The family, from Hawaii is urging for 30-year-old Hannah Kobayashi to be found after she went missing in Los Angeles while she was due to fly to New York City.
The woman flew from her home in Maui on November 8 with the plan of arriving in NYC the day after.
But her mum and sister have been left worried sick and confused after she seemingly vanished into thin air at the LAX airport.
According to them, she never got on her connecting flight to the Big Apple.
Hannah Kobayash was supposed to go on her ‘bucket list’ trip (YouTube/IslandNews)
Her mother, Brandi Yee told HawaiiNewsNow: “I didn’t hear from her. I texted her, ‘Hey, are you in New York City yet?’ She just texted me, ‘Not yet.’
“My sister, I reached out to her, and I’m like, ‘Hey, have you heard from Hannah?’ She’s like, ‘No. She’s supposed to meet me at the hotel in New York City and we’re supposed to go to a show tonight’”.
Her sister Sydni Kobayashi and her mum believe that Hannah left the airport to attend an event, as text messages from her said she ‘had a spiritual awakening and was heading back to the airport’.
She then later shared how she was ‘sorry for a craziness’ and that she was ‘definitely intercepted’.
A friend of hers thinks that she’s in trouble. According to the pal, texts she received from the star left her feeling worried.
She revealed that they read as though she had been scammed.
Her family claim her mobile is off and last pinged at the airport (YouTube/IslandNews)
The message said: “I got tricked pretty much into giving away all my funds. For someone I thought I loved.”
The family claim that her phone was turned off on November 11 while she was at the Los Angeles Airport., and they haven’t heard from her since.
Yee shared of the friend: “She heard from Hannah. She was at LAX, and she said that she was scared.”
Kobayashi agreed that ‘she texted her that she was scared and that she couldn’t come back home or something’.
Calling it ‘really weird texts’, the pair think it could have been someone else texting from her mobile.
According to the pair, it ‘did not sound like her’ at all.
Worried, her mum shared that they share locations, but when they call or text, nothing is ‘getting delivered’ and they can’t locate her mobile phone.
After contacting the Los Angeles Police Department and filing a missing person’s report, they were told that she wasn’t a priority case as she isn’t considered vulnerable.
This means that they have to wait ‘48 hours before they could do anything’.
Her mum said it was ‘because she’s not elderly, she’s not mentally off’ and ‘she’s not under age.’
She added: “I woke up last night crying and I just like, this like the sister, mother, anyone’s worst nightmare of losing your child.
“Please help her, if you can. If you know where she’s at, or you have the chance to just help her, please. We just want to bring her home.”
As of now, her disappearance remains a mystery.
LADbible contacted the Los Angeles Police Department for comment.
The incident occurred on 21 October 1978, as 20-year-old pilot Frederick Valentich was flying a Cessna 182L light aircraft from Moorabbin Airport in southern Melbourne, Australia, to King Island when he disappeared an hour into his journey.
His chilling final transmission is sure to send shivers down your spine though.
The young pilot was making his way over the Bass Strait Triangle, an area of sea between Victoria and Tasmania, infamous for ships and planes vanishing in.
More or less an Australian ‘Bermuda triangle’, people have theorised what may have happened, over the years.
Where was he going and who was he?
We know that he was heading for King Island, but why?
Valentich racked up around 150 hours of flying time, but was rejected from the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) twice due to his lack of qualifications, despite being part of the RAAF Air Training Corps.
He was also studying to become a commercial pilot, but failed all his commercial licence exams several times, despite being desperate to have a career in the industry.
The 20-year-old had a record of reckless flying too, being warned after flying into a controlled zone and into clouds on numerous occasions.
It is still unknown why he undertook the journey to King Island that evening, as he told friends and air officials different stories.
What happened, exactly?
He radioed Melbourne Flight Service to inform them that an unidentified aircraft was following him at 4,500ft, but they responded by telling him that there was no recognised traffic at that height.
Valentich said he saw a large aircraft with four bright landing lights with a shiny metal surface and a green light.
The craft passed 1,000ft above him, when he revealed that he was experiencing engine problems.
Flight Service asked him to identify the plane, and he replied: “It’s not an aircraft.”
The final radio from his plane was described as a ‘metallic scratching’.
Australian Department of Transport
The search
Authorities launched a sea and air search, with shipping traffic, a RAAF plane and eight civilian aircraft searching an area of more than 1,000 square miles.
After four days, the search was halted as nothing was found, though in 1983, an engine cowl flap washed ashore on Flinders Island.
