Being Ducktaped on Flight 618: A Biblical Look at Spiritual Attack

A conversation about Jesus on a first-class flight from Dallas to Newark ended with zip ties, duct tape, and an emergency landing in Baltimore. That much isn’t in dispute. What’s drawing attention is what the man sitting next to the accused says set it off – and what he believes was actually happening underneath it.

That man is Messianic Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, the author behind The Harbinger and its sequels, several of which have landed on the New York Times bestseller list. Cahn says the passenger beside him went from friendly to violently hostile in a matter of seconds, right after their talk turned to the gospel. He’s calling it a demonic attack. Here’s the story, in the order Cahn says it happened, alongside what other passengers and reporters have independently confirmed – and what Scripture actually says about this kind of opposition.

Who Is Jonathan Cahn?

Jonathan Cahn is a Messianic Rabbi and pastor known for tracing Biblical prophecy through modern headlines in a run of bestselling books. He leads Hope of the World ministry and serves at Beth Israel Worship Center in Wayne, New Jersey. His breakout book, The Harbinger, argued that an ancient pattern of national judgment and defiant rebuilding recorded in Isaiah was echoing in America’s response after September 11: “The bricks have fallen, but we will build with dressed stones; the sycamores have been cut down, but we will put cedars in their place” (Isaiah 9:10). The book became a surprise sensation, and Cahn followed it with a string of related titles exploring Biblical prophecy, the Shemitah cycle, and the ancient roots of modern culture. His newest release, The Altar of Pergamon, was the book he had open on his laptop the day this story begins.

What Happened Aboard Flight 618

The facts everyone agrees on are fairly simple: a passenger became violent, and the flight had to divert. On September 3, American Airlines Flight 618 was headed from Dallas-Fort Worth to Newark when a disturbance broke out in first class involving Arthur “Layne” Lundeen, 67, a Tucson, Arizona real-estate broker who had been a vice president with Long Realty. The company has since ended its affiliation with him. The plane diverted to Baltimore, where Maryland Transportation Authority Police arrested Lundeen after landing. He now faces second-degree assault and disorderly-conduct charges, and CBN News reported that the FBI has been looking into the conduct that took place in the air.

The Chronology, According to Cahn

A Friendly Two Hours

By every account, the conversation started warmly and stayed that way for a long stretch. Lundeen sat beside Cahn in first class. Cahn was signing book inserts, which got Lundeen asking what he was doing, and the two ended up talking about his newly released book, their wives, their families, and Lundeen’s career as a Tucson realtor. They laughed enough, Cahn says, that flight attendants apparently assumed the two men already knew each other. This wasn’t a tense exchange from the start. It was two strangers hitting it off.

The Gospel Conversation

Cahn says he brought his faith into the conversation directly, telling Lundeen he was also a minister, Jewish, and a believer in Jesus. He asked Lundeen what he believed. According to Cahn, Lundeen said he’d been raised in a strict Christian home but no longer believed – partly, he said, because he’d felt judged by religious people. TMZ reported that Cahn connected this to Lundeen’s divorce. When Lundeen described himself as a good person and questioned why more would be required to reach heaven, Cahn walked him through sin, forgiveness, Christ’s death and resurrection, and what it means to be born again. Cahn says Lundeen stayed receptive the whole time—listening, asking questions, still smiling. Lundeen then asked how Cahn knew any of this was real. Cahn told him about his own past as an atheist and how Biblical prophecy concerning Israel and the Messiah had convinced him otherwise. He added personal stories he considered evidence of God’s hand in his life – the unlikely circumstances behind The Harbinger’s publication and how he met his wife. Lundeen kept listening. Kept smiling.

The Sudden Turn

Then, Cahn says, something changed almost instantly. Lundeen rejected everything he’d just heard as nonsense and turned specifically against Jesus, cursing and telling Cahn, with profanity, to leave him alone. Cahn tried to disengage and go back to his laptop. Lundeen wouldn’t let it go – he began striking or knocking the computer, and a damaged spot already on the display started spreading. At one point he put his hands around Cahn’s neck. Cahn says it briefly looked almost like a joking gesture, the kind of thing that could pass for horseplay—except it didn’t stop there.

