20 Famous Disappearances History Never Fully Solved

In 1937, Amelia Earhart, the famous American pilot, along with her navigator Fred Noonan, departed from Lae, New Guinea on their attempt to fly around the world via the equator. The two aimed for the minuscule Howland Island. Earhart radioed the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Itasca, stating she could not see land and that she was running low on fuel. It was the last anyone heard from them. Extensive searches by the Navy and Coast Guard did not uncover any wreckage. Earhart was pronounced legally dead a couple of years later.

In December 1926, Britain’s most famous mystery writer, Agatha Christie, disappeared from her Berkshire house after her husband Archie asked for a divorce. Her car was later discovered deserted by a chalk pit, with her coat still hanging inside. After 11 days of searching by police, bloodhounds, and other volunteers, including fellow writers Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L. Sayers, she was found at a Harrogate hotel registered under her husband’s mistress’s last name. Doctors diagnosed her with amnesia. But even Christie herself never publicly mentioned what happened.

In the summer of 1930, Judge Joseph Crater, a newly appointed judge on the New York State Supreme Court, cleared out his office, made off with all of his files, and pulled over $5,000 out of his bank account. Then he ate at a Manhattan chophouse and, when he left later that night, he vanished. Crater’s disappearance revealed that some judges in the city bought their positions through the Tammany Hall political machine and gave America an enduring catchphrase for vanished people: Calling Judge Crater. There was no crime scene, no body.

In 1924, George Mallory, then considered Britain’s leading mountaineer, and his companion Andrew “Sandy” Irvine departed their high camp on Mount Everest to make one last attempt to reach the summit. A member of their team observed two indistinct figures on a ridge above them through a telescope, just before the weather closed in. Mallory and Irvine did not return. Mallory’s body was discovered in 1999; he had sustained fatal injuries from a fall. Irvine and his camera remained missing, so whether they reached the summit first remains unknown.

Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg came to Nazi-occupied Budapest, Hungary, during World War Two and distributed passports that protected an estimated 20,000 to 100,000 Hungarian Jews from being deported. Soviet soldiers captured the city, and the Soviet secret police arrested Wallenberg for alleged espionage and transferred him to a prison in Moscow, where he was never publicly seen again. The Soviet Union said that he died of a heart attack, but investigators believe he was probably executed.

For decades, British explorer-colonel Percy Fawcett was obsessed with finding a mythical lost city of gold, called Z. He headed into the Mato Grosso, in Brazil, with his son Jack and Jack’s friend, Raleigh Rimmell, in 1925. The last letter Fawcett sent home from a camp he’d dubbed Dead Horse Camp said not to bother sending search parties if they weren’t found. The men were never seen again. Newspapers later claimed that over 100 searchers had died hunting for them, but that figure was a press exaggeration. Verified fatalities among the search parties were actually very few.

In 1874, 4-year-old Charley Ross was lured with candy and a carriage ride in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and driven off while his brother was left behind. His father, a Philadelphia grocer, received 23 ransom letters demanding $20,000. Charley’s kidnapping was the first documented cash-ransom kidnapping in America. Two men were later shot to death during an unrelated burglary; one confessed to being involved in the kidnapping before he died, but didn’t say where the boy was. Charley was never found. But the case changed how America warned its children about strangers.

In 1944, French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, famous for writing The Little Prince, flew reconnaissance for the Free French Air Force just before the Allies invaded the south of France. He took off from Corsica that year in an unarmed plane and never returned. In 2003, French underwater archaeologists found his plane lying on the ocean floor with no sign of bullet or shrapnel damage. His body was never found.

In December 1944, Major Glenn Miller, conductor of the nation’s most popular swing orchestra, boarded a small plane at an English airfield to beat his band to Paris for a radio broadcast. The flight was ill-equipped. When Miller noticed the plane did not carry parachutes, he allegedly asked a nearby colonel, “Where the hell are the parachutes?” The plane flew into freezing fog over the English Channel and did not land. Official investigations pointed to bad weather and engine icing. Miller and his two passengers were never found.

India’s former wartime leader of the independence movement, Subhash Chandra Bose (often referred to as “Netaji”), who had raised an army with Japanese help, boarded a Japanese bomber in Taiwan en route to the USSR in 1945. People said the plane crashed right after takeoff. Hospital staff mentioned he passed away from his injuries hours afterward and was cremated. But no pictures or remains were ever shared, so millions of his supporters wouldn’t buy the story. Netaji Bose’s true fate has never been determined to their satisfaction.

