What happened to Flight 77?

I was watching an episode of Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura the other day where they were investigating the conspiracy theory that a missile hit the Pentagon instead of Flight 77.  It's not the first time I've ever heard of this conspiracy theory, but I've never really taken it too seriously.  Flight 77 was hijacked, so the story that it crashed into the Pentagon makes sense.  Besides, even if there was a conspiracy and the hijacking was an inside job, why would they need to use a missile anyways?

I must admit though, it is kind of odd there was no visible debris that looked like it came from an airplane.  But if it wasn't Flight 77, then what happened to it?  The episode didn't really say anything about that.  I asked someone I work with who's interested in conspiracy theories what he thought about it, and he suggested it may have been shot down over the ocean.  If so, and no one saw it, it would be very difficult to find any evidence for it if you don't even know where to look.

Without a plausible theory about what happened to Flight 77 that is backed up by some kind of evidence, it's going to be hard to convince people that a missile hit the Pentagon instead of Flight 77.  If Flight 77 didn't hit the Pentagon, then finding evidence of what happened to it would be the missing piece of the puzzle.  It would be difficult to deny that a missile (or possibly a bomb) hit the Pentagon if Flight 77 was found somewhere else.        If people who support the missile hitting the Pentagon theory really want to convince people they are right, then they need to figure out what happened to Flight 77.

But there may be no evidence to find.  It must have crashed or landed somewhere.  Maybe it really did crash into the Pentagon.  I'm not really convinced that it did or it didn't.  We may never know for sure.