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Real 20th Century Mysteries, Amelia Earhart (pronounced Air-hart), James Hoffa, John F. Kennedy, Michael Rockefeller, and D.B. Cooper

FBI sketch of D.B. Cooper, with age progression

Amelia Mary Earhart

Amelia Mary Earhart was born July 24, 1897; missing July 2, 1937 just shy of her 41th birthday on a quest to become the first woman avaitor to fly around the world. She started from Oakland, California and was last seen in Lae, New Guinea, her last words were "30 Minutes gas remaining, no landfall... circling, trying to pick up island landfall, position doutful.." then silence. Two weeks of searching by the US Pacific Fleet and aircraft for Amelia and her Navigator, they were never found.

More information and pictures can be found at city of Newark New Jersey with a picture of her boarding a TWA Flight in the history section, and at Canada Information under Harbour Grace Newfoundland and Labrador.

James Riddle Hoffa

James Riddle Hoffa was born on February 13, 1913 in Brazil, Indiana and was reported missing by his wife the night of July 30, 1975 when he failed to return home. It is ironic that his middle name was Riddle, considering that his fate has become an American 20th century mystery. When Jimmy Hoffa's father, a cool miner, died, Jimmy left school to go to work in a Detroit warehouse. At the age of twenty he organized a dock workers strike at the Kroger Grocery and Baking Company warehouse in Detroit Michigan. James rose quickly through the ranks of the Teamsters union by the skillful use of strikes, boycotts, and sometimes less lawful means to archive the objectives of the union. When teamsters' president Dave Beck went to prison, James Hoffa became president of the union in 1957. By 1964 Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters union brought nearly all American truck drivers under a single national master freight labor agreement. Jimmy Hoffa was convicted of attempted bribery of a grand juror in 1967 and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. In 1971, President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence on the condition that he not participate in union activities. James was planning to sue to gain the right re-enter union activities and to regain his place in the Teamsters.

On July 30, 1975, Jimmy Hoffa planned to meet Anthony Giacalone aka Tony Jack, a reputed mob enforcer for the Detroit La Costa Nostra and New Jersey Teamster boss Anthony Provenzano aka Tony Pro of Union City, New Jersey, at the Machus Red Fox restaurant on Telegraph Road in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. James Hoffa believed Giacalone had set up the meeting to help settle a feud between himself and Provenzano. At 2:15 p.m. Hoffa phoned his wife Josephine, telling her that no one showed up for his meeting. This is the last time Hoffa was heard from. In 1975, the FBI said in a memo that the disappearance was probably connected to Hoffa's attempts to regain power within the Teamsters union. James Hoffa was never seen or heard from again.

In 1982 Jimmy Hoffa was declared legally dead.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 to November 22, 1963), often referred to as Jack Kennedy or his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his death in 1963 while visiting Dallas Texas. Unlike others in this group, he was assassinated, and buried, the mystery is why was he killed. Lee Harvey Oswald was charged with the crime but was shot and killed two days later by Jack Ruby before any trial. The FBI, the Warren Commission, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that Oswald was the assassin, with the HSCA allowing for the probability of conspiracy based on disputed acoustic evidence.

Today, JFK continues to rank highly in public opinion ratings of former US presidents.

Michael Clark Rockefeller

Michael Clark Rockefeller (born 1938 and presumed dead November 17, 1961), was the youngest son of New York Governor (later Vice President) Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller and Mary Todhunter Rockefeller and a fourth generation member of the Rockefeller family. He disappeared during an expedition in the Asmat region of southwestern New Guinea.

After attending The Buckley School in New York, Rockefeller graduated from Harvard University cum laude in 1960, served for six months as a private in the U.S. Army, then went on an expedition for Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology which studied the Dani tribe of western New Guinea. The expedition produced Dead Birds, an ethnographic documentary film produced by Robert Gardner, and for which Rockefeller was the sound recordist. Rockefeller and a friend briefly left the expedition to study the Asmat tribe of southern New Guinea. After returning home with the Peabody expedition, Rockefeller returned to New Guinea to study the Asmat and collect Asmat art.

