Jack the Ripper. Sure, it’s hard to say that he disappeared when he was never identified in the first place; but it’s odd to think that a serial killer would just stop at five victims.
Aleister Crowley had an interesting theory: Jack killed them in a pentagram pattern as part of an invisibility spell. But then, Crowley was usually full of shit.
Er, maybe I’m just an intolerant idiot or something, but… :dubious:
As for the “Lost Tribes of Israel,” they didn’t vanish into thin air. They were conquered by the Assyrians, and the survivors gradually intermarried and intermingled with the Assyrians to the point where they were no longer Israelites, for all practical purposes.
A British diplomat, Sir Benjamin Bathurst, mysteriously disappeared in Perleberg, on November 25, 1809
Wasn’t there a general in WW2 who went missing? I remember hearing on the History Channel that after Allied forces landed in Italy, one general just wandered away from the beachhead and was never seen again. Supposedly, he’s the only general to ever be declared MIA.
Yes, post #3. But the name he registered under was Dan Cooper. “D.B.” was a reporter’s error.
And of course some decided to check out Africa. (I know, these technically aren’t the lost tribes, but still interesting.)
The guy who wrote “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” known only as B. Traven is really more of an actual disappearance I believe. He was involved in the screenplay for the famous Bogart/Houston film, and may have even been on set. Somewhere along the line though, he vanished. Lots of rumors abounded. One rumor even said that he WAS Ambrose Bierce. He wrote a few other books worth reading as well.
B. Traven died of prostate cancer in Mexico City on March 26, 1969. This had to be established by his widow and his estate so that the proper copyright terms on his works (death + 50 years at the time) would be observed (if date of death was not known, the copyright terms would by default go to 75 years from publication, which in all cases would be a shorter term).
Traven’s date of death is listed in numerous reference works, including The Oxford Companion to American Literature, The Penguin International Dictionary of Contemporary Biography from 1900 to the Present, Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, and Twentieth Century Authors.
Carlos Fuentes’s novel El Gringo viejo fictionalized a theory about how Ambrose Bierce met his end during la revolución. It was made into a movie, Old Gringo, with Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda.
Doesn’t say anything about the quality of the plane. When five airplanes on one flight all go into the drink, it’s almost certainly due to navigational error leading to fuel exhaustion over the ocean.
A few were from mid-air collisions, actually 
This is how the story goes:
—Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, Shi‘ite Islam, p. 210-211.
So, according to the traditional account, the imam predicted the death of his last spokesman and announced in advance that there would be no replacement. Obviously these spokesmen had to have a very high degree of trust reposed in them by the believers, because there was no independent verification of what they said. They could have smothered the imam with a pillow and buried him in the cellar years ago for all anyone knew. The only detail in the story that doesn’t fit that scenario is the prediction of Simmari’s death a few days before it happened. I guess this put Simmari in the position of foretelling his own death.
The background for why the imam would feel a need to disappear: none of the previous eleven imams had died a natural death. They had all been murdered for political reasons. Wouldn’t you go into hiding if you were next in line? By this time, the senior Shi‘ite management must have decided that it was just too hazardous to continue the line of imams, so a way out was found. Step one: remove the 12th from public view. Step two: Extend his imamate indefinitely. This way you don’t get a 13th, and no more murders too. Removing the 12th when he was a little boy helped, since he didn’t have any sons to continue the line. If he never died, one may hope he will return someday. Like King Arthur, or Frederick Barbarossa.
I know, it looks kind of a shaky premise to base one’s faith on, but somehow it has had an enduring appeal to centuries of Shi‘ites, don’t ask me to explain how.
Speaking of the Bolivian army, also among the disappeared are Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Their biopic presumes the Bolivian army got them, which is probably true, but to my knowledge this has never been conclusively established.
And Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail around the world alone (1895-1898), disappeared at sea in 1909.
I did not know that. Amazing that they all ended up in the in the same area.
Maybe not too amazing. Given how many green pilots must have been learning to fly torpedo bombers in that area in the Forties, there must have been a heck of a lot of crashes.
Philip Kramer, Iron Butterfly bass player, dissappeared in 1995. Over four years later they found his van at the bottom of a ravine, skeletal remains nearby.
There’s still a bit of controversy over whether it was an accident or suicide.