It is the British equivalent of Lost. A plane leaves the UK for Australia but never arrives. Weeks later its crew are rumoured to have been taken prisoner by bandits in Yugoslavia who hold them to ransom before selling the plane to the Israeli air force.
But, unlike the US television series currently gripping British audiences, the tale of what happened to flight G/AKPD is a true life mystery that threatened to become a major diplomatic incident in the Middle East.
Confidential documents, released to The Observer by the National Archives, show senior Foreign Office officials were taken in by a mysterious man whose claims helped shroud the truth of what may have happened to the plane.
The few undisputed facts that are known about flight G/AKPD are these: On 29 October, 1948, a Lockheed Lodestar, owned by paper merchants RA Brand set off from the old Croydon airport in south London for New South Wales, via Rome, where it was to pick up five passengers.
On board were four men: Captain Thornton Hall, navigator J Ash and two passengers, referred to in Foreign Office documents as Mr Wellman and Mr Morris, who both worked for an engineering company. The plane never made it to Rome; its last perfunctory radio contact came after it passed above Orly in France. Despite extensive investigations, no trace of a crashed plane was ever found.
Following the plane's disappearance, the owners launched a £250 appeal for information in the continental press, unleashing a chain of events that would grace a John Le Carré novel.
A man, identified only as Mr X, approached RA Brand with information: one of the passengers had forced the pilot to land the plane at Ljubljana, then in Yugoslavia, and the crew were being held for a £1,250 ransom by a Zionist organisation, which had sold the plane to the Israelis. The ransom part of the story was reported in Britain.
'All we are worried about is the lives of our two boys,' said a representative of RA Brand. 'We want them back safely and we will pay the ransom if it means their release.'
The Foreign Office approached the Yugoslav authorities for help. But when no information was forthcoming, Mr X told RA Brand, the Yugoslav authorities, now aware of British interest, had transported the crew to an unknown destination, possibly Israel. Subsequent, credible, reports produced sightings of the crew in Tel Aviv.
'Discreet unofficial inquiries did produce a story - second- or third-hand - that a Lockheed aircraft had reached Israel in the autumn of 1948, and that Ash, the navigator, had been seen in Israel that winter,' reveals a confidential Foreign Office letter, written in 1950.
The story of flight G/AKPD prompted deep unease within the Foreign Office as mandarins debated how to confront the Israeli government over allegations it had struck deals with bandits to procure the plane.
'The Minister at Tel Aviv had been hoping for more definite information from unofficial sources before he taxed the Israel authorities with a story which, if true, would place them in a most unfortunate position,' the letter states.
Intriguingly, a confidential Foreign Office memo written on 4 January, 1950, appears to corroborate the claims that the plane and its crew ended up in Israel. A trusted British intelligence agent in Israel claimed to have received such confirmation from two independent sources.
Others speculated that the plane crashed into the sea, but there is no definitive conclusion. One thing is certain - there is enough to provide a fresh script for the makers of Lost.

Sorry Doug I didn't spot that error by the journalist...