Unexplained Disappearances You Probably Never Heard About

By Editorial Staff in Bizarre On 13th November 2016

Every year thousands of people are reported missing. Some make the national and world news, but others just go unnoticed. While the majority are found within hours, others disappear without a trace, never to be seen again. Here are some of the more famous and bizarre cases in history.

#1 Jimmy Hoffa

Despite many years of investigations and countless speculations, the body of the President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and a known mob boss, Jimmy Hoffa has never been found. Investigators have little doubt that he was murdered when he was on his way to have a meeting in 1975 with his mafia connection. The only missing thing was his body, and that has become the source for many theories over the years. A number of grisly possibilities were considered, among them that Hoffa's body was mixed into concrete that was used to build the New York Giants football stadium, that he was buried beneath a swimming pool in Michigan, and that he was crushed in a car compactor, but all of these theories have proven to be unsubstantiated. The FBI proclaimed his case closed and he was pronounced dead in 1982.

#2 Louis Le Prince

Known as the man who actually invented movies, Le Prince was an inventor who created the first camera and projector in 1888 in France and recorded the first motion picture. In September of 1890, Le Prince boarded a train bound for Paris, where he was to meet with his family for a trip to the United States to demonstrate his camera. But when the train arrived in Paris, Le Prince, along with his luggage and camera equipment, was nowhere to be found. The police claim it was suicide because he had been a known manic depressive. However, French authorities believe he met with foul play and suspect none other than Thomas Edison, who patented a very similar invention just 18 months later. The body of Le Prince was never found.

#3 DB Cooper

Dan "D.B." Cooper was the alias of an unknown man who hijacked a Boeing 727 commercial airliner in 1971. The case had America on the edge of their seats for weeks and months as the brazen criminal was suspected to still be alive and living under an assumed name. After the plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the man demanded and received four parachutes and $200,000 in unmarked bills, at which point he released the passengers and ordered the plane and its four crew members to take off again and head for Reno, Nevada. The plane took off and shortly thereafter, Cooper lowered the stair and parachuted out, money in hand. Though he is suspected to have landed somewhere near Vancouver, Washington, he was never seen again, and no body or remains of a parachute were ever discovered. The only thing found was one marked $100 bill in a tree. What followed was one of the largest manhunts ever conducted in the US, and after suspecting over 100 people of being the real DB Cooper, nobody was ever arrested and his real identity remains a mystery.

#4 Amelia Earhart

Though she was not unheard of or far from being someone people have forgotten, Amelia Earhart still remains one of our biggest unsolved disappearances. In 1937, along with navigator Fred Noonan, she set out for what was to be her crowning achievement: a flight around the world. Near the end of her 29,000-mile journey, Earhart encountered unfavorable weather conditions in the south Pacific and was unable to find the small island where she was to refuel. Sometime around July 2, all contact with her plane was lost, and Earhart and Noonan would not be seen again. A huge scale search and investigation followed covering over 250,000 miles of ocean, but no wreckage from Earhart's Lockheed Electra was ever found. The best theory about her disappearance is that she simply ran out of gas and crashed somewhere or landed on an island and eventually died. Still another theory says that the duo crashed on a Japanese-controlled island, where they were captured and eventually executed. To this day, her disappearance is one of the most talked about and theorized in American history.

#5 Flight 19

It remains one of the most bizarre mysteries ever and is what began the theory about the devilish Bermuda Triangle. In 1945, a group of five Navy bombers disappeared off the coast of Florida, but no wreckage was ever found. Ever. Another plane carrying 13 airmen was lost when it exploded while searching for the missing squadron. The Navy conducted an inquiry into the incident, eventually stating that the five pilots became disoriented and flew off course, ran out of fuel, and landed out in the sea. A much stranger theory posited by a number of magazine articles suggested that supernatural elements were responsible for the disappearance, citing bizarre radio transmissions where the pilots report: "We are entering white water, nothing seems right. We don't know where we are, the water is green, no white."

#6 Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce was a famed American author, who was best known for The Devil's Dictionary, as well as for numerous short stories about ghosts and the American Civil War. He wrote for The San Francisco Examiner, where his opinions earned him the nickname "Bitter Bierce." At the age of 71, in 1913, he decided to go on a tour of the battlefields in Mexico with Pancho Villa's army during the Mexican Revolution. He disappeared sometime between 1913 and 1914. It is rumored that Pancho Villas men murdered him because he was considered an enemy, but written records of the Mexican troop indicate that Bierce had never been with their camp and his family believes he was murdered while still in San Francisco.

#7 Percy Fawcett

An adventurer and a supposed inspiration for the Indiana Jones character, Percy Fawcett was a British archeologist who gained fame in the early 1900s for a series of map-making expeditions to the jungles of South America. In 1925, Fawcett, along with his son Jack, returned to Brazil as part of an ambitious expedition to discover a supposed lost city located deep in the jungle. On May 25, 1925, Fawcett sent a wire message to his wife letting her know that he, Jack, and a young man named Raleigh Rimmell were venturing into uncharted territory in search of the mythical city, which he had dubbed "Z." It was the last anyone would hear from the group. It is believed he was living as a ruler over this lost civilization or was killed en route. Despite his instructions left prior to the expedition, several search parties have gone on the hunt for the missing men, resulting in over 120 more missing men.

#8 The Mary Celeste

The prototypical "ghost ship," the Mary Celeste was a merchant vessel that was discovered in 1872 abandoned and adrift in the Atlantic Ocean. All of the ship's 7 crewmembers, along with Captain Benjamin Briggs and his wife and daughter, were nowhere to be found. The ship's life raft was gone, but the Mary Celeste appeared to be perfectly seaworthy, and even stranger, a number of necessary survival items had been left behind. The ship's cargo and a number of valuables were also untouched, seemingly ruling out the possibility of piracy. So what could have happened? A number of theories have been proposed, ranging from mutiny to alien abduction, but the most likely scenario is that a freak storm or earthquake caused the ship to take on a small amount of water, leading to a panic and an unnecessary evacuation. Adrift in a single life raft, the survivors are suspected to have perished at sea.

#9 Judge Joseph Force Crater

Although he is relatively unknown today, Joseph Force Crater's disappearance in 1930 became a national obsession, to the point that the phrase "pulling a Crater" became synonymous with vanishing. A well-known judge in New York City, Crater inexplicably disappeared on the night of August 6, 1930. A number of bizarre details surround the case, most notably Crater's relationship with an Atlantic City showgirl named Sally Lou Ritz, who would herself disappear soon after the Judge. An investigation found that Crater's safe deposit box had been emptied, along with thousands of dollars from his bank account, but no concrete proof that Crater engineered his own disappearance has ever been uncovered.

#10 The Lost Colony

The biggest disappearance of a large group of people ever, the people of the lost colony were never located. In 1587, 104 people settled on what was known as Roanoke Island in an attempt to establish a permanent colony in the New World, Fear of the Indian tribes sent their leader, John Wite, back to England for assistance. Upon his arrival to the new colony in 1590, he found nothing there. The colonists were gone and all 114 structures were dismantled. The only sign they left behind was the word "Croatan," the name of a nearby island, carved into a tree. People believe that the settlers were assimilated into the native tribes after many native Americans were found who spoke fluent English. A project is now underway to try to prove the theory using DNA evidence.

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