Vanishings: The Pilots and Planes That Flew Into the Unexplained and Never Returned

"That strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again ... it is not an aircraft." Then seventeen seconds of metallic sound, and silence. A twenty-year-old pilot and his plane were never seen again.

Some aircraft don't crash. They vanish - leaving no wreckage, no distress call, no body, and a question their families spend the rest of their lives unable to answer.

In The Vanishings, the third of the Unseen Files, investigative writer Jonah Carlson follows the pilots and planes that flew into the unexplained and never came back:

- Frederick Valentich, narrating an impossible object over Bass Strait in the last six minutes of his life

- The Air Force interceptor whose radar blip merged with an unidentified target over Lake Superior - and an official story the named air force flatly denied

- Flight 19, the Bermuda Triangle's crown jewel - and the ordinary, heartbreaking truth the legend buried

- Amelia Earhart, MH370, and the disappearances that prove vanishing is not a relic of the past

This is not a book that tells you aliens took them. It is a book that refuses to. Most disappearances are ordinary tragedies, and Carlson says so - dismantling famous mystery after famous mystery with the same honesty that makes the few genuinely unexplained cases impossible to wave away.

What remains, when the sea has been given its due and the myths stripped bare, is a small, hard residue of cases that should have an explanation - and don't.

The files are open. Some of them were never closed. Start reading.