Upon closer inspection, The Bureau of Air Safety Investigation concluded that ‘the part has been identified as having come from a Cessna 182 aircraft between a certain range of serial numbers’, meaning there is a possibility that it could have been Valentich’s.
What are the potential causes of his disappearance?
Faking his own death
Many conspiracies have flown around since the incident, from the pilot staging his own disappearance, as police received reports of a light aircraft landing not far from Cape Otway, just 45 minutes from his start point, around the time he ‘disappeared’.
Accidental crash
He could also have been disorientated while flying upside down, as the lights he saw may have been his own lights reflected in the sea before tragically crashing.
However, the type of plane he was flying had a gravity feed fuel system, as flying upside down for long periods of time in the Cessna would have caused the engine to die.
Getty Stock Photo
Possible suicide
Doctors and colleagues close to him have ruled this out, despite the possibility.
In 2013, it was suggested that he was deceived by a tilted horizon ‘illusion’.
When he tried to correct this, it sent the plane into a spiral to his death.
The G-force caused by this tight spiral would have caused engine problems as fuel flow would have dropped, according to retired United States Air Force pilot James McGaha and author Joe Nickell.
Aliens
That’s right, the big whopper.
Ufologists speculated that he was destroyed or abducted by a UFO, as reports on the day said there was an off green light moving erratically in the sky.
UFO group Ground Saucer Watch claims that pictures taken on the day show an object moving swiftly through the air near the Cape Otway Lighthouse.
Jerome Clark, a UFO Writer for Ground Saucer Watch claimed that there was ‘a bona fide unknown flying object, of moderate dimensions, apparently surrounded by a cloud-like vapour/exhaust residue’, but photos were not clear enough to back these claims up.
Featured Image Credit: Australian Department of Transport / Getty Stock Ph
Joseph David Emerson was off-duty when a drug-fuelled change in behaviour cost him his career, and almost his and 83 others’ lives while in the cockpit of an aircraft.
The American has been charged for his actions onboard Alaska Airlines Flight 2059 on 22 October 2023, which was on its way to San Francisco, California from Everett, Washington.
10 months following the horror incident, Emerson spoke to ABC News about the course of events from his point of view.
In a sit-down interview along with his wife Sarah, Emerson explained that he and his friends had taken psychedelic mushrooms on the Friday night, two days before the flight, in commemoration of the death of his best friend, Scott, who had died six years previously.
The Class A drug is known to cause hallucinations and can affect all other senses too, also altering the user’s thinking, sense of time and emotions.
But after feeling unwell on the way to the airport, he got into the cockpit behind the captain and first officer, solely thinking about being home, fearing that he would never make it back.
‘I was fully convinced this isn’t real’
After tricking himself into believing he was trapped in the plane, he started to believe that what he was seeing wasn’t real, and after a text from his friend attempting to calm him down played in his headphones, he lost it.
“That’s kind of where I flung off my headset, and I was fully convinced this isn’t real and I’m not going home,” he said.
The plane’s engines didn’t shut down, and everyone remained safe. (Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
As the pilots didn’t respond to his odd behaviour, he reacted by reaching for the two red handles in front of him.
“Thinking that I was going to wake up, thinking this is my way to get out of this non-real reality, I reached up and I grabbed them, and I pulled the levers.”
It turned out that these were the engine shut-off controls, which would usually have killed the power and potentially killed all of those onboard, but luckily, they did not do anything.
After this, he was kicked out to the cabin, where he drank straight from a coffee jug and attempted to open the airplane door before being stopped by a flight attendant.
But as she touched his hand, he snapped out of his hallucination and quickly texted his wife while in the air.
He wrote: “I made a big mistake.”
“What’s up? Are you ok?” She asked.
Emerson replied: “I’m not.”
That was the last that Sarah would hear from her husband for days, as Emerson told the flight attendant to handcuff him before he did anything that could cause harm.
Sarah broke down after finding out what happened to her husband. (Sam Sweeney/ABC News)
‘I screamed and I keeled over’
His wife tracked his flight, and found out it had made an emergency landing in Portland, with Sarah completely in the dark for 24 hours until a jail receptionist gave her an unfortunate update.
At the time, Emerson had been charged with 83 counts of attempted murder, one for every passenger on board, though these have since been dropped.
“I walk up to the window and say I’m looking for my husband and he kind of just looked on the computer and typed some things in and then nonchalantly tells me the charges, and I lost it,” Sarah Emerson explained to ABC News.
