In 1590, John White returned to Roanoke Island to find 115 colonists gone — and a single word carved into a post. Modern archaeology may finally be closing in on where they went.

Her final radio call came in at full strength - she should have been minutes away. Instead she vanished. After a sonar sensation that turned out to be a rock, an expedition sailing in July 2026 believes the answer may have been visible in photographs since 1938.

On a December afternoon in 1945, five US Navy bombers took off from Florida on a routine training run. Six aircraft and 27 men never came back.

In 1888 Louis Le Prince shot the first moving pictures in history - years before Edison or the Lumieres. Two years later he boarded a train from Dijon to Paris and vanished from it: no body, no luggage, no trace. Cinema's inventor became its own first unsolved mystery.

Five children went missing in a Christmas Eve house fire in 1945 — yet the ashes held no remains, and 23 years later a photograph arrived in the mail.

On Easter Sunday 1967, Jim Thompson left his cigarettes and his pills on the table and stepped out of a Malaysian hill cottage for a short walk. More than 500 searchers, helicopters and a celebrity psychic found nothing. Nearly sixty years later, not a bone, a button or a bank withdrawal has ever surfaced.

On a clear night in 1978, a young pilot told Melbourne flight service that something hovering above him was not an aircraft. Seventeen seconds of metallic noise followed, then nothing, ever again.

In 1925 a decorated British explorer marched into the Amazon to find a lost civilisation, promising his wife there was nothing to fear. Science eventually proved his city was real. He was never seen again.