Mysterious row of seats wash up on US beach, sparking speculation about what they’re from

Matthew Jacob was walking along the beach in Margate, in the US state of New Jersey last week when he found the rusted seats that he believes are from a lost or forgotten airliner, according to his viral TikTok post, The NY Post reports.

“I think I just found plane seats washed up on the Jersey shore,” he wrote on the video, which had rung up 1.3 million likes by Sunday afternoon.

“I wasn’t sure what it was,” Jacob, a local actor, told PEOPLE magazine.

“I thought it was a tree branch at first. As I got closer, I realised that I was looking at seats. The closer I got they appeared to be plane seats.”

Speculation ran wild, with one commenter claiming, “I was on flight TWA 800 and remember sitting there” — a reference to the deadly 1996 crash off the coast of Long Island.

“Everyone is saying TWA flight 800 but I’m pretty sure it’s the TZB 900,” another commenter wrote. “I wielded these very seats.”

Yet another suggested, “I’m pretty sure that’s from a 2011 Kia Soul.”

While the seats remain a mystery, Margate Police Chief Matthew Hankinson told NJ.com there was a more reasonable explanation, noting that the seats, “are far too heavy to come from anything like a plane.

“The seats are stripped down to the metal with nothing left from cushions, seat belts or buckles that would indicate they came from a plane crash,” the town’s top cop told the outlet.

“A detective did some further research and found that decommissioned railcar seats are typically stripped down to the metal parts and taken out to see and dumped to help build artificial reefs,” he said.

He said recent storms could have knocked the seats free from a reef.

This article originally appeared in The NY Post and was reproduced with permission.