En décembre 1946, une étudiante de 18 ans a gravi en plein jour un sentier de montagne du Vermont, plusieurs personnes l'ont vue, puis elle a disparu. Des centaines de personnes l'ont cherchée. Rien.

Le 11 juin 1962, trois détenus ont laissé de fausses têtes dans leurs lits et ont pagayé dans la baie de San Francisco sur un radeau fait d'une cinquantaine d'imperméables volés. Soixante-quatre ans plus tard, nul ne sait s'ils se sont noyés ou s'ils ont touché terre.

Par un après-midi glacial de décembre 1944, le chef d'orchestre le plus célèbre du monde est monté à bord d'un petit monomoteur sur un terrain d'aviation du Bedfordshire et a mis le cap sur la France. Ni épave, ni corps, ni lieu de chute n'ont jamais été retrouvés, et la querelle sur les causes dure encore quatre-vingts ans après.

Un avion britannique au-dessus des Andes a signé son dernier message par sept lettres illisibles, puis a disparu pendant cinquante et un ans. La montagne a fini par expliquer le crash. Elle n'a jamais expliqué le mot.

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.