On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it disappeared from radar over the Indian Ocean, sparking the most expensive search in aviation history, wall-to-wall global news coverage, and even rare public
protests within China. The mystery captured the hearts and minds of millions of people across the world, but there was no closure or catharsis for the families of those missing. In an age of seemingly ubiquitous satellite coverage, the plane’s final resting place — and that of the 239 people on board — remains an open question.
But a man named Ashton Forbes believes he has the answer: the U.S. military teleported the passenger jet in a show of might against China. Armed with a pair of dramatic videos that appear to show the aircraft vanishing, Forbes has spent the last three years posting relentlessly on X and YouTube, trying to convince everyone that the military used orb-like vessels to instantaneously teleport MH370 out of the sky. On its face, his theory appears impossible. So why do so many people believe him?
Since he started posting about the unlikely theory in 2023, Forbes — a 44-year-old healthcare IT consultant from St. Paul, Minnesota, with a close-cropped side-parting, rectangular glasses, and well-ironed plaid shirts — has become a divisive cult figure in the online UFO-obsessed hinterland. In the uniquely sparse information vacuum surrounding the fate of the plane, Forbes has positioned himself as the radical, crusading thought leader with the far-reaching answer that doubles up as the confirmation that truly magical feats are possible.
In an age of increasingly sophisticated deepfakes and deepening distrust, Forbes’ rise from anonymous Reddit lurker to conspiracy world talking head reflects a broader phenomenon. With 78 percent of Americans believing the government knows more about UFOs than it is telling the public, and 37 percent convinced that some unidentified flying objects are alien spacecraft, his claims tap into a widespread suspicion that there is more out there — and that this is only the latest example of the government refusing to admit what the U.S. military knows, and can do.
Forbes, who has a fear of flying — “every time I get on a plane I assume it’s the last thing I’ll do” — was a self-described “lurker in the UFO community” when he clocked the videos on Reddit in August 2023. The footage ignited a frenzy of speculationafter someone on the r/UFOs subreddit claimed in a viral thread that the videos showed “UFOs stealing an airliner out of the sky and teleporting away with it.”
Despite his sympathy toward the possibility of extraterrestrial life, Forbes dismissed the idea that an alien civilization would meddle with humanity so simplistically. “Aliens are so advanced, we’re like ants to them,” he tells Rolling Stone. “It’s more likely we’re a zoo.”
It made more sense to him that the U.S. military was behind it. According to Forbes, the military secretly developed fusion-powered technology capable of manipulating the space-time continuum. “The government has figured out how to turn an electromagnetic beam into a gravitational one,” Forbes says. “This is the United States vs. China.” The teleportation of MH370, he says, was a message for America’s enemies, and that China’s intelligence services know what happened. “We can end them anytime we want,” he says. Of course, there is no evidence that any of this technology exists — if the plane was in fact “ported,” it would upend our understanding of physics, warfare, and the nature of reality itself.
Not long after finding the videos, Forbes started posting about his own increasingly expansive theory, endlessly engaging with supporters and critics alike, earning him more than 300,000 X followers and 100,000 YouTube subscribers. His claims — broadcast in tens of thousands of tweets — have carried him from obscure online discussions to some of the biggest podcasts covering conspiracy theories, including those hosted by Candace Owens, Alex Jones, and Danny Jones. Forbes is convinced, as he wrote to Congress, that he has stumbled upon not just “the most important videos in the history of the world,” but a secret capable of transforming civilization.
On his X feed, Forbes has railed at “libtards,” claims his detractors are “clinically insane narcissists,” accused the government of “LARPing about revealing UFOs,” and mourned the death of Patrick Stewart. He will appear in Tucker Carlson’s forthcoming documentary series Shadow Figures, which advances another theory about MH370: that an explosion brought it down.
At first, his liberal family feared Forbes, who is single, might have had “a psychological break or something, as time went on they had to find a way to cope with it,” he says, noting that they simply refuse to engage in discussions about MH370 with him. He also told his employer of the last 20 years that, “I’m doing something completely crazy, and I think I’m exposing my own government.” The company, which he does not wish to name, reviewed his social media, Forbes says, “and they said it was basically fine as long as I just put my own opinions and avoid talking about them.”
THOUGH FEVERED SPECULATION SURROUNDS the fate of MH370, we do have substantial evidence about the aircraft’s final movements. According to analysis of the plane’s automated satellite communications, after losing contact with air-traffic control, it continued flying for hours. Investigators concluded that it had most likely flown south into the Indian Ocean, off the coast of western Australia, where it was presumed to have crashed.
Around 30 pieces of suspected debris from the plane have washed ashore along the east African coast and islands in the western Indian Ocean, three of which were confirmed to be from MH370. But the main wreckage remains undiscovered, and investigators have never definitively established why the aircraft changed course, or who turned off its transponder.
Suspicions of a coverup emerged almost immediately. In the wake of the plane’s disappearance, the former prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, accused the CIA of “hiding” its whereabouts. “Airplanes don’t just disappear,” he wrote. “Certainly not these days.” On his blog, Mohamed cited a 2006 article which apparently claimed that the CIA has the power to operate aircraft “remotely by radio or satellite … if terrorists attempt to gain control of the flight deck.” (The CIA did not respond to a request for comment.)
