The Arrival

[opening narration]

Narrator: This object, should any of you have lived underground for the better parts of your lives and never had occasion to look toward the sky, is an airplane. Its official designation: a DC-3. We offer this rather obvious comment because this particular airplane, the one you're looking at, is a freak. Now, most airplanes take off and land as per scheduled. On rare occasions, they crash. But all airplanes can be counted on doing one or the other. Now, yesterday morning this particular airplane ceased to be just a commercial carrier. 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. In just a moment, we're going to show you the tail end of its history. We're going to give you ninety percent of the jigsaw pieces, and you and Mr. Sheckly, here of the Federal Aviation Agency, will assume the problem of putting them together, along with finding the missing pieces. This we offer as the evening's hobby, a little extracurricular diversion which is really the national pastime - in The Twilight Zone.