On December 12, 1910, Dorothy Arnold, a 25-year-old New York socialite and heiress to a perfume-importing fortune, stepped out of her family’s Manhattan mansion to go shopping for a gown. She bought some chocolates and a book, and ran into a friend later that afternoon. Dorothy promised she’d make her way home by walking through Central Park. She never did. Her father, concerned about scandal, waited 43 days to alert the police, choosing to rely instead on private detectives. But those were the days when a search might have actually found her, and because of the delay, Dorothy Arnold was never found.

In 1888, Louis Le Prince, a 48-year-old French engineer, made what survives as the oldest motion-picture footage ever shot in Leeds, England. He was preparing for a public demonstration in New York when he stopped by to see his brother in Dijon, France, before boarding a train to Paris on September 16, 1890. He and his luggage and camera prototypes disappeared before the train reached its destination. With his U.S. patents never granted, his main rivals, Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers, would go on to stake their claims to the infancy of cinema.

On October 7, 1949, 26-year-old Hollywood bit-part actress Jean Spangler left her Los Angeles apartment and told her sister-in-law she had a night shoot. Two days later, her torn purse turned up in Griffith Park with an unfinished note addressed to “Kirk.” Spangler’s co-star Kirk Douglas stepped forward, proved he was in Palm Springs at the time of her disappearance, and was completely exonerated. Hundreds of officers combed through Griffith Park, but Spangler was never found. The widely believed rumor that she was connected to the mob was never confirmed.

Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, already well known for earlier Australian expeditions, departed Queensland in 1848 with six other men and dozens of pack animals on the first east-to-west crossing of Australia. In his last letter, he expressed full confidence in his men. But within weeks, the expedition had disappeared without a trace. The search continued for decades without success, and although a nameplate was unearthed around 1900, it could only confirm the right era, not the place he died.

Weldon Kees, a poet and painter who had been suffering from depression, had told friends that he was considering killing himself or making a fresh start in Mexico. He disappeared in San Francisco in 1955. His car was found the next day on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge, with its keys still in the ignition. There was an unfed cat waiting in his apartment, but no letter. The police decided that he had probably jumped, although his body was never found. Some friends figured he’d slipped away to Mexico instead.

In 1930, Wallace Fard Muhammad came to Detroit and started a movement that would eventually become the Nation of Islam. It attracted thousands of members. Then, after one follower committed a ritual killing in his name, police arrested and expelled him. He showed up again and got arrested again, then disappeared from history for good in 1934. His main follower, Elijah Muhammad, took over leadership of the group and explained Fard’s leaving as a supernatural occurrence. The mystery of Fard’s disappearance became a cornerstone of the religion.

In December 1913, the Civil War veteran and author of The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce, joined the army of Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary general, in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, where he served as an observer. Months before he disappeared, he had written to his niece that there could be no more fitting end than being shot against a Mexican wall. His last reported dispatch stated that the next morning he would set out on horseback for the town of Ojinaga. After that, he was never heard from again. U.S. consuls sent to search for him found no evidence that Bierce was dead or that there was a grave for him.

In 1934, 20-year-old Everett Ruess, a California artist and nomad, rode two pack burros into a secluded Utah canyon. He spoke with two sheep herders, the last people known to have talked with him. When his letters home suddenly ceased, searchers found his burros alive and his possessions unopened, but no sign of Everett. Someone had scrawled the word “NEMO,” Latin for “nobody,” into a canyon wall. Someone else claimed in 2008 to have found his bones, but DNA testing the next year showed the remains were Native American.

In 1897, Swedish engineer Salomon Andrée set off from Svalbard, Norway, in a hydrogen balloon along with fellow engineer Knut Frænkel and photographer Nils Strindberg, with the aim of reaching the North Pole by air. After just a few hours, however, they were forced to land on Arctic pack ice due to icing and gas leaks, some 500 miles away from the Pole. All three men survived the landing and tried to drag their sledge across the ice for months until they died in the autumn, on a remote island. It wasn’t until 33 years later that a sealing ship found their frozen camp, diaries, and film.

In 1928, Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer who had been first to reach the South Pole, boarded a French flying boat at Tromsø to search for Umberto Nobile, a rival explorer whose airship had crashed on Arctic ice. Amundsen’s plane lost radio contact over the Barents Sea in heavy fog. Wreckage recovered later that summer confirmed a crash at sea. Amundsen and his five crew members were never found. Nobile, the man he set out to save, was later rescued alive.

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