Forbes, who describes himself as a skeptic and says the only other conspiracy he entertains is that a government operative may have assassinated John F. Kennedy, would come to share Mohamad’s suspicion of U.S. government involvement. The immediate response to the plane going missing was the first sign that something was going on. “They have this plane going dark 40 minutes after it takes off, [then] it flies over Malaysia,” but the Malaysian government doesn’t send any jets to track it. (The Malaysian government’s initial response was criticized as lackluster, though it ultimately led an unprecedented search mission, dispatching 334 search flights over 1.7 million square miles.) “This plane goes into the Andaman Sea, they lose track of it and let it drift off into somewhere where we don’t know where it went.”
Forbes’ search for the whereabouts of the plane began nine years later. The teleportation videos were apparently first posted on YouTube in the weeks after the plane went missing by RegicideAnon, “a UFO uploader account,” which by Forbes’ own admission mostly posted discreditable clips before the channel itself disappeared. But they had no impact for almost a decade, until they suddenly took the r/UFO subreddit by storm in the summer of 2023. The videos had resurfaced after Department of Defense whistleblower David Grusch testified in front of congress about his knowledge of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP. Though he didn’t make the connection, Redditors did.
In the low-resolution footage, which Forbes believes was taken by U.S. military drones, what appears to be a passenger jet is flying through a cloudy, hazy blue sky when three small, saucer-shaped white objects — or “plasma orbs,” as Forbes calls them, supposedly containing fusion reactors — suddenly appear and circle the plane with increasing speed. Then there is a flash, and the plane disappears. “I was like, ‘Dude, what is this?’” he says.
Forbes got to work quickly, inventorying “what it would take to ‘hoax’ the videos.” In a 28-point list posted on X, he speculated that it would have taken anywhere from four to 72 days to make the videos, that the hoaxer would need to recreate what MH370 looked like, know what the turn radius of a Boeing 777 is at a certain altitude, and know “how to animate orbs.” Forbes is no expert, with his business degree from Washington University in St. Louis, but he concluded that it was more likely the videos were real than that someone would have gone to such lengths to fabricate them. He pledged to give $150,000 to anyone who conclusively proved that the videos have been faked.
Some, however, say it wouldn’t have been too difficult. According to visual effects expert Niko Pueringer, whose YouTube channel Corridor Crew has debunked the videos, a VFX artist back in 2014 could have created them in a couple of days. “There are plenty of giveaways in the MH370 animation, but it is executed so well, and with such a perfect eye to style and dramatic timing, that it gets us to emotionally respond,” he says. “If you can create a fantastical image, but give it the texture of real footage, you are pulling off a magic trick. If you can elevate it by placing it within a story, you end up hitting something really primal in every human being.”
Other VFX experts have highlighted “glaring” compositing errors which allegedly reveal the videos were fabricated from various multimedia sources. When the plane disappears with a sudden flash, the two videos appear to be slightly out of sync (which Forbes vehemently disputes), while the clouds are said to be unchanging and the moving objects exhibit no motion blur. Pueringer has also pointed to an apparent match between the flash in the videos and a stock explosion effect from the 1990s, which had been used in video games.
Yet a stronger blow came to Forbes when his critics traced the clouds in one of the videos to aerial photographs taken years earlier. One sleuth even claimed to have discovered the source file behind them and purported to have linked the cloud photographs to a NASA weather satellite, before their account was recently taken down. Forbes has an explanation: these photographs “must have been planted online by the U.S. intelligence agencies” in a type of false flag operation to confuse the public further and are “objectively fake.” Forbes has so far not dispensed his promised $150,000. “When you start to realize I’m right, you’ll start to see these patterns,” he says. “[The government is] influencing our thoughts all the time.”
In the face of criticism, the scope of Forbes’ claims expanded far beyond the videos themselves. Toward the end of 2023 he supposedly figured out who had leaked them: a former Lieutenant Commander in the Navy who pleaded guilty in 2017 to mishandling classified information. (He could not be reached for comment.)
There is no publicly available evidence connecting the former serviceperson to the MH370 videos, but Forbes says classified portions of his case must conceal the answer. “It has to be him because everything lines up: right time, right place, right access, and right punishment,” he says. “How can it not be those videos? Tell me anything else it could be that he leaked.”
One day in February 2024, Forbes thought he’d hit the jackpot. Joe Rogan messaged him on X with an invitation to his show. “Hey man I’m watching this YouTube video of you talking about Malaysian airlines,” Rogan wrote. “Fascinating stuff. I’d love to talk to you about this.” The influential podcaster had recently interviewed a former U.S. intelligence official who claimedthe government was secretly attempting to reverse-engineer alien spacecraft.
“Anytime you want Joe. I just want to say I’m a normal guy and this rabbit hole has been really wild,” Forbes wrote back, according to a screenshot of the chat shared with Rolling Stone. “A lot of the stuff you’ve been saying about UFOs being drones, our technology etc lines up with exactly what I’ve come to realize through this investigation.”
