Life abounds with mysteries, both profound and trivial, and if we were to spend all our time pondering them we would never get any work done. Yet some tug more forcefully at our imaginations than others -- and of these, the mysteries surrounding disappearances are the most forceful of all. Nature abhors a vacuum, and when a person vanishes, never to be found, those of us left behind feel oddly compelled to refill the empty space, preferably with a body but at the very least with an explanation.
Hence the elation when the body of British climber George Mallory was found on Mount Everest in 1999, 75 years after his death on the mountain's north face. Hence the fever of conjecture that has gripped Washington this summer, as police search vainly for a missing intern. Hence, too, the lingering interest in another decades-old missing-persons case that may finally be solved this fall, as two teams race to bring the latest technologies to bear in support of divergent explanations.
Sixty-four years ago last month, a small plane piloted by Amelia Earhart -- the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic -- disappeared in the western Pacific. Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had been trying to circumnavigate the globe and apparently ran out of gas before reaching a scheduled refueling stop at Howland Island. In all this time, no definitive trace of the pair or their aircraft has been found, although there have been many searches and even more theories. Most people accept the view that the plane simply ditched in the ocean, but wilder rumors persist: Earhart was a U.S. spy; she was forced down by Japanese military forces and taken into custody on Saipan; she is alive and well and living with Elvis in America; and so on. The Internet -- that hotbed of conspiracy theorists -- has only fanned the flames of speculation.