5 Books About People Who Simply…Disappeared

The Lost City of Z, by David Grann
In 1925 Percy Fawcett was a celebrity adventurer and archaeologist. He traveled to the Amazon searching for evidence of a “lost city” he had named Z, which he believed would prove the existence of an entire lost and isolated civilization. He and his son were never seen again. Grann’s book recounts how the Kalapalo tribe in the Amazon, who were the last to see Fawcett, maintain an oral history of his visit. The Kalapalo warned him not to head east, because of “fierce indians” who would kill him, but he insisted. Five days later they stopped seeing the smoke from his cooking fires. Grann reports that in that area of the jungle modern archeology is finding evidence of a lost civilization, just as Fawcett suspected, which would be a fitting monument to one of the most fearless explorers of the 20th century.

Wildest Dream, by Peter Gillman
Even if you know nothing about climbing mountains, you’re probably familiar with the famous quote attributed to Mallory when asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest: “Because it’s there.” He was among the first climbers to attempt Everest, and in 1922 came very close to reaching the summit without bottled oxygen. In 1924 Mallory and his partner disappeared when they were just 800 feet from the top, and their fate was unknown for 75 years, until his body was discovered in 1999—sadly without the camera he carried on the attempt. There are more than 200 corpses on Mt. Everest, many of which are actually used by climbers as landmarks to gauge their progress.

Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days, by Jared Cade
Agatha Christie wrote the most popular mystery novels of all time, and some believe she inspired one of the most popular novels of this century, Gone Girl. In 1926, Christie, in the midst of a crumbling marriage and already quite famous, disappeared for 11 days under mysterious circumstances. There was a media frenzy until she was discovered at a hotel, looking none the worse for the wear and claiming to have no memory of the events. Her disappearance has never been explained outside of a Doctor Who episode, and Christie took the secret—if she remembered it—to her grave.

Skyjack, by Geoffrey Gray
In 1971 flying was very different, so different that a man with a vague resemblance to Kevin Spacey in sunglasses could buy a plane ticket using an alias and hijack a plane with a note. D.B. Cooper actually used the name Dan Cooper to buy his ticket, and then received $200,000 in ransom before jumping out of the plane somewhere over the Pacific Northwest. Some of the money was found in the woods, but most of it was never found—and neither was the man who called himself Cooper. Although most believe he died in the jump, the FBI kept the investigation open for decades, and no body has ever been found.

Fatal Journey, by Peter C. Mancall
You may remember Henry Hudson from school—there’s a pretty major river and some other geographical locations named in his honor, after all. But not everyone remembers that Hudson’s final expedition, in 1610, ended in horror when his ship became trapped in ice. With food and other supplies running low, Hudson’s crew mutinied, putting Hudson, his young son, and a few loyal crew members into a skiff and abandoning them in the Hudson Bay. None of those nine people were ever seen again, and no sign of their boat or their activities after that has ever been detected. While it’s easy to imagine what might have happened, the details remain one of the great mysteries of history.