Plane Mysterious

We're surely at the point, were the disappearance of that Malaysian airliner a movie, where the baffled authorities are forced to bring in some unorthodox outsider, like a stage magician or Sherlock Holmes, for example, to solve the mystery.  Sadly, this is real life where mysterious events, more often than not, don't have neat explanations, not even very bizarre ones involving sleight of hand, evil criminal masterminds or giant rats of Sumatra.   The most perplexing part of the whole affair so far has been the apparent ineptitude of the Malaysian authorities: they spent the better part of a week searching the wrong are before revealing they had radar traces suggesting the plane could have veered West, back over the Malaysian peninsular, and now they seem intent upon 'proving' it was a hijack gone wrong and pinning blame for that on the flight crew.  The trouble is that the hijack theory, (like all the other theories advanced to explain the flight's disappearance), leaves many questions unanswered, most notably, why didn't any of the passengers use their mobiles to contact family or friends, as happened on United Flight 93 in 2001?  With their haste to make this theory stick, anyone would think that the Malaysian authorities had something to hide.

But it isn't my intention to perpetuate conspiracy theories or speculate as to the reasons for the disappearance of flight MH370.  The fact is that I have no more idea what happened to it than anyone else.  However, the whole unfortunate business put in mind of a story I read many, many years ago (or it could have been a movie I saw, it was so long ago I really can't remember), in which an airliner vanishes in flight, kidnapped by aliens.  The intent of these aliens is to use the passengers (who they assume to be a cross-section of earth society) to judge whether our species is safe to be allowed to continue developing.  Otherwise, they'll wipe us out before we can threaten the rest of the galaxy.  Which leaves me wondering - do the missing passengers and crew of flight MH370 hold the fate of humanity in their hands?  In which case, I hope they aren't anything like the average mob of heavily tattooed drunken misogynists and bigots you'd find aboard the average Malaga to Manchester flight.  In which case, may God help us all.  But then again, if we're into pop culture explanations perhaps, as I write this, the passengers have found themselves marooned on some mysterious island full of weirdos and monsters...