The first Virgin America flight lands in San Francisco on Aug. 8, 2007.
As the residents of Windsor, Ont. lay fast asleep, somewhere in the night sky overhead, two gay men were taking advantage of a brief jaunt into Canadian airspace aboard a commercial flight to tie the knot in front of the captain.
At least, that was the story. But even as the romantic tale spread like wildfire across social media networks, cheered on as a novel way to flout American marriage laws, the airline itself cast doubt on its veracity.
By the end of the day, it was still unclear whether the purported nuptials were an historic first or merely a joke played by a member of the flight crew on sleepy passengers.
It all started early Thursday morning, as passengers disembarking from the overnight Virgin America Flight 28 from San Francisco to New York City began tweeting about the wedding. The plane, they wrote, had diverted over Canada while the captain officiated a ceremony in the galley.
"There was a wedding on my flight to New York!" wrote Matt Mullenweg, a San Francisco entrepreneur who developed the WordPress blogging software. "The captain flew briefly over Canadian airspace so two gentlemen could marry."
Mr. Mullenweg and other passengers indicated they hadn't seen the ceremony themselves, but that a member of the crew had announced it over the loud-speaker and the cabin burst into applause.
Almost immediately, holes appeared in the story. According to the flight plan, the plane didn't need to divert over Canada, passing into Canadian airspace for the few minutes as part of its normal route, flying over the southern tip of Ontario and Lake Erie.
Then, a spokeswoman for Virgin America said she had spoken with the pilot, who hadn't even heard of the supposed wedding until she informed him.
"He actually was unaware of the reported celebration in the cabin," said Abby Lunardini. "He definitely did not perform a marriage ceremony."
She said the airline does not typically marry people on board on request (although founder Sir Richard Branson did officiate at a wedding on a flight to Las Vegas in 2007 as a publicity stunt).
Others pointed out that, even if the marriage had occurred, it would have required an Ontario official to preside.
"I think it's a fun thing and I'm glad the pilot got into it, but I don't think it's actually legal," said Robert Dykeman, an administrator at the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto, which made history as one of the first to marry same-sex couples. "[The official]has to be registered in the jurisdiction where the wedding happens."
Regardless of the story's dubiousness, it continued making the rounds online and was eventually picked up by major media outlets.
On Twitter, users took advantage of the story to question the laws that make gay marriage illegal in all but a handful of U.S. states.
One frequently-shared tweet, from the art director of a New York advertising agency who was on board, expressed hope the company would support its employees for allowing the nuptials to proceed: "Why I love the redeye: our plane veered into Canadian airspace so the captain could marry a gay couple in the galley. Nice job @virginamerica."
Experts said they had never heard of anything quite like it.
Bruce McDonald of Travel Gay Canada said U.S. cruise ships had made stops in the Great White North for the same purpose, but that no American he'd heard of had tried to do it tens of thousands of feet in the air without touching ground.
Elise Chenier, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, said same-sex marriage has often historically brought attention to GLBTQ rights and said that perhaps the purported nuptials represented the same thing.
"If this did happen, we can also see this as two people trying to keep this issue in the public eye," she said.
Others, however, were just interested in the sheer humour of it. Wrote one Twitter user: "Did they join the mile-high club?"
Adrian Morrow