Going missing while at work is pretty unusual unless you're a scientist, that is.
As a scientist, your job might involve the exploration of remote, wild places to discover
new and unknown things...which means that history is full of stories of explorers, archaeologists,
geologists, physicists and even physicists who ventured into places where few people
have gone before...and never came back.
Vladimir Alexandrov wasn't just any physicist; he contributed to the mathematical model for
nuclear winter, or terrifying concept of the descending darkness that would accompany full-scale
nuclear war.
In 1985, the Soviet physicist vanished while visiting Madrid.
So what happened?
There's a possibility that Alexandrov may have disappeared on purpose after defecting
from the Soviet Union, which wasn't exactly known for being open-minded at the time.
Others theorize that the whole nuclear winter idea might have been heavily promoted by Russia,
in order to convince US activists to protest America's nuclear weapons programs, potentially
crippling America's ability to defend itself in a nuclear war.
Was Alexandrov kidnapped by the KGB because he was planning to tell the world that nuclear
winter was less likely than he'd originally proposed?
We still don't know.
Not all disappearances are related to controversial scientific theories.
Sometimes, as was the case of Soviet-born mathematician and Penn State professor Boris
Weisfeiler, things just go terribly wrong while hiking.
In late 1984, Weisfeiler got tired of the cold winters in Pennsylvania and decided to
go hiking in the Chilean Andes, never to return.
The last time anyone saw or heard from Weisfeiler was in January of 1985.
Not long after that, his backpack was reportedly found next to a river, and Chilean authorities
concluded he drowned while trying to cross.
Like all great mysteries, though, there were people who said otherwise.
In 2000, documents came to light that suggested Weisfeiler might have been abducted and murdered
after wandering too close to Colonia Dignidad, a cult-like camp run by expatriated Nazis,
which had served as an internment and torture center for dictator Augusto Pinochet.
The evidence was damning enough that eight people were arrested in 2012 and charged with
the kidnapping, but the judge eventually closed the case and set everyone free, citing statutes
of limitations.
The mystery remains unsolved.
Extracurricular hiking tragedies aside, the most common way for a scientist to vanish
is in the line of duty.
That's what happened to Peng Jiamu, a biologist at the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry
and Cell Biology.
In 1980 Peng led an expedition into the Lop Nur desert, a dangerous landscape full of
soft riverbeds and shifting sand dunes, which made for treacherous traveling conditions.
On June 17th, Peng's team signaled the army that they needed a rescue, as they'd run out
of supplies.
Soon after that, Peng walked out of camp, leaving only a note saying that he was going
to go look for water.
He never returned.
Chinese leaders diligently searched for Peng for three months, sending planes, helicopters,
police, dogs, and hundreds of soldiers to scour the landscape.
Peng had completely vanished, except for some footprints and a candy wrapper.
Even though Peng had been exploring the area since 1956 and was fairly familiar with it,
Peng's colleagues don't seem to find his disappearance that mysterious.
The Lop Nur landscape could swallow someone up without a trace; hillsides would sometimes
collapse, burying everything nearby in an avalanche of shifting sands.
Other expeditions into Lop Nur have found bodies though to date none of them have turned
out to be Peng.
Rumors persist that Peng was dying of cancer and wanted to disappear on his own terms,
or that he was murdered by a teammate after a dispute over resources, and even that he
defected to the United States from communist China, but Peng has never been found.
New Zealand cardiologist J.C.P. Williams noticed that a lot of kids visiting his practice shared
some characteristics.
In addition to their cardiovascular problems, they also had similar facial features and
were especially friendly and outgoing.
Today, we call this genetic disorder Williams syndrome, but most people don't realize that
the doctor who identified it disappeared less than 10 years later.
But was it intentional?
Michael King's book Wrestling with the Angel says Williams was living with New Zealand
poet Janet Frame in the late 1960s, but when he proposed marriage in 1969, Frame literally
ran away.
By the time she finally returned a week later, Williams had vanished.
But maybe he wasn't technically gone.
It was reported that friends met him in Austria in the mid-1970s.
He renewed his passport in 1979.
And even though his sister had the High Court of New Zealand declare him a missing person
in 1988, there's evidence he might have been alive as recently as 2000, when Williams allegedly
asked to not be included in Frame's biography.
If those things are true, then Williams is likely one missing person who would really
just prefer to remain missing.
Thomas A. Mutch was the Associate Administrator for Space Science at NASA, and the author
of two books on the geology of the Moon and Mars.
He was also involved in the Viking mission to Mars as the lead for the Lander Imaging
Team.
In 1980, he vanished.
Mutch disappeared while descending Mount Nun, a 23,000-foot peak in the Kashmir Himalayas.
After slipping, Mutch reportedly fell hundreds of feet down the slope of the mountain, losing
his glasses and hitting his head in the process.
