In December 1946 an 18-year-old student walked up a Vermont mountain trail in daylight, was seen by several people, and vanished. Hundreds searched. They found nothing at all.

On 11 June 1962 three prisoners left dummy heads in their beds and paddled into San Francisco Bay on a raft made of stolen raincoats. Sixty-four years later nobody can say whether they drowned or landed.

On a freezing December afternoon in 1944 the most famous bandleader in the world climbed into a small single-engine aircraft at a Bedfordshire airfield and flew towards France. No wreckage, no bodies and no crash site have ever been found, and the argument over why is still running eighty years later.

A British airliner crossing the Andes signed off with seven letters nobody could read, then vanished for fifty-one years. The mountain eventually explained the crash. It has never explained the word.

At ten minutes to one on 8 June 1924, a geologist alone on the North Ridge of Everest watched two black specks climbing toward the summit, and then the cloud closed over them. A body came back in 1999, a boot with a foot inside it in 2024, and the one object that would settle the question has never been found.

On a Sunday morning in 1942 a US Navy blimp drifted out of the fog and settled onto a California street. The radio worked, the parachutes were stowed, the doors stood open. The two officers who had flown it were gone, and they have never been found.

Herodotus wrote that a Persian army marched into Egypt's Western Desert to burn an oracle and was buried alive by a sandstorm while eating lunch. Twenty-five centuries later, not one confirmed soldier of that army has ever been found. Two rival claims say they solved it, and most Egyptologists accept neither.

In 1912 a four-year-old walked away from a Louisiana swamp and vanished. Eight months later a boy was found on the road with a traveling handyman, and two mothers stood up to claim him. A court chose one of them. Ninety-two years later a DNA test proved the court had chosen wrong.

She was writing confessional singer-songwriter music in New York years before anyone called it that, and almost nobody heard it. In August 1974 she wrote a handful of calm farewell letters, packed her Volkswagen and drove out of Ann Arbor. Neither Connie Converse nor her car has ever been found.

On the morning he was due to fly to America, the lyricist of the Manic Street Preachers checked out of a London hotel and drove west, leaving his passport behind. Two weeks later his car turned up at a service station beside the Severn Bridge, battery flat, family photographs on the seat. Britain has been arguing about the rest for thirty-one years.

A crashed car on a dark New Hampshire highway. A bus driver who offered help and was turned away. Nineteen minutes later the police arrived and the driver was gone. Twenty-two years on, her phone and bank cards have never registered anywhere on earth.

She was nine years old, and at half past two in the morning she dressed, packed a bag and walked out into the rain. Drivers saw her on the highway; when one turned back she ran into the trees. A year and a half later her bag was dug up twenty-six miles away, wrapped in plastic and buried.