When Absence Does The Damage
History is usually told through things that happened, but some of its biggest turning points came from things that disappeared. A missing body could fuel rumors for decades, while a weapon nobody could find could leave an entire government scrambling for answers. Some mysteries were resolved within weeks. Others remain open centuries later. Here are 20 disappearances that changed the course of history.
1. The Princes In The Tower
Edward V and his younger brother entered the Tower of London in 1483 and were never seen again. Richard III took the throne and spent his short reign unable to produce the boys or explain where they had gone. Henry Tudor used that silence as a recruiting tool, and a pretender claiming to be the younger prince went on to unsettle Henry's own reign for years.
Unknown authorUnknown author on Wikimedia
2. King Sebastian Of Portugal
Portugal's young king rode into a battle in Morocco in 1578 and his body never came back from the field. The crown passed to his elderly great-uncle, and Philip II of Spain annexed the country outright within two years. Portuguese villagers went on expecting Sebastian to return for the next three centuries.
Alonso Sánchez Coello on Wikimedia
3. The Roanoke Colony
An English resupply ship reached the Carolina coast in 1590 and found the settlement standing empty, with CROATOAN carved into a post. Over a hundred colonists were unaccounted for and never found. English colonization of North America stalled for close to two decades afterward.
4. The Franklin Expedition
Two Royal Navy ships carrying 129 men sailed into the Arctic in 1845 hunting the Northwest Passage and stopped sending word. Lady Franklin spent her fortune and her public standing pushing the Admiralty into search after search. Those searches ended up charting far more of the Arctic than the original voyage had set out to.
William Alexander Baillie Hamilton (1803-1881) on Wikimedia
5. The Irish Crown Jewels
Regalia belonging to the Order of St Patrick vanished from Dublin Castle in 1907, days before Edward VII arrived for a state visit. The king was furious, the investiture was cancelled, and the officer responsible for the safe lost his post after a commission of inquiry. The jewels have never turned up, and the case stayed cold for most of a century.
Unidentified photographer on Wikimedia
6. The Mona Lisa
Staff at the Louvre needed over a day to notice the painting had left the building in 1911. France closed its borders, the museum shut for a week, and police hauled in Picasso and the poet Apollinaire for questioning. An Italian handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia had walked out with it under his coat.
7. The Lindbergh Baby
Somebody took the twenty-month-old son of the most famous pilot alive out of his New Jersey nursery in March 1932. The country followed the ransom negotiations for weeks before the body was found a short distance from the house. Congress passed the Federal Kidnapping Act that June, making it a federal crime to carry a victim across a state line.
8. The Just Judges Panel
Thieves pried a lower panel out of the Ghent Altarpiece in 1934 and sent the diocese a ransom demand. A Belgian stockbroker said on his deathbed that he alone knew the hiding place and died without giving it up. A copy has filled the slot ever since, and Belgian police still log tips about the original.
Jan van Eyck / Presumably Hubert van Eyck on Wikimedia
9. Amelia Earhart
Radio contact with Earhart's Electra ended near Howland Island on July 2, 1937. The US Navy committed a battleship and an aircraft carrier and called the search off sixteen days later. Newspapers put the bill in the millions, though the Navy never worked out an actual figure.
Underwood & Underwood (active 1880 – c. 1950)[1] on Wikimedia
10. The Amber Room
German troops stripped the amber panels out of a palace outside Leningrad in 1941 and shipped them to Königsberg. The room was documented there in 1945 and has not been seen since. Russia built a replacement in the original space, a project that ran for over two decades.
Sergey A. Demidov on Wikimedia
11. Raoul Wallenberg
Soviet forces took the Swedish diplomat who had issued protective passports to Hungarian Jews into custody in January 1945. Moscow said nothing for a decade, then announced he had died of a heart attack in 1947. Sweden pressed the case into this century without ever receiving a body or a file it believed to be complete.
12. The Stone Of Scone
Four Glasgow students broke into Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1950 and carried off the coronation stone, snapping it in two on the way out. The England-Scotland border was closed for the first time in four hundred years during the manhunt. The stone turned up at Arbroath Abbey months later, repaired by a stonemason and draped in a saltire.
13. A Hydrogen Bomb Off Palomares
A B-52 and a refueling tanker collided over southern Spain in January 1966 and dropped four hydrogen bombs. Three came down on land, and the fourth went into the Mediterranean, where it took eighty days and a deep submersible to locate. Spain later barred American aircraft carrying nuclear weapons from its airspace.
14. Harold Holt
Australia's prime minister walked into the surf at a Victorian beach in December 1967 and did not come out. One of the largest searches in the country's history recovered nothing at all. The governor-general swore in a replacement within days, and the governing party then tore itself up over the job.
Australian News and Information Bureau, via National Archives of Australia on Wikimedia
15. The Submarine K-129
Moscow lost contact with a ballistic missile submarine in the Pacific in 1968, and the Soviet navy hunted for it for weeks without success. American listening stations had recorded the implosion and knew roughly where to look. The CIA then spent years and a purpose-built ship trying to raise the wreck without Moscow catching on.
16. Eighteen And A Half Minutes Of Tape
A White House recording handed over to the Watergate investigation in 1973 came back with a long stretch erased in the middle of a conversation about the break-in. The president's secretary demonstrated a stretched-out posture that might have caused it by accident, which convinced very few people. The missing audio turned into shorthand for the entire scandal.
Unknown authorUnknown author on Wikimedia
17. The Kursk
Russia's newest submarine went down in the Barents Sea in August 2000 with 118 men aboard, some of whom survived the initial explosions. The navy said almost nothing for days, initially refused foreign help, and finally accepted it when the crew could no longer be saved. Vladimir Putin faced widespread public anger for staying on vacation during the crisis and for his government's slow, secretive response.
18. Iraq's Weapons Of Mass Destruction
The 2003 invasion was argued in public on the basis of stockpiles that inspectors then could not locate anywhere. The Iraq Survey Group reported the following year that the programs had been dismantled long before. Washington and London both spent years on formal inquiries into how the case for war had been assembled.
19. Six Warheads Over Middle America
Six cruise missiles carrying live nuclear warheads were loaded onto a B-52 at Minot in August 2007 and flown to Louisiana. Nobody reported them missing, and they sat on the aircraft for about thirty-six hours without nuclear security measures. Four commanders were relieved of command, and the Air Force secretary and chief of staff both resigned the following June.
Moslem Daneshzadeh on Unsplash
20. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
Two hundred and thirty-nine people were aboard a Boeing 777 that turned off its route and out of radar coverage in March 2014. The search swept a vast stretch of the southern Indian Ocean and became the most expensive in aviation history. Debris washed up on Indian Ocean coasts in the years afterward, and the aircraft has never been located.
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