Agatha Christie — 11 Days, No Explanation Given (1926)
On December 3, 1926, mystery writer Agatha Christie disappeared from her home in Berkshire, England. Her car was found abandoned near a local pond. A massive search — involving 15,000 volunteers — turned up nothing for 11 days. Christie was found at a spa in Harrogate, registered under a false name (the name of her husband's mistress), apparently suffering from amnesia. She never publicly explained the disappearance. Her biographers have offered theories ranging from genuine dissociative fugue to deliberate theater designed to embarrass her husband, who had recently asked for a divorce. Christie gave no interviews on the subject and destroyed relevant diaries.
Louis Le Prince — The Inventor Who Vanished Before Edison (1890)
Louis Le Prince was, by the strongest evidence available, the actual inventor of the motion picture camera — he produced the Roundhay Garden Scene in 1888, two years before Edison's claimed invention. In September 1890, Le Prince boarded a train in Dijon, France. He never arrived at his destination. His luggage was not found. No body was ever recovered. His disappearance came at the precise moment he was preparing to travel to the United States to demonstrate his inventions publicly. Edison subsequently claimed priority for the motion picture. Le Prince was never seen again.
D.B. Cooper — Parachuted Out and Disappeared Forever (1971)
On November 24, 1971, a man using the alias D.B. Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient flight, collected $200,000 in ransom, and parachuted from the rear stairs of the aircraft somewhere over the Pacific Northwest. He was never found. Despite one of the longest unsolved investigations in FBI history, Cooper's real identity remains unknown. A small portion of the ransom money was found on a riverbank in 1980. No additional evidence of Cooper — living or dead — has ever been confirmed. He is the only unsolved case of air piracy in American commercial aviation history.
Brian Shaffer — Vanished Into a Crowded Bar (2006)
On April 1, 2006, Ohio State University medical student Brian Shaffer walked into Ugly Tuna Saloona, a bar in Columbus, Ohio, during the university's Spring Break bar crawl. Security footage shows him entering the bar. No footage shows him leaving. The bar's external security cameras were non-functional that night. Shaffer was never found. Investigators could not account for how he left the building. He was 27 years old. He had recently been accepted into his final year of medical school. There were no signs of foul play and no confirmed sightings after that night.
Ettore Majorana — The Nuclear Physicist Who Left (1938)
Ettore Majorana was one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists of the 20th century — Enrico Fermi said that Majorana was a genius comparable to Galileo and Newton. In March 1938, Majorana withdrew all his money from the bank, booked a one-way ticket from Palermo to Naples, and was never seen again. His last letters suggest a decision to disappear voluntarily. Some have speculated he foresaw the nuclear weapons implications of his work on nuclear physics and chose to remove himself. The most likely explanation remains voluntary disappearance. Where he went is unknown.