I Think I Can Make It: The Vanishing of Michael Rockefeller

2026-08-02 · Vanished Without a Trace · 8 min read

Shortly after seven in the morning on 19 November 1961, a twenty-three-year-old American stripped down on the overturned hull of a small catamaran in the Arafura Sea, off the southwest coast of what was then Netherlands New Guinea. He had spent a night and most of a day clinging to the wreck beside a Dutch anthropologist named Rene Wassing. The tide had carried them steadily away from land rather than toward it. Michael Clark Rockefeller lashed two empty containers together into a crude float, said that waiting was no longer an option, and spoke the sentence that has followed the case ever since: "I think I can make it."

Wassing watched him for roughly half an hour. He later described three dots on the water, the two cans and a head, getting smaller. Then nothing. No trace of Michael Rockefeller has ever been recovered.

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