7 of the most mysterious famous disappearances ever

People disappear all the time. After all, the world is a strange and savage place and occasionally, a dude will run a car off a secluded cliff and never be heard from again or a dingo will carry away some Outback baby or a whole airplane will disappear into the Bermuda Triangle and be carried off to Atlantis, but most of the time no one except for the immediate family really cares. But when a famous person -– even a moderately famous person -– disappears, everyone goes nuts. People write a million books, the History Channel runs a thousand specials and people come up with all manner of outlandish theories. Sometimes, the person doesn’t even have to be famous. They just have to be cute, white, female and from a decent family. Then people really get crazy. In the end, I think that most people don’t want these mysteries to be resolved because the truth will almost always be disappointing. No one wants to hear that Amelia Earhart crashed in the ocean. They just want to go on believing that she’s still alive somewhere, serving as the Queen of the aliens who sucked her up in some sort of cosmic vacuum tube. But, she’s dead and, let’s face it, so is everybody else on this list. Sorry to be such a downer, but we’re all responsible adults here. Still, until someone finds the bodies, the following seven cases will continue to intrigue everyone from academics to the dumbest of tabloid readers. Oh, and Nancy Grace. I’ll leave it to you to decide which end of the spectrum that particular shrieking harridan falls on. But enough about all that. Let’s just get on with it.
7 Jimmy Hoffa
Jimmy Hoffa, a labor union leader with suspected ties to organized crime, disappeared in 1975 and immediately people began to speculate that he had been offed by his criminal pals. Since then, there have been rumors that he’s buried everywhere from a rural farm to the end zone at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. I mean, I think it’s pretty obvious that Hoffa was hanging with some seedy dudes, and, well, you do that and sometimes you end up buried under a football field or on a farm or in an old Indian graveyard. Shit happens. I suppose there’s the possibility that a near 90 year-old Hoffa is still alive, hiding out in some shack in the woods, but I prefer to think that after he was snatched up he was buried in an old Indian graveyard, from which he rises every year on the anniversary of his disappearance to fight evildoers, and that this was the basis for the film The Crow. Perhaps that is a bit outlandish, but until someone finds the body, you can’t prove that I’m wrong, now can you?
6 Bison Dele
In July of 2002, Dele, who was born Brian Williams, and who made his name as a starting center in the NBA for teams like the Chicago Bulls and the Detroit Pistons, disappeared at sea while sailing aboard his catamaran (Which, by the way, was named Hakuna Matata – or, “no worries” — which given what happened seems a bit ironic, no?) Soon after, his brother, a dude named Miles Dabord, which sounds like the name of a bad guy in a cheesy ‘80s flick or something, sailed into port aboard the boat without Dele or anyone else who had been aboard the ship. Oops! You know, Miles, people tend to notice that kind of thing. Of course, the cops hauled him in and went over the boat, discovering what seemed to be a bunch of badly patched bullet holes, and quickly concluded that Dabord murdered his brother and his other passengers and dumped their bodies at sea. Of course, it didn’t help Dabord’s case that he had forged Dele’s signature to buy $152,000 of gold. I mean, other than a videotape narrated by Dabord in which he said, “Now, here’s the part where I shoot my brother,” the fuzz couldn’t have had better evidence. Apparently Dabord figured this out because he intentionally overdosed on insulin, slipped into a coma and died, which meant that although everybody pretty much knows what happened, Dele’s disappearance still remains somewhat mysterious. If you’re delusional anyway.
5 D.B. Cooper
D.B. Cooper is infamous for being the perpetrator of the only unsolved airline hijacking in American history. The truth is, however, is that no one actually knows who D.B. Cooper is. The name is an alias given to the man who extorted $200,000 in ransom money and then parachuted to oblivion and into the heart of popular culture. Since then, Cooper has become something of an icon, an anti-hero for these strange and terrible times. Theories abound as to what happened to Cooper after he jumped. Some people believe he never landed safely, others believe that he got away with the whole damn thing while others believe something in between. Maybe he died in a failed escape attempt from a Chicago prison with Michael Schofield and Lincoln Burrows. Or maybe he works as a roadie for Kid Rock. Who knows? The only thing anybody knows for sure is that nobody knows anything. A dude hijacked a plane, jumped out of it and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. Either he’s one of the greatest criminal masterminds of all time or one of the dumbest. There isn’t a whole lot of middle ground there, and I suppose there is a sort of doomed romanticism about all that. This dude went all out and he either retired to a Mexican beach with a bag full of money or he died in a thorn bush and was eaten by coyotes. They write songs about dudes like that. The truth is nothing compared to the legend.