The Book Cover and the Threat

The confrontation escalated again once Lundeen actually saw what Cahn had been working on. When he spotted the cover of The Altar of Pergamon on the laptop screen, Cahn says he grew more agitated and demanded to know what Cahn had done. Then, using profanity, he threatened to punch Cahn’s “Jewish face.” That detail matters. It shifts this from a generic in-flight meltdown toward something with a specifically religious and ethnic edge – a threat aimed at Cahn’s identity as much as anything he’d said.

The Struggle, the Slurs, and the Restraint

From there it turned into an actual fight. Cahn says Lundeen struck him in the chest and moved toward his face; Cahn deliberately avoided hitting back and called for the flight attendants. When Cahn tried to stand up with his laptop, Lundeen allegedly grabbed it and wrestled to pull it away, and Cahn says the struggle reinjured a shoulder he’d hurt before. The disturbance didn’t stay contained to their two seats. Other passengers independently reported hearing Lundeen use racial slurs and anti-gay language toward crew and passengers alike. A former law enforcement officer, Juan Mejia, and another passenger, Richard O’Lenick, stepped in once things turned physical – a version of events ABC News reported was independently confirmed. Flight attendants handed over zip ties and duct tape, and Lundeen reportedly bit Mejia while being restrained before he was finally secured to his seat. The plane diverted to Baltimore, where police arrested him on landing. O’Lenick later told TMZ that the two men had been talking – amicably, about faith – for roughly two hours before Lundeen’s demeanor flipped “like a light switch.”

What Scripture Says About This Kind of Opposition

The Bible doesn’t treat sudden, violent hostility to the gospel as some strange new phenomenon – it names it as something with a source behind the source. Paul was blunt about where real opposition comes from:

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. [Ephesians 6:12]

Peter’s warning runs in the same direction, describing an adversary who is active and looking for an opening:

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. [1 Peter 5:8]

The Gospels record moments where an encounter with genuine spiritual authority provoked exactly the kind of abrupt, violent reaction Cahn is describing. When Jesus confronted the demon-possessed man among the tombs, the response wasn’t calm:

For he was saying to him, "Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!" And Jesus asked him, "What is your name?" He replied, "My name is Legion, for we are many." [Mark 5:8-9]

Acts records something similar happening to Paul – not a philosophical debate, but a spirit reacting to the proclamation of the gospel itself:

As we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune-telling. She followed Paul and us, crying out, "These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation." And this she kept doing for many days. Paul, having become greatly annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, "I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her." And it came out that very hour. [Acts 16:16-18]

A few chapters later, Acts also records the reverse case – the seven sons of Sceva, who tried to invoke Jesus’ name without any real relationship to Him and were overpowered for it (Acts 19:13-16). That account is worth remembering here too. It’s a reminder that the Bible treats the demonic as real, but never as something to be handled casually, and never as a label to hand out with certainty from a distance.

What We Can Say for Sure – and What We Can’t

Some of this story is verified; the demonic explanation is Cahn’s interpretation, not a police finding. What’s independently corroborated is significant on its own: the abrupt, violent turn; the religiously hostile and racial language; the physical assault; the restraint; the diversion; and the arrest. What can’t be independently established by police reports or other passengers is Cahn’s reading on why it happened – that the trigger wasn’t politics, sexuality, or even the book cover at first, but the gospel itself, and that what followed was spiritual rather than purely psychological or medical.

Scripture acknowledges the reality of spiritual opposition. It also doesn’t hand us the authority to diagnose a stranger’s spiritual condition from a news account. John’s letter puts it plainly:

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. [1 John 4:1]

Holding both of those things at once – the reality of spiritual warfare and honest caution about assigning it to a specific person from the outside – is the harder, more Biblical way to read a story like this.

Whatever was actually happening in Arthur Lundeen’s mind and heart that day, the picture that emerges is a familiar one to anyone who’s ever tried to talk about Jesus with someone who was, until that moment, perfectly friendly. Good news is never neutral. It exposes something. Cahn walked away from that flight with a damaged laptop and a reinjured shoulder, still saying the same things he was saying before Lundeen sat down next to him – people react to the Good News of Jesus Christ. It is also true that the evil one and his minions react as well.