Nel dicembre 1946 una studentessa di 18 anni salì in pieno giorno su un sentiero di montagna del Vermont, diverse persone la videro, e scomparve. La cercarono in centinaia. Non trovarono niente.

L'11 giugno 1962 tre detenuti lasciarono teste finte nelle brande e uscirono nella baia di San Francisco su una zattera fatta con una cinquantina di impermeabili rubati. Sessantaquattro anni dopo nessuno sa se annegarono o toccarono terra.

In un gelido pomeriggio di dicembre del 1944 il capo orchestra più famoso del mondo salì su un piccolo monomotore in un campo di volo del Bedfordshire e partì verso la Francia. Non sono mai stati trovati relitti, corpi o punto d'impatto, e la discussione sul perché va avanti ottant'anni dopo.

Un aereo britannico sulle Ande chiuse il messaggio con sette lettere che nessuno seppe leggere, poi sparì per cinquantuno anni. La montagna alla fine ha spiegato lo schianto. La parola non l'ha mai spiegata.

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.