The Jungle’s Grip: The Abandoned Plane and Its Silent Predator
It sits like a ghost from another century, half-buried in emerald hell.
A Douglas DC-3, tail number PK-AFV, once the pride of Garuda Indonesia’s postwar fleet, now lies broken-backed in a clearing no map has ever dared to name. Vines as thick as a man’s thigh snake through shattered windows. Moss carpets the cockpit. The aluminum skin is painted with fifty years of rain, rot, and silence.
Locals call it *Pesawat Ular* – the Snake Plane.
They say the jungle didn’t just reclaim it.
It *kept* it.
The story begins in 1973. Flight 207 vanished en route from Jayapura to Sentani. Thirty-two souls aboard: crew, miners, a Catholic nun, and a crate of uncut diamonds bound for Jakarta. No distress call. No wreckage. Just a hole in the sky that swallowed them whole. Search parties combed the Foja Mountains for weeks, then months, then gave up. The insurance paid. The families mourned. The jungle closed its fist.
Then, in 2023, a drone operated by a National Geographic team hunting rare birds of paradise clipped something metallic glinting through the canopy. Coordinates were logged. A small expedition (three guides, two photographers, one herpetologist) hacked their way in. What they found has become the stuff of whispered campfire legend and viral midnight TikToks.
The fuselage is split open like a cracked seed. Inside, the seats are still in rows, seatbelts dangling like nooses. Faded children’s drawings (crayon suns and stick-figure families) are taped above the windows, untouched by time. The cockpit yoke is wrapped in the shed skin of something impossibly large.
And coiled around the entire aircraft, from propeller to tail, is the snake.
Twenty-eight feet of reticulated python, thicker than a man’s torso, its scales the exact moss-green of the surrounding leaves. Locals swear it is the same serpent photographed by a Japanese soldier in 1944, a “guardian spirit” that grew fat on pigs, cassowaries, and, some whisper, the occasional lost hunter. The expedition’s herpetologist, Dr. Mara Susanto, measured the beast at 180 kilograms. It hasn’t moved in days. It doesn’t need to. The plane is its throne.
They found bones inside the cabin (human, picked clean, arranged almost ceremonially along the aisle). A child’s shoe still buckled. A pilot’s cap fused to the floor by decades of mold. And etched into the metal wall above seat 14A, a frantic scrawl in faded ballpoint:
“IT WATCHES. IT WAITS. DO NOT SLEEP.”
The diamonds? Gone. The flight recorder? Crushed flat, as if something coiled around it until the casing screamed. The snake’s belly, when the team shone a light, revealed strange rectangular lumps (some say the missing crate, swallowed whole).
At night the python moves. Thermal drones captured it sliding from the fuselage to the wings, tongue tasting the air, eyes glowing like twin embers. One guide swears he heard it *hiss* in Morse code. Another woke to find the zipper of his tent undone and the serpent’s head resting inches from his face, as if deciding whether he was worth the meal.
The Indonesian government has now sealed the site. “Conservation area,” they claim. But locals know better. They leave offerings at the jungle’s edge (chickens, pigs, once an entire goat) so the guardian stays with its metal prize and does not follow the path back to the villages.
Explorers still come. YouTubers with death wishes. Cryptozoologists chasing internet fame. They post shaky GoPro footage of the plane’s dark interior, the serpent’s slow blink, the way the vines seem to tighten when footsteps get too close.
None stay longer than a night.
The jungle doesn’t give back what it takes.
The snake doesn’t forget.
And somewhere deep in that green abyss, PK-AFV still flies (not through sky, but through time), forever trapped in the coils of a predator that was waiting long before the first engine ever turned.
If you hear the distant drone of propellers in your nightmares, don’t look up.
Look down.
The jungle remembers.
And it never, ever lets go.
