The disappearances that gripped the world

A disappearance leaves a particular kind of wound: no answer, no ending, a question that stays open for years and sometimes forever. The files here are the ones that did not stay local — cases a whole country, or the whole world, followed and never quite stopped wondering about.

A three-year-old gone from a holiday apartment in Portugal. A flight with 239 people aboard that stopped transmitting over the Indian Ocean. A six-year-old who set out for his school bus in Manhattan one morning in 1979 and was never seen again — his face on milk cartons became a symbol of every missing child. Some of these were answered years later; most were not.

Several of these files sit in other collections too — a disappearance can end in a name, a courtroom, or nothing at all. What gathers them here is the scale of the watching: the sense that somewhere, someone still knows.