own majority shares in several corporate news agencies. Unless Cliven Bundy actually shoots somebody, people will tire of his racism and ironic comparisons to Rosa Parks. But the search for hundreds of victims, trapped in a vessel that vanished into thin air, like in the Rapture, or which could be floating in space -- now that’s got something for everyone: a dramatic life and death struggle, religious overtones, hard science fiction. It’s perfect. Plus, it diverts people from news I would rather not have reported on the front page, like the final stages of the wealthy’s plan to claim control of a global oligarchy.”

2014. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See disclaimers.