Thursday in Los Angeles didn’t feel like history. It felt like any other weekday—traffic, errands, people half-listening to the news while doing everything else. Then a short video started bouncing around phones: a big military-looking jet coming down toward LAX. The caption did the rest—“Doomsday plane.”

I first saw it in a group chat that’s normally just memes and dinner photos. Somebody wrote, “Is this real?” Someone else replied, “That’s the plane they use if everything goes bad.

” No one had an article link. Just the video, the nickname, and a lot of anxiety packed into a few seconds of footage.

By late afternoon, it was everywhere. TikTok stitches. Instagram reels. People arguing in comments like they were air-traffic experts. The funny part is a lot of us in L.A. see planes constantly and never care. This time, we cared because the story came pre-loaded with fear.

“Doomsday” isn’t a neutral word. It tells your brain to fill in the worst.

What actually happened, in real life, was simpler: people’s phones kept lighting up. Not with some official emergency alert—just the regular flood: notifications, screenshots, “my cousin said,” “my friend’s friend works at the airport.

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