What Happened to Michael Rockefeller? Inside His Strange 1961 Disappearance and Rumored Cause of Death By Alex Gurley

Michael Rockefeller went missing over 60 years ago, and his body has never been found.

The son of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and an heir to the Rockefeller fortune, the 23-year-old Harvard graduate was on an expedition to New Guinea when he disappeared. A lifelong lover of art, Rockefeller had joined a group of explorers and anthropologists from around the world in hopes of collecting pieces to display at his father’s Museum of Primitive Art.

In May 1961, Rockefeller reached Asmat, one of the most remote communities in the world, then governed by the Dutch, and shrouded in mystery. There, he himself amid a population of native islanders who had rarely had contact with outsiders, aside from the occasional priest or Dutch official. Rockefeller lived among the Asmat people, traveling from village to village while collecting tools and unique artifacts.

His journey, as chronicled in Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art, took a turn during his second Asmat expedition in November 1961. During an excursion, his boat encountered treacherous waters and capsized.

After nearly a day of waiting for help, Rockefeller decided to attempt to swim to shore himself, leaving behind anthropologist Dr. René Wassing. He watched as Rockefeller disappeared into the distance and was never seen again.

So what happened to Michael Rockefeller? Here’s everything to know about his disappearance, more than six decades later.

Who was Michael Rockefeller?

Michael Rockefeller was born in May 1938, the son of future vice president Nelson Rockefeller and his wife, Mary Todhunter Rockefeller. He and his twin sister Mary were the youngest of their father’s seven children.

He was born into one of the wealthiest families in the United States, the grandson of financier John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the great-grandson of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller Sr. Michael grew up with privilege, attending prestigious schools and elite events in New York City.

In 1956, he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, a private boarding school in New Hampshire. He then went on to enroll at Harvard University, where he studied history and economics, and graduated in 1960.

Afterward, Rockefeller’s family hoped he’d follow in his father’s footsteps, beginning a career in banking or finance. But instead, he pursued his passion for the arts and travel.

What was Michael Rockefeller doing in New Guinea?