At 2:10 p.m., five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo-bombers comprising Flight 19 take off from the Ft. Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida on a routine three-hour training mission. Flight 19 was scheduled to take them due east for 120 miles, north for 73 miles, and then back over a ...read more
1. Ark of the Covenant According to the Hebrew Bible, Moses had the ornate, gold-plated wooden chest known as the Ark of the Covenant built according to God’s own design. Its purpose was to guard sacred relics, including two stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments. The ...read more
TIGHAR, which has spent more than 25 years investigating the ill-fated final voyage of Amelia Earhart, believes Earhart’s plane did not crash in the Pacific Ocean, as many believe, but rather that she and her co-pilot Fred Noonan were able to make a landing on the remote, ...read more
In “Amelia Earhart: Beyond the Grave,” author W.C. Jameson claims that Amelia Earhart was a spy for the U.S. government, and was flying a secret mission to photograph Japanese military installations in the Pacific at the time of what he calls her “so-called disappearance” in July ...read more
On November 7, 1872, the 282-ton brigantine Mary Celeste set sail from New York Harbor on its way to Genoa, Italy. On board were the ship’s captain, Benjamin S. Briggs, his wife, Sarah, and their 2-year-old daughter, Sophia, along with eight crewmembers. Less than a month later, ...read more
By the time he sailed from Greenhithe, England, on May 19, 1845 at the head of two ships and some 129 men, 59-year-old Sir John Franklin had already traveled to the Arctic three times with the intention of charting the Northwest Passage. The HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were both ...read more
With his steely blue eyes, manicured beard and trademark Stetson hat, Colonel Percy Fawcett looked like the quintessential swashbuckling adventurer. His resume included a stint as a British artilleryman in Sri Lanka, a tour of duty in World War I and a top-secret gig as a spy in ...read more
The man who approached the Northwest Orient Airlines counter on the afternoon of November 24, 1971, said his name was Dan Cooper (“D.B.” was a distortion that later appeared in the press). He asked for a one-way ticket from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington—and used cash to ...read more
It’s one of the most puzzling mysteries in maritime history. In 1845, famed Arctic explorer and British hero Sir John Franklin left England on a mission to navigate the fabled Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. After last being spotted by British ...read more
On this day in 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members, loses contact with air traffic control less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur then veers off course and disappears. Despite a massive air-and-sea search effort for the ...read more
Nungesser, the pilot of L’Oiseau Blanc, was an aristocrat and French flying ace; Coli, his navigator, was a mariner and former infantryman who had lost one of his eyes in an earlier injury. The two men were competing for the Orteig Prize, a $25,000 reward offered by a New York ...read more
1. Gardena, California As the search for the vanished Hoffa got underway in Michigan after his 1975 disappearance, an early theory regarding his fate cropped up thousands of miles away on the West Coast. When rumors surfaced that Hoffa may have been involved in an acrimonious ...read more
1. Percy Fawcett The unforgiving Amazon jungle has claimed the lives of more than one adventurer, but perhaps none so famous as Colonel Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in 1925 while on the trail of a mythical lost city. One of the most colorful figures of his era, Fawcett had made ...read more
The origins of one of the America’s oldest unsolved mysteries can be traced to August 1587, when a group of about 115 English settlers arrived on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina. Later that year, it was decided that John White, governor of the new ...read more
By this time next week, one of U.S. history’s most perplexing mysteries might finally be solved. Earlier today, police drilled under a driveway at a home outside Detroit in their latest attempt to uncover clues about union leader Jimmy Hoffa’s 1975 vanishing act. According to ...read more
1. Jimmy Hoffa On July 30, 1975, James Riddle Hoffa, one of the most influential American labor leaders of the 20th century, disappeared in Detroit, Michigan, never to be heard from again. Born in 1913 to a poor coal miner in Indiana, the charismatic Hoffa proved a natural ...read more
1. Butch Cassidy According to the traditional narrative, the American train and bank robber Butch Cassidy, leader of the Old West gang known as the Wild Bunch, died in a hail of bullets in Bolivia in 1908. But rumors that the notorious bandit (who is seated on the far right in ...read more
The Bermuda Triangle is a mythical section of the Atlantic Ocean roughly bounded by Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico where dozens of ships and airplanes have disappeared. Unexplained circumstances surround some of these accidents, including one in which the pilots of a squadron of ...read more
In the 73 years since Amelia Earhart vanished into thin air, a number of theories have emerged about how and where the famed aviator died. According to some researchers, new discoveries on the Pacific island of Nikumaroro may bring us closer than ever before to an answer. Amelia ...read more
The Dei Gratia, a small British brig under Captain David Morehouse, spots the Mary Celeste, an American vessel, sailing erratically but at full sail near the Azores Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. The ship was seaworthy, its stores and supplies were untouched, but not a soul was ...read more
Five years to the day that American aviator Charles Lindbergh became the first pilot to accomplish a solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, female aviator Amelia Earhart becomes the first pilot to repeat the feat, landing her plane in Ireland after flying across the ...read more
On July 2, 1937, the Lockheed aircraft carrying American aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Frederick Noonan is reported missing near Howland Island in the Pacific. The pair were attempting to fly around the world when they lost their bearings during the most challenging leg of ...read more
On July 31, 1975, James Riddle Hoffa, one of the most influential American labor leaders of the 20th century, disappears in Detroit, Michigan, never to be heard from again. Though he is popularly believed to have been the victim of a Mafia hit, conclusive evidence was never ...read more
The Israeli submarine Dakar, carrying 69 sailors, disappears on this day in 1968 and is never seen again. The exact fate of this vessel remains a mystery to this day. The Dakar was built at the height of World War II by H.M. Dockyard in Great Britain and commissioned as the HMS ...read more