"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth," the fictional Sherlock Holmes said in passages of his famed sleuthing, as penned by his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Holmes' lateral, if not outlandish, allegory emerges when he's about to blow open the machinations, motives and means of a deceptively heinous crime based on complicated but supportive clues.
We muster this ageless allegory in hoping to shine a light of alternative clarity onto the mystery of the ages — the ninth anniversary of the stupendous disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, supposedly 2,500km southwest of Australia, somewhere in the vastness of the Indian Ocean.
Truly, there are more tantalising questions than there are diminishing answers to extrapolate the exact location of the "downed" Boeing 777-200ER.
It was just a routine commercial flight from Kuala Lumpur International Airport to Beijing Capital International Airport, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members. Here's what has been theorised and methodically debunked: mechanical failure, pilot suicide, hijacking but no claims of responsibility, and shot down by a missile.
Unlike the evil annihilation of Flight MH17 by a ground-to-air missile over eastern Ukraine in exponential view of the world, MH370 revealed no evidence of debris, projectiles or shrapnel. It's insane.
In a nutshell, MH370 simply vanished, inadvertently inventing a new study in modern forensic science in an era of sophisticated surveillance and detection technology where powerful satellites make it virtually impossible to hide. And yet, MH370 vanished, only to leave teasing traces.
Back to the Sherlock Holmes' allegory: we must consider outlandish hypotheses that no matter how improbable, they must be the truth.
First improbability: MH370 was indeed hijacked, but with transponders shut down and physical identification scrubbed, the hijackers flew stealthily, refuelling at strategic landing spots until it reached its destination, motive only found in espionage thrillers. Still, the fate of the people on board is anyone's guess: after being missing for this long, we have to assume the worst.
Second improbability: As much as we are deeply reluctant to postulate super stealth hijacking and fantastical alien abduction, we are compelled to adopt an open mind after the full breadth of official investigations failed to rationalise how a huge aircraft went missing. The books, TV docuseries and articles playing out MH370's disappearance offer no concrete conclusions. So, the ultimate distillation of MH370's vaporisation, if ever, must be a Steven Spielberg thriller, based on true events, unreal as they are.
Otherwise, check David Copperfield's alibi on March 8, 2014: the venerated magician is probably the only one who could make a passenger aircraft vanish.