VANISHED, MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCES

 David Clark, Michael O’ Mara books 1991.

Each year, in Britain alone, 25,000 people ‘disappear’. Ninety per cent are found, but what of the 2,500 who are unaccounted for? Have they simply vanished into thin air? Multiplied on a global scale, it is clear that in the past ten years there have been hundreds of thousands of unexplained disappearances. In Vanished! David Clark investigates a broad selection of cases, from the famous such as Lord Lucan and Glenn Miller to the less well known such as Raymond Maufrais, who vanished in the South American jungle, and Bill Lancaster, whose biplane was last seen over the Sahara desert in 1933 on an attempt at the speed record for a flight from England to the Cape of good Hope.

 In some cases there are, eventually, explanations. Bill Lancaster’s plane was found some thirty years later by a French Army patrol. But most of the disappearances in this book defy logical explanation, such as the passenger liner Waratah which was last seen off the coast of Africa in 1909 – no wreckage or flotsam was ever found and her fate is unknown to this day.

Vanished! Also contains accounts of mass disappearances such as the hundred English colonists of Roanoke Island in Virginia who, without any sign of a struggle, vanished into thin air in 1590.

Whether they occurred on land, at sea or in the air, the disappearances recounted in this book make for fascinating reading. They show that even in the scientific age there is still much that even in the scientific age there is still much in our world which eludes explanation.

Other than for some minor shelf wear and a little (3cm) ink squiggle at the top of the inside front cover, both the book and the dust jacket are in very good condition.