A pilot who attempted to crash a plane while on magic mushrooms sent an alarming message to his wife before being arrested.
Joseph David Emerson was off-duty when a drug-fuelled change in behaviour cost him his career, and almost his and 83 others' lives while in the cockpit of an aircraft.
The American has been charged for his actions onboard Alaska Airlines Flight 2059 on 22 October 2023, which was on its way to San Francisco, California from Everett, Washington.
10 months following the horror incident, Emerson spoke to ABC News about the course of events from his point of view.
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In a sit-down interview along with his wife Sarah, Emerson explained that he and his friends had taken psychedelic mushrooms on the Friday night, two days before the flight, in commemoration of the death of his best friend, Scott, who had died six years previously.
The Class A drug is known to cause hallucinations and can affect all other senses too, also altering the user's thinking, sense of time and emotions.
But after feeling unwell on the way to the airport, he got into the cockpit behind the captain and first officer, solely thinking about being home, fearing that he would never make it back.
'I was fully convinced this isn't real'
After tricking himself into believing he was trapped in the plane, he started to believe that what he was seeing wasn't real, and after a text from his friend attempting to calm him down played in his headphones, he lost it.
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"That's kind of where I flung off my headset, and I was fully convinced this isn't real and I'm not going home," he said.
As the pilots didn't respond to his odd behaviour, he reacted by reaching for the two red handles in front of him.
"Thinking that I was going to wake up, thinking this is my way to get out of this non-real reality, I reached up and I grabbed them, and I pulled the levers."
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It turned out that these were the engine shut-off controls, which would usually have killed the power and potentially killed all of those onboard, but luckily, they did not do anything.
After this, he was kicked out to the cabin, where he drank straight from a coffee jug and attempted to open the airplane door before being stopped by a flight attendant.
But as she touched his hand, he snapped out of his hallucination and quickly texted his wife while in the air.
He wrote: "I made a big mistake."
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"What's up? Are you ok?" She asked.
Emerson replied: "I'm not."
That was the last that Sarah would hear from her husband for days, as Emerson told the flight attendant to handcuff him before he did anything that could cause harm.
'I screamed and I keeled over'
His wife tracked his flight, and found out it had made an emergency landing in Portland, with Sarah completely in the dark for 24 hours until a jail receptionist gave her an unfortunate update.
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At the time, Emerson had been charged with 83 counts of attempted murder, one for every passenger on board, though these have since been dropped.
"I walk up to the window and say I'm looking for my husband and he kind of just looked on the computer and typed some things in and then nonchalantly tells me the charges, and I lost it," Sarah Emerson explained to ABC News.
"I screamed and I keeled over, and I almost fell. They grabbed me and pulled me over because I know what that means. I was in a complete shock."
Emerson was taken into custody when the plane landed, spending 45 days behind bars before being granted bond, with it taking a full four days from the day he took mushrooms to fully recover and return to normal.
The jail physician told him that he had suffered from a condition called hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD), which can cause a first-time user of psychedelics to suffer from persistent visual hallucinations or perception issues for several days afterward.
Though he is no longer facing murder charges, Emerson is now facing over 80 state and federal charges, which include 83 counts of reckless endangerment after prosecutors reduced the charges in December.
Topics: Drugs, Crime, Travel, US News, World News
Joshua Nair