That something is the paramilitary in-flight boardings of the ill-fated Kahuna Airlines, from an vessel of advanced (but plausible) technology:
The captain took what evasive action he could, but the other matched his maneuvers exactly. Finally they stood, side by side above the tropic of Cancer, between them, some twenty meters across, a flow of savage wind, as, slowly, not telescoping out, but assembling itself from small twinkling pieces of truss-work, the other spun across to them a windproof access tunnel, with a cross section like a long teardrop, that locked firmly on to the forward hatch of the Boeing....When the hatch at last sighed open, the intruders entered the flying nightclub with elite-unit grace, automatics ready, faces dim behind high-impact shields, all Business. Everyone was ordered to a seat. The captain came on the PA. "This is for our own good. They don't want all of us, just a few. When they get to your seat number, please cooperate, and try not to believe any rumors you hear. And till we get the rest of you where your tickets say you're going, all drinks are on the Kahuna Airlines Contingency Fund!"
(source: businessweek.com)
A predecessor work with another sufficiently-advanced technology, "Air Raid" by John Varley, published in The Persistence of Vision (1978), in which the "stewardesses", agents from the future, board planes about to crash and push the passengers through a portal to the future, refilling their seats with simulated bodies.
...
Is this some new kind of rescue? I mean, are we going to crash--I switched my gun to prod and brushed it across his cheek. He gasped and fell back.
(source: badmovies.org)
Another retrieval, this time unworldly, in the "Tempus Fugit" (1997) episode of The X-Files written by Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz.
You're saying that, that Flight 549 was in the grip of... sort of a UFO tractor beam?
(source: mediacircus.net)