Also B. Traven, who wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
A lot of great replies, keep’em coming.
I still think Hoffa takes the palm for most prominent person to disappear in mysterious circumstances, but the Judge Crater and Lord Lucan cases are intriguing.
Yeah – there are really two flavors of disappearances:
- The body was never found, though it’s generally agreed upon as to what happened. Holt, as well as people like Glenn Miller, seem to fall into this group.
- The body was never found, and the circumstances behind their fate are also unclear or unexplained – and, due to that, there’s often a lot of speculation and theories about it. Earhart and D.B. Cooper fall into this group; arguably, Hoffa does, too – though it’s pretty well-accepted that it was a mob hit, the details, and his final resting place, are where the speculation falls.
Earhart’s fate is not much of a mystery. It’s almost certain her plane crashed in the middle of the ocean and she was either killed in the crash or drowned.
The same is true of several of the other “mysterious disappearances” in kenobi’s link. These are people who drowned and whose bodies weren’t recovered.
Along with some family members, she went missing in 1995. She and the others were soon assumed murdered based on FBI investigations, but it wasn’t until 2001 when one of the murderers showed investigators the locations of the bodies.
Probably more despised by most Americans, and more infamous than famous, I guess.
I suspect that without this meme Hoffa would have passed from public consciousness years ago. Plus I suspect that Earhart was much more famous amongst the population in general before her disappearance than Hoffa was. Not sure how to quantify that though…
Then there was the strange story in 2006 that the FBI searched a Milford, Michigan farm for Hoffa’s body, over 30 years after his disappearance. Going so far as to completely raze a horse barn to look for it.
Rumor has is the son of the family who owned the farm was in prison, and his father wrote him saying “The farm’s not doing well-- I don’t know how we’re going to afford to have that old horse barn removed”.
The son wrote back saying “don’t worry, I’ll figure something out. But just make sure that the people who tear down the barn don’t dig too deep under it-- they might find Hoffa’s body”.
After the mother reports that the FBI showed up soon after and razed the barn, the son wrote “told you I’d figure out how to get it done!”
(First part true, second part adapted from an old joke)
Amelia Earhart is no more of a mystery than Glenn Miller. Her plane crashed in the South Pacific.
Jimmy Hoffa disappeared with no idea of what happened to him. He could have gone away voluntarily or he could have been kidnapped. He could have been alive for who knows how long or dead soon after.
Michael Rockefeller disappeared on an expedition to New Guinea in 1961. Some villagers claimed to have killed him, but his remains and no evidence of his demise was ever found.
There’s the interesting bit “He walked around horses” - most notable for the science fiction story it inspired.
And Ghislaine Maxwell’s father disappeared, but that’s less of a mystery - he’d looted the company’s pension fund, and was out in the middle of the ocean on his yacht when the fan was being impacted back home.
Louis Augustin Le Prince disappeared in 1890, after inventing one of the first movie cameras.
The story about what happened to the $600,000 in gold coins is as interesting as the disappearance! I, too was surprised when I heard about it on “All Things Considered” on the 1-year anniversary of their disappearance that I hadn’t heard about it AT ALL, which I guess illustrates just how “admired” she really was.
As for D. B. Cooper, he’s famous for being missing, and most likely hiding in plain sight for many years, and is most likely deceased himself.
Disappeared for good or just disappeared for a while? Iin the latter category we have SC Gov Mark Sanford
Disappeared for good, a la Jimmy Hoffa
I knew about him, because Bill Bryson mentioned the incident in In a Sunburned Country. <ninja’d above>
My dad got dragged to the Foursquare Temple by my grandma when he was a kid.
Maxwell doesn’t count. He went missing from his boat, but his drowned body was recovered from the ocean twelve hours later.
Even I know about that despite being an American born a few years after his disappearance due to a catchy (cover) song by Black Box Recorder. Is he more or less known in the UK than Percy Harrison Fawcett, though?
Well, there was a movie about six years ago about Percy Fawcett’s last expedition, so right now he might be better known.
I’ve never heard of Percy Fawcett. Lord Lucan is known to pretty much everyone. Well, people over 40 anyway.
She was featured quite heavily in a book that I read a few months ago about the history of space exploration. O’Hair’s objections to religious verses being read by astronauts starting with the Genesis reading from the crew of Apollo 8 in a Christmas broadcast back to Earth led to a legal showdown against NASA regarding separation of church and state. She lost the case which eventually was tossed out by the Supreme Court.
Another sensational (in its time) disappearance in the UK was Victor Grayson, a young firebrand Socialist MP.