or the hour of Christ’s return at the Rapture. But one day billions of people will suddenly vanish from the face of the earth. Are you ready?
- Dr. David Jeremiah
Everyday thousands of people go missing. One-minute things are normal, the next lives are forever changed. According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, 89–92 percent of those missing people are eventually found—either alive or deceased. But what about those that are not recovered? What are the explanations? Where is the closure? How long should the search for answers continue?
Below are six disappearances that have gripped the world’s attention and imagination for decades.
On March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777 carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members departed Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia for Beijing, China. The plane veered off course before disappearing from radar—never to be seen or heard from again. Despite a three-year investigation, as well as an air and sea search that involved multiple countries, there is still not an official explanation for it disappearance.
A pioneer of her time, Amelia Earhart took her first flight in December of 1920. She went on to become the first women to fly solo across the Atlantic; she thus had a prominent flying career. In 1937, Earhart undertook a circumnavigational flight around world. On one of the last legs of this historical flight she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, headed toward Howland Island. But they never arrived and no remains have ever been located.
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In the late 1500s, a group of English settlers arrived in the Americas to set up a colony on Roanoke Island, which is part of present-day North Carolina. The settlement had an estimated 115 people when John White sailed back to England for supplies. When he returned three years later, there was not a single person or sign of a settlement anywhere to be found—only the world “Croatoan” carved into a wooden post. To this day, there is no explanation for the disappearance of the “Lost Colony.”
The MV Joyita was an American merchant ship that was found adrift in the South Pacific on November 10, 1955 with no passengers, crew, or cargo aboard. The ship had departed from Samoa five weeks earlier with 25 people on board for the Tokelau Islands. But upon its mysterious discovery, the ship was more than 600 miles off course. While many theories abound as to the fate of those aboard the MV Joyita—from pirates to mutiny—no official account exists.
D. B. Cooper is the name attributed to the hijacker of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 who parachuted out of the plane with $200,000 in ransom on November 24, 1971. The unidentified male wore a suit and tie but not many other distinct details exist about his appearance. While the FBI believes he perished upon jumping in rough weather over forested terrain, no remains were ever found, and the case wasn’t officially closed until 2016. The mystery of who and where D. B. Cooper is continue to this day.
In each of the stories above, lives were forever changed. Not only for the people who vanished, but for the family and friends they left behind—and for the people who investigated the cases. Today, all five of these disappearances remain officially unsolved. Though many theories abound for each, none have a true explanation. These five mysteries are not the last of their kind, as there are similar cases throughout history. Yet sadly, more are likely to occur in the future.
This will be the greatest disappearance of all time, and it will change the face of the planet for eternity. It has been predicated for thousands of years, but it’s not a mystery to those who know of its coming. The date is unknown, but a day will come when, in an instant, a multitude of people will vanish from the earth. The Rapture of the Church, as it’s called in the Bible, will change the course of history and usher in a new reality. What is this great disappearance and what truths does it hold for life today?
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