Page Content (OCR)
In A.D. 1212 a teenaged boy in France, Stephen of Cloyes, began to hear voices which inspired him to collect together fifty thousand children for the pathetic Children's Crusade. They marched off to do battle with the infidels and disappeared en masse. The popular explanation is that they " . WW 1 One of the first colonies to be established in the New World - the Roanoke Island colony begun in 1585 off the coast of what is now North Carolina - disappeared magically, Virginia Dare, the first child of European descent to be born on this continent, was among the missing. The local Indians were not hostile and were as bafited by the vanishing colony as the explorers who came weet Leta searching for it. Another entire village, a remote Eskimo settlement in northern Canada, lost its entire population sometime in August 1930. The Northwest Mounted Police found the village abandoned, but its thirty inhabitants had left behind their food, clothing, kayaks, rifles, and dogs. Since no Eskimo is likely to travel very far without his precious rifle or his dog, the police were baffled. A two- week investigation of the area failed to yield any clues. Strangest of all, a grave on the edge of the village had been opened, and the body was gone. Grave robbing is an unspeakable crime among the Eskimos, and it is very unlikely that they dug up the body and fled the village, leaving behind their weapons, tools, food, and their dogs. May 7th, 1965. He was Carl Robert Disch, twenty-six, and he was assigned to the Byrd Station, operating equipment to investigate VLF radio noises for the National Bureau of Standards. He set out to walk from his hut to the main station a short distance away, following a hardline that was strung as a guide for the path between the two points. When he failed to appear after forty- five minutes, the other scientists went out searching for him in tracked vehicles. If Disch had fallen and was lying in the snow,' Ron Sefton the leader of the Byrd Station explained to William J. Perkinson of the Baltimore Sun, 'the huskies would have seen him long before the searchers did. Similarly, if he had fallen and was covered by drifting snow, the dogs would have sighted the mound and rushed out to investigate it. That's the way huskies are.’ The search went on for three days and covered a thirty-five-mile area around the hut. Disch's own dog, 3 husky called Gus, disappeared shortly afterwards. Some of the searchers claimed they saw mysterious lights and heard engine noises in the distance. Antarctica is, of course, uninhabited except for a handful of international scientists who work very closely with one another. Aeroplanes, ships and submarines have also disappeared by the hundreds. In quite a few cases the missing ships or planes were later found, mysteriously abandoned by their crews. One of the first and most celebrated of these incidents took place on July 24th, 1924, whea Lt W. T. Day and Pilot Officer D. R. Stewart went off in a single-engined biplane for a routine patrol over the Arab desert. A search party found their plane the next day, parked on the desert and completely intact, in excellent working order. There was gasoline in the tack, and no sign of trouble or were all seized by slavers. At the other end of the world in Antarctica an American scientist vanished without a trace on