On November 17, 1961, Michael Rockefeller, now 23, and Dutch anthropologist René Wassing were in a 40-foot dugout canoe about three miles from shore when their double pontoon boat was swamped and overturned. Their two local guides swam for help, but it was slow in coming. After drifting for some time, Rockefeller said to Wassing "I think I can make it" and swam for shore. Wassing was rescued the next day, while Rockefeller was never seen again, despite an intensive and lengthy search effort. The waters in which the boat overturned were known to be infested with sharks and saltwater or estuarine crocodiles, the largest of all living reptiles. If Rockefeller, like his guides, reached land, he'd have found himself in a region of thick mangrove swamps and tribes of headhunters and cannibals. His body was never found.

D. B. Cooper

With $200,000 strapped to his body, D. B. Cooper stepped out the back of a plane and into history

AT 2:53 PM on November 24, 1971, a tall, nondescript man boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 305 from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle. Five hours later, with $200,000 in ransom money tied to his waist, he parachuted out the back of the Boeing 727 into the dense forests of southern Washington.

The man gave the alias Dan Cooper when he bought his ticket (an erroneous news report supplied the name D. B., which stuck). Wearing sunglasses and a dark suit, he found a seat in an unoccupied row. As the plane was taking off, he passed the flight attendant a note stating that he had a bomb in the briefcase on his lap and demanding $200,000 in small bills and four parachutes when they landed in Seattle. When his demands were met, Cooper released the passengers and directed the pilot to take off toward Mexico at an altitude below 10,000 feet and a speed of less than 200 miles per hour. Shortly after 8 p.m., Cooper ordered the flight attendants into the cockpit, put on two of the parachutes, lowered the aft staircase, and stepped out into the stormy night somewhere near the Washington-Oregon state line. To this day, it stands as the world's only unsolved skyjacking.

Despite one of the most extensive manhunts in FBI history, agents found no body or parachute and never determined the hijacker's real identity. Meanwhile, Cooper was rumored to be drowned in the Columbia River, dead and eaten by animals in the forest, laundering his cash in Reno or Las Vegas, or alive in New York, Florida, or Mexico. People came forward with skulls, deathbed confessions, and tales of a man who looked like the FBI's composite sketch, but none of it ever amounted to anything. Cooper's legend blossomed, inspiring a 1981 movie, The Pursuit of D. B. Cooper, with Treat Williams in the title role. In 1978, a hunter in Washington found a plastic placard that was verified to be from the rear stairs of the 727. In 1980, an eight-year-old boy playing in the sand on the banks of the Columbia River unearthed $5,880 of Cooper's loot. Those 294 bills are the only part of the ransom that has ever surfaced, and they seem to lend credence to retired FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach's less than romantic version of what really happened.

"Most likely he was injured on impact," says Himmelsbach, who worked on the case from 1971 to 1980 and posits that Cooper died by the side of a creek. "And then later, the creek overflowed and carried him and the money downstream, where the money was found."

Sounds logical, but logic never killed a folk hero. The most recent fuel for the fire comes in the form of Duane Weber, a 70-year-old Florida man who, as he was dying in 1995, confessed to his wife that he was Dan Cooper. His widow, Jo Weber, contacted the FBI. She began to wonder about some of Duane's strange behavior—like the 1978 nightmare in which a sleep-talking Duane said something about fingerprints on the aft stairs, or the 1979 vacation to Washington during which Duane walked down to the banks of the Columbia by himself just four months before the portion of Cooper's cash was found in the same area.

"If Duane was not Cooper, someone will have to explain a lot of things to me," says Weber. "It is a story with so many coincidences that it defies the odds."

The FBI recently visited Weber's Florida home and removed gloves, an electric shaver, and hair samples, presumably for the purpose of extracting Duane's DNA to compare with that extracted from cigarette butts that the hijacker left behind. The FBI has confirmed that the case is still open, and will remain so indefinitely. .

This account was written by Tim Sohn.

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Email: Tim at proworld.us