The Arrival (The Twilight Zone)

As of its arrival it became an enigma, a seven-ton puzzle made out of aluminum, steel, wire and a few thousand other component parts, none of which add up to the right thing.

This we offer as an evening's hobby, a little extracurricular diversion which is really the national pastime in the Twilight Zone.After Flight 107, a propeller-driven Douglas DC-3 from Buffalo, lands safely with no crew or passengers aboard, the FAA sends Grant Sheckly, an inspector with 22 years of experience and proud of his flawless record of solving cases, to investigate the matter.

He is assisted by the airport staff — vice president Bengston, PR man Malloy, mechanic Robbins, and ramp attendant Cousins — but despite their combined efforts, no one can explain how an empty plane could safely land and taxi to a stop.

To prove his hypothesis, as well as to break the illusion, Sheckly proposes a simple, yet potentially fatal, test: he will put his arm in the arc of the plane's turning propeller.

Sheckly staggers away and wanders through the airfield he calls out, demanding to know the fate of Flight 107, then slumps onto the ramp as the sound of an aircraft's jet engine is heard passing overhead.

Picture of a man with an Achilles' heel, a mystery that landed in his life and then turned into a heavy weight, dragged across the years to ultimately take the form of an illusion.

But if you choose to think that the explanation has to do with an airborne Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship on a fog-enshrouded night on a flight that never ends, then you're doing your business in an old stand in the Twilight Zone.