Maybe worst of all, he lost a crampon from one of his climbing shoes.
He couldn't make any progress without the device, so one of his two companions went
to grab a spare from camp.
When he returned, Mutch was gone, leaving only his ice axe behind.
After his disappearance, NASA honored him by renaming the Mars Lander the "Thomas A.
Mutch Memorial Station."
Mutch's body was never recovered.
Acclaimed anthropologist Dor Bahadur Bista was a professor at a university in Nepal,
who was known for his work with traders in the upper Kaligandaki River Valley.
He was also reportedly fond of trekking off alone into the wilderness where he could conduct
his research in private.
In the weeks before his 1995 disappearance, friends said he was upset over some negative
responses to a book he'd just published.
He'd also apparently angered a group who was opposed to his efforts to help empower lower-class
Nepalese, and defamatory articles were published about him in local papers.
He confided to one friend that he felt threatened and was considering leaving Nepal for his
own safety.
A few weeks later, he was seen boarding a bus.
After that, he was never seen again.
Hopefully that bus took him somewhere safe, but we may never know.
In 2007, Turing Award-winning Microsoft researcher Jim Gray launched his 40-foot sailboat in
sunny weather on a voyage that was only supposed to take one day.
When he didn't return that evening, his wife reported him missing.
The Coast Guard searched 132,000 square miles of ocean off of San Francisco for four days,
but found no trace of Gray's boat.
His friends and colleagues weren't about to give up, though.
The collective geniuses wrote software to help volunteers sift through thousands of
satellite images in search of Gray's red and white vessel, and they enlisted the help of
Google Earth satellites.
The NASA Ames Research Center even volunteered to steer a high-altitude aircraft over the
search area.
Despite the technology, and the tenacity of participants, the weeks-long search turned
up nothing, so Gray's wife hired an underwater search team to scan the ocean floor.
That search also turned up nothing.
Some people think the boat sank and fell over the continental shelf, where it would be impossible
to find.
But there aren't any good theories to explain why the boat might have gotten into trouble
in the first place, especially considering the good weather and its captain's extensive
experience.
Five years later, Gray's wife had him declared missing but presumed dead.
Microsoft continues to give an award named in his honor.
"Jim was a unique person, he really was a networker he could create communities and
bring lots of dispirant peoples together."
In July 1994, biologist Ernst Priesner went out into the Bavarian Alps by himself to check
some insect traps.
Like everyone else on this list, he was never heard from again.
Priesner was a well-known scientist who was interested in insect pheromones, and was actively
collaborating on some important works on the subject.
After he failed to return home, search parties were organized, but also could not find him.
His colleagues concluded he'd met with some kind of accidental death, and declared it
an "irreplaceable loss" for science and countless joint studies still being conducted.
His samples and studies were quickly divided up between other scientists, and with no other
clues about where he ended up, that seems to be the end of the story.
Percy Fawcett was a geographer and archaeologist searching for the City of Z, a lost civilization
he believed was hidden somewhere in the Amazon.
In 1925 he entered the jungle with two companions, two laborers, and a ton of supplies.
After a final letter sent to his wife sent a month after entering the jungle, he was
never heard from again.
No one could believe he'd just vanished without a trace, and rumors and stories persisted
for many years after his disappearance.
Local tribes recalled stories of seeing them, while others admitted to killing the explorers
decades prior and keeping their bones.
While those bones didn't turn out to belong to Fawcett, more reports of various murders
persisted, and still more stories about how they either starved to death, or died from
illness.
Some of Fawcett's possessions were later discovered but it was determined that they were from
other expeditions.
Even more complicated is Fawcett's last letter, in which he may have intentionally given his
wife inaccurate coordinates for his last known camp, in order to prevent others from finding
the City of Z.
Interestingly, his lost City of Z kind of turned out to be a real thing.
Since his failed expedition, archaeologists have discovered huge cities of stone fortified
by walls hidden within the jungle, not too far from where he disappeared.
You don't become an explorer if you don't want to discover new things, but sometimes,
with discovery comes great danger.
Russian geologist Vladimir Rusanov thought that his discoveries, studying the coal potential
of Svalbard, required passage through the treacherous Northern Sea Route.
After a successful expedition into Svalbard in 1912, Rusanov and 11 of his crew decided
to split off and sail to the Pacific Ocean via the Northern Sea Route, which was by all
accounts a dangerous idea, given the small size of his ship and crew.
The last communication from the ship was a telegram on September 27th, 1912, in which
Rusanov said he planned to sail east across the Kara Sea.
A couple ships went out in search of Rusanov in the years that followed, but were unsuccessful.
It wasn't until 1937 that a few personal effects of the crew were found on one island off of
Siberia.
A wooden column bearing the ship's name, "Gerkules", was found on another island.
The ship itself was never found, and neither was the crew.
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