4 Natalee Holloway
Somewhere, Nancy Grace just felt a tingling in her loins. Somewhere else, Joran van der Sloot just avoided getting cornholed by a giant Peruvian who makes him sit down when he pees. That’s because ol’ Joran is awaiting trial for killing another chick even though people are pretty sure that he also killed poor Natalee Holloway during her high school graduation trip to Aruba. Indeed, no one is entirely sure what happened to Holloway, but the two things that most people do know is that van der Sloot was probably involved and that this case turned Nancy Grace into Captain Ahab –- that is if Captain Ahab was incredibly annoying and cared just a little too much about what happened to some random blond girl, although I’m pretty sure that was the original plot of Moby Dick. You see, the whale was a metaphor. Anyway, Natalee Holloway is basically synonymous with the whole “missing blonde, reasonably attractive white girl goes missing, and the world freaks out” phenomenon which is used by people like Nancy Grace to get ratings and assholes like me to point out that people like Nancy Grace are soulless misery merchants who leech off of the genuine pain and loss of others, neither of which is really fair because, let’s not forget, this poor girl is probably dead and that kinda sucks, you know? Who knows if they’ll ever solve the mystery of her disappearance but what we can all be fairly confident about is that at some point in the not too distant future Joran van der Sloot will be made to wear a blonde wig and answer to the name Natalee while a terrifying Peruvian criminal decides to reenact his theory about what went down. So, that’s something, right?
3 Oscar Zeta Acosta
Oscar Zeta Acosta was a lawyer, novelist and activist known for his work in defending the rights of his fellow Mexican-Americans and for his wild friendship with Hunter S. Thompson, the latter of which was immortalized in Thompson’s iconic novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Thanks to Dr. Thompson’s immortalization of Acosta as the infamous Dr. Gonzo, his reckless, dangerous and massive “Samoan” attorney/partner in debauchery, no one was really that surprised when Zeta disappeared while traveling in Mexico. Even his own son believes that Oscar got involved with some shady people, mouthed off and got himself killed. But nobody knows for sure. Acosta reportedly told his son he was “about to board a boat full of white snow” just before he disappeared so I prefer to believe that he hijacked said boat and retired to a tiny Pacific island where he lived out his days as a cocaine baron served by a bevy of wild island girls. Hell, maybe he actually made it to Samoa. Who knows? But the reality is that poor Zeta probably did pick a fight he couldn’t win. That’s what those closest to him believe, and in the end, I suppose they would know best.
2 The Roanoke Island Colony
Settled by Sir Walter Raleigh in the late 16th Century, the Roanoke Island Colony was the first attempt by the English to establish a permanent colony in the new world. Naturally, it ended with every single member of the colony disappearing. No one knows what happened to them, but most people tend to believe that the colony was either wiped out by Indians or even ended up integrating with the local tribes. The only clue to their disappearance was the word Croatoan -– the name of one of the tribes — carved into a post of the fort. There was no sign of struggle or violence. Of course, people get all wild and dumb and theorize that the colonists were carried off by aliens or were sucked into some sort of X-Files mystery and that they’re all still alive aboard some spaceship or are living in some parallel dimension somewhere but the truth is probably much more mundane. In fact, in the early 18th century, the Croatoans (there’s that tribe again) living on Hatteras Island claimed to once live on Roanoke Island and to have had white ancestors, a claim which was bolstered by the grey eyes of the Indians. Subsequently, many European explorers and pioneers noted that several of the Indian tribes of the area seemed to have European features, so… yeah, the most likely explanation is that the people turned to the Indian tribes for survival in their strange new land and over time assimilated with the natives and essentially ceased to be European. In some ways, it’s actually the most successful account of European integration into the Americas. Of course, there’s always the possibility that they were all transported to some strange alien planet where they were all hunted for sport by giant squid people. It’s important to be open to all theories.
1 Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart’s disappearance in 1937 over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to become the first woman to successfully circumnavigate the globe is quite possibly the most famous –- and infamous -– disappearance of the modern era. People are fascinated with it, probably both because of Earhart’s trailblazing attributes as both a pilot and a woman and because the idea of someone vanishing completely at the edges of the earth is one which instantly evokes a sort of doomed romanticism. It tugs on that reckless part of ourselves which is endlessly curious and which yearns for the unknown and the unknowable. It’s pretty obvious that Earhart crashed and died during her journey, but there is a part of all of us that wants to believe that she somehow made it, that she’s still out there, flying towards a strange new world. It’s completely ridiculous, and yet it appeals to that restless pioneer spirit which lies at the heart of all things American. She’s an icon and a symbol of that pioneer spirit, perhaps more for her doomed failure than for the possibility that she could have succeeded. She looms as a sort of tragic and yet noble ghost, hovering over our collective identity, serving as both a cautionary tale and feeding our wildest dreams. She could have been marooned on a deserted island or entered some sort of strange wormhole or… something, anything. We know she died, but there’s a part of us that refuses to believe that, that wants to -– needs to –- believe in something bigger, something greater, something strange and surreal and… possible. We want to believe that somewhere, somehow, in some parallel dimension, Amelia Earhart soars into the horizon, to a place where the sun never sets and all things are possible. It is utterly absurd, and yet it is the heart of what makes us so fascinated by these types of disappearances and that’s why Amelia Earhart is number one on this list.

πηγη: guyism.com