Rogan said that his team could book his travel and hotel, but then he put on the brakes. “Hey man, I’m gonna put a pause on this episode until I can clarify whether or not this is a hoax,” Rogan wrote. “I’ve been going down the rabbit hole and there’s a lot of evidence that those videos are special effects.” Forbes sent him reams of messages claiming they are real. In a later episode, Rogan dismissed the videos as “bullshit.” Forbes messaged Rogan with a link to the clip, saying: “Bro what is this? Lmao.”
Despite the setback, Forbes was undeterred, appearing on conservative commentator Candace Owens’ podcast in October 2024 for a friendly interview that amassed 1.7 million views. By then Forbes had metamorphosed the MH370 enigma into the foundation for a considerably larger theory of reality, centred on the existence of a hidden, virtually limitless source of energy that could revolutionise civilization. “There was a day where, I realized, this is all about free energy,” Forbes told Owens, “if you connect and follow the dots, and the science, if you ask yourself, ‘Where is the energy from these self-sustaining, coherent orbs coming from?’”
He was no longer merely arguing that the U.S. military possessed technology capable of making an airliner disappear, or — as he later began to — that most UFO sightings actually pertain to U.S.-government orbs. “It’s all just fusion,” he says. Forbes became ardent in his belief that humanity already possessed the means to extract virtually limitless energy from the fabric of the universe — and he invested $5,000 into a purported “free-energy” device which he started promoting.
The contraption — a magnetic motor capable of generating electricity by harnessing zero-point energy — might be able to power your home for free, he claimed. But when Forbes showed viewers an image of the product during a livestream, sleuths quickly traced it to a years-old YouTube video. The UFO Feed website accused Forbes of trying to “scam his fanbase.” Dave Farina, host of the YouTube channel Professor Dave Explains, which has 4.4 million subscribers, accused Forbes of being “a grifting fraud” for promoting the free energy device. “It’s a ‘secret knowledge’ cult surrounding someone who doesn’t have high school-level physics competency,” Farina tells Rolling Stone.
Forbes acknowledged his mistake, saying he had been sent a photograph of what he believed was a similar design and misunderstood what he was looking at. His belief in the technology itself, however, remained intact. “What I showed was a real free-energy device,” he told the UAP Unidentified Alien Podcast in August 2024. “Absolutely real.” Forbes insists that he has “never directly sold anything to profit off the [MH370] case, but tried to promote a lot of podcasts and other small businesses.”
Three years into his quest, Forbes is still gaining traction, with one recent X post notching 17,000 likes and 1.5 million views. “239 people died on this plane, in an operation the U.S. will never admit to, using technology that shouldn’t exist,” he wrote. “No one is fighting for them except my community [the 14,000-acolyte MH370x on X]. We’re proud of it, because despite how insane it seems, we know it’s true. They teleported that plane.”
The evidence bolstering the hypothesis, in his view, only continues to accumulate. In the White House’s Sept. 18 release of “UAP Encounter” files, one of the documents shows that the Defense Intelligence Agency commissioned a report on “traversable wormholes and ‘stargates’ … that theoretically offer a means of faster-than-light travel.” Forbes tweeted: “I’m literally being proven correct in real time and it’s amazing.” In another tweet, he added: “Proves our reality is a hologram.” (The wormhole report is a theoretical document.)
The fact that the Trump administration has also been trumpeting America’s technological prowess in language borrowed from science fiction has only helped Forbes. Last year, White House science adviser Michael Kratsios claimed in a missive celebrating American technological supremacy that U.S. innovations “permit us to manipulate time and space” and “leave distance annihilated.” He was speaking broadly about scientific and technological progress, rather than announcing a physics-defying weapon, but he concluded his speech reiterating that new “scientific discoveries … will bend time and space, make more with less, and drive us further into the endless frontier.”
Forbes isn’t necessarily opposed to the U.S. being in charge of the endless frontier. On Sept. 23, he was on Alex Jones Live, effectively celebratingthat the U.S. has an “asymmetrical advantage” over its enemies — and one which it should be leveraging because it won’t last forever. “That was a message in 2014 to China, Iran, Russia, North Korea, that we have something that you don’t have, and we control this planet,” Forbes said. “They’re using these fusion reactors to manipulate spacetime.” For his part, Jones agreed that it was “the biggest conspiracy in human history, that free energy and teleportation are real.”
For all the extraordinary claims Forbes has made about secret military technology and the nature of reality, his convictions ultimately rest on two pieces of evidence. He admits that his entire worldview “is solely because I watched them teleport that Malaysian airliner. That’s why they hide this secret so fiercely. If they told the truth everything would crumble.”
He says there are ways to prove him wrong: Find the person who made the videos, find the plane, talk to the lieutenant commander, or get the U.S. government to make a statement about the footage. “Those are the only ways to prove the videos fake,” he says, “and the debunkers hate it because they know they can’t do any of those things.”
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