The case of a 16-year-old boy who apparently survived a five-hour flight from California to Hawaii stowed away in the nose-wheel compartment of a passenger jet, left aviation experts perplexed and divided last night (Monday).
The FBI said security camera footage had shown the unnamed teenager scaling the perimeter fence at California's San Jose airport on Sunday morning before walking towards a Hawaiian Airlines Boeing 767 that took off shortly afterwards for the island of Maui.
Five hours later, airline officials said, the boy was found dazed but otherwise unhurt wandering on the Tarmac at Kahului airport, after flying halfway across the Pacific at a maximum altitude of 38,000ft where outside temperatures plunged to as low as -80F (-62C).
Photographs in local media appeared to show the boy sitting upright and alert as he was wheeled into an ambulance at the airport.
Officials said he had run away from home after an argument with his parents and concealed himself on Flight 45 to Hawaii with only the clothes he was wearing and a pocket comb. He was carrying no form of identification.
"How he survived, I don't know. It's a miracle," said Tom Simon, an FBI spokesman in Honolulu who added that the boy's story appeared to "check out" following examination of video footage from the airport in San Jose.
"Kid's lucky to be alive," added Mr Simon, speaking to local media, which reported that the boy had been unconscious for most of the flight. He had been handed over to child services in Honolulu and had not been charged with any crime, he said. "Doesn't even remember the flight," Mr Simon said. "It's just an apparent miracle... There was no appearance of any special gear of any sort."
The survival of the boy, who is reported to be from Santa Clara, California, was met with incredulity by many aviation analysts.
"Somebody surviving at 35,000ft for five hours with no supplemental oxygen supply? I just don't believe it," John Nance, an ex-pilot and one of America's leading aviation experts, told ABC News.
"This is one of three things - a hoax, a miracle or we're going to have to rewrite the textbooks."
Peter Forman, another leading airline analyst, added: "The odds of a person surviving that long on a flight at that altitude are very remote, actually. I mean, you are talking about altitudes that are well above the altitude of Mount Everest," he told Hawaii's KHON radio.
"A lot of people would only have useful consciousness for a minute or two at that altitude. For somebody to survive multiple hours with that lack of oxygen and that cold is just miraculous. I've never heard of anything like that before."
Others pointed to previous examples of people surviving in similar circumstances, citing a Federal Aviation Authority study that examined the survival prospects of aircraft stowaways. Among several cases, it detailed how one person survived a flight from Panama to Miami in 1986 that reached 39,000ft.
Among the theories is that the lack of oxygen and slow cooling of the body could send the central nervous system into a form of hibernation, with latent heat from the nose wheels and hydraulic lines keeping the body from freezing completely.