“I screamed and I keeled over, and I almost fell. They grabbed me and pulled me over because I know what that means. I was in a complete shock.”
Emerson was taken into custody when the plane landed, spending 45 days behind bars before being granted bond, with it taking a full four days from the day he took mushrooms to fully recover and return to normal.
The jail physician told him that he had suffered from a condition called hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD), which can cause a first-time user of psychedelics to suffer from persistent visual hallucinations or perception issues for several days afterward.
Though he is no longer facing murder charges, Emerson is now facing over 80 state and federal charges, which include 83 counts of reckless endangerment after prosecutors reduced the charges in December.
Heather Insley, the mum of Sean Cox, mourned his death for three days, after spending time at Ottawa’s Montfort Hospital by his bedside whilst he passed away.
Heather and her family had planned his funeral arrangements and honoured his wishes of organ donation – all for them to receive a text message from him on the day he was cremated.
The message was asking for money, which her husband Bill reassured her would just be a sick scammer impersonating their dead son.
She dialled the number it came from, and suddenly a voice that sounded just like Sean’s appeared on through the phone.
CBC/Heather Insley
Talking to CBC, Heather said: “We were freaked.”
In the days following the phone call encounter, Ottawa police were able to track down Sean’s exact location.
She said: “Oh my God, your funeral’s tomorrow.
“I thought, I’m so happy he’s alive, but I just went through all that mourning.”
The bizarre case of the 43-year-old turned his world upside down.
He said he had no idea about the hospital situation, but after hearing what his parents had gone through, he felt he had a ‘second chance’ at life.
But how did such a mix-up happen?
CBC/Heather Insley
Martin Sauvé, Montfort’s director of communications, told CBC: “We offer our most sincere condolences to the loved ones of the deceased patient, and offer our apologies to both families involved for the distress caused by this situation.”
According to Heather, a nurse thought she recognised the man in the bed as her son from an earlier hospital stay, following an overdose two months previous.
Heather said neither she nor the five other family members who visited the hospital room ever questioned whether the man in the bed was Sean.
She recalled: “He had the same haircut, same thick hair, like my boy did – his long eyelashes.”
The experience was traumatic for the family, and she added: “We cried.
“We cried so much.
“It was just, it was devastating.
“We planned the funeral.
“I never knew what it would feel like to lose a child, and it was awful.”
Heather said she hasn’t heard from the other man’s family and still doesn’t know who he was.
A mix-up that you’d hope would never happen again.
A British man was charged after he allegedly flew from Heathrow in London all the way to New York’s JFK airport without a ticket or passport.
46-year-old Craig Sturt has been accused of following another passenger through security and passport checks at Heathrow Airport before boarding a British Airways flight bound for New York.
The man is then believed to have been detained by armed officials at John F. Kennedy International Airport when it was discovered that he had no official documents with him, before being sent back to the UK on a charter flight.
He was then arrested after arriving back in the UK and charged with offences under the Aviation Security Act.
According to court records, he admitted the offences to Uxbridge Magistrates Court but the 46-year-old man has since been the subject of a missing person’s appeal.
Tejas Sandhu/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
On 30 January, Thames Valley Police issued a picture of Sturt and asked members of the public whether they could help find him.
They said: “Urgent missing person appeal. Please can you help us find Craig? The 46-year-old is 6ft, slim, with short dark brown hair.
“When he was last seen, he was wearing a grey jacket, a top, black jogging bottoms and white trainers.
“Craig was last seen in Reading, but is from Slough and also has links to Heathrow and the Tottenham Court Road in London. If you see Craig, please do not approach him, instead call 999.”
He had been reported missing on 25 January, a month after he was arrested at Heathrow, and the Met Police took over the investigation on 31 January.
Ken Jack/Getty Images
A statement from the Met Police said: “On 24 December 2023 police were made aware of an alleged breach of security at Heathrow airport and a male was subsequently arrested and later charged with Fraud and Aviation Security Act offences.
“We continue to work with all our partners to review and enhance the already robust security measures in place which are kept under constant review by the wider security partnership.”
The issue of how a man was seemingly able to walk onto a passenger plane without ticket or passport is under investigation.
“All people who go airside are subject to security screening, including the individual involved in this case,” a Heathrow spokesperson said.
“We are supporting the authorities with their ongoing investigation.”
A British Airways spokesperson told LADbible: “We are assisting the authorities with their investigation.”