8 Famous People Who Went Missing (And Were Never Found)

3. Amelia Earhart

Vanished in 1937

The first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean didn’t exactly have a successful journey.

Bright and early on 2 July 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off from Lae, New Guinea, on one of the last legs in their historic attempt to fly around the globe. Their next destination was Howland Island in the central Pacific Ocean. A U.S. Coast Guard waited there to guide the world-famous aviator in for a landing on the tiny, uninhabited island... but she never arrived.

Battling faulty radio transmissions, horrific weather, and a rapidly decreasing fuel supply in her plane, she and Noonan lost contact with the Coast Guard somewhere over the Pacific. Despite a search-and-rescue mission of colossal scale, including ships and planes from the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard scouring some 250,000 square miles of ocean, they were never found.

In its official report at the time, the Navy concluded that Earhart and Noonan had run out of fuel, crashed into the Pacific and drowned. A court order declared Earhart legally dead in January 1939, 18 months after she disappeared. From the beginning, however, debate has raged over what actually happened on 2 July 1937 and afterward. Several alternate theories have surfaced, and many millions of dollars have been spent searching for evidence that would reveal the truth of Earhart’s fate.

In an interview in 1932, Earhart uttered, “Flying may not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.” Which raises the question: was it worth your life?