In 1977, the town of Hazen, Arkansas, was distraught to hear that Gary Betzner, a local crop duster with three young children had plunged to his death off the steep White River Bridge.

A pastor broke the somber news to Polly, Betzner’s oldest daughter from his first marriage on her sixth birthday. She, like his other two children, was grief-stricken and confused.

But nobody took it worse than his second wife, Sally, who became so inconsolable she was detained in a psych ward of a nearby hospital for days.

The entire town was dumbfounded as to why a seemingly happy, financially stable 30-something man would leap to his death in broad daylight — especially the authorities, who only ever recovered clothes and shoes, but no body.

That’s because there was no body to be found.

Betzner faked his death to live a dangerous double life — as a multimillionaire, international drug smuggler for Pablo Escobar, while also mounting a covert CIA war almost simultaneously.

His fascinating, stranger-than-fiction story is the subject of a new HBO Max docuseries, “The Invisible Pilot,” premiering Monday, April 4 at 9 p.m. The three-part, eye-opening tale covers Betzner’s unlikely transition from family man to drug maven, wrangling covert US government operations in Central America.

“We see him as this sort of ‘Forrest Gump’ character, he’s everywhere,” Ari Mark, who co-directs with Phil Lott told The Post of Betzner, who is still alive and is now in his 80s.

The docuseries, executive produced by Adam McKay who is known for wild anti-establishment stories like “The Big Short,” was “a dream come true” collaboration for the directors.

A real mystery man

Even the directors, who sat down with Betzner a number of times through the course of the project, say it’s hard to pin down who he really is.

He grew up in the South, with an abusive father who left his mother when Gary was young. Years later, he joined the Navy, where he served in a communications branch. Betzner also says he was trained as a pilot, learning how to fly undetected with precious cargo.

“He is as cagey about [his military service] as he is about anything and we desperately tried to get his records from the Navy,” Lott said. “Whether it was piloting or he was in communications, he definitely picked up something [about evading radar] there.”

After starting a family in Arkansas, the crop duster moved briefly to Alaska in 1976, in the hopes of working in the state’s booming oil industry. It was there he started dabbling in small-time pot smuggling. A year later, Betzner — an anti-establishment hippie whose love of substances was not limited to marijuana — was busted in Miami on narcotics charges.

He returned to Arkansas, but was picked up for possession a second time there. His choice was simple: spend half his life in jail or disappear.

Telling not a soul but his wife, Sally, the two hatched the plan to fake Betzner’s death. She threw his clothes in the river and told authorities that he jumped off the bridge outside their hometown.

Sally was so game that she even took hypnosis classes with her husband to deliver her yearslong performance as the grieving widow to the townsfolk. Her nervous breakdown, according to Sally in the documentary, was part of the act.

Illusive identities

After a year of being presumed dead, Betzner was hiding out in Hawaii under a fake name and would have his family come visit periodically.

But then he got busted yet again in his new, tropical locale. Again, Betzner had to go on the run to avoid a life in jail — only this time, he upped the ante and became truly invisible, even to his loved ones.

Untethered, Betzner entered the underworld of high-profile, international drug smuggling.

By 1980, Gary had moved around the US under several aliases as he began his work as a smuggler for various groups and cartels — putting his crop-dusting skills and military experience to good use. He traveled from place to place under the guise of a chiropractor, a car salesman, a real estate broker and many other trades, all the while flying planes for his bosses. Fittingly, it all went down during the height of President Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs.

“He’s a shapeshifter … and he pulled [multiple lives] off,” Mark said.

Betzner, who retired his birth name for his most frequently used moniker Lucas Harmony, quickly accrued an “astronomical” fortune from his newfound career while living in South Florida, according to Mark.

“Phil and I spent a lot of time with him in the Miami and Coconut Grove area retracing steps. ‘That guy owes me 50 million, those people owe me 100 million’ and you’re like, ‘OK!’” he added. “He has all kinds of stories about trading cars and giving gifts, he was actually a fairly generous guy. He gave a lot of it away.”

His motivation for the death-defying runs — where Betzner said he was once chased by Cuban MiG fighter jets for flying in their airspace — wasn’t actually about making money, the directors said.

“Every flight he brought in, he felt like he was being a patriot. That’s a twisted world view that, in his mind, is absolutely 100% correct,” Lott said. “I think Gary wants to be extraordinary. It’s such a quintessentially American idea, right? It’s like: ‘I’m a small town crop duster, but … I’m a really good pilot, I’m really good at what I do, boy, I can do better than [crop dusting] and I can keep ascending,’” Mark said.

Escobar’s fly guy

In the early 1980s, Betzner made a new contact to fly for — the notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.

“Escobar and him seemed to have a mutual respect,” Mark said.

“Gary tells a great story of purchasing planes and he created Pablo Escobar’s air force. And it was several planes, big planes, not just single engines or twin engines — these were jets,” Lott added. “And he tells several stories about spending time flying planes to Chile and just flying around looking for great valleys and beautiful vistas with Pablo Escobar.”

Around the same time, Betzner found another new employer in the United States government.

After catching wise to his illegal dealings, the CIA leveraged Betzner to do their dirty work of arming anti-communist, Contra rebels in Nicaragua during a black ops mission. To avoid jail time, Betzner agreed to fly weapons and explosives to the ranch of John Hull, an American contractor in Costa Rica who worked with the CIA.

Specifically, he twice hauled M-16 rifles, mines, and C-4 explosives down to the property, bringing back a near 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) of cocaine, according to an Associated Press report.

“That tension is messed up. You’re dealing with these two kind of superpowers playing them off each other in some kind of way,” Mark said of Betzner’s unlikely employers. “I think for him, and I’ve experienced this firsthand, he is so incredibly good at shapeshifting — at rolling with whatever the situation is and making it work.”

Betzner’s incredible run came to an abrupt end in 1984, when he was busted in Florida for smuggling Escobar’s cocaine. After being sentenced to 27 years in jail, Betzner spited the CIA — who he says had guaranteed him immunity from jail — by testifying to the false flag mission and many more secrets of government-known drug smuggling.

He did so publicly in 1988 to a Senate Committee led by John Kerry, where he even pointed to the exact runway he landed on in Costa Rica.

But Betzner’s policy-altering testimony also put him at risk of pissing off his other boss.

“[Escobar] knew where I was from, my children, that I ‘committed suicide,’” Betzner says in the series. “Apparently he hired somebody [in the US] to investigate who I was as, like, insurance.”

“There was this implication of collateral, the collateral being his family,” Mark said. “There was this sort of unspoken surveillance that Escobar and his people made very clear to Gary.”

Ultimately, Betzner served his full sentence, and Escobar left his family alone. He reconnected with his kids and now lives humbly with his third wife, and no traces of the many millions that were seized by the feds at the height of his drug trafficking career.

He admits he lives with a degree of remorse.

“His family has clearly had its struggles and I think Gary has and will continue to admit he regrets that,” Mark said. “He really embraces, ‘This is who he is’ and ‘This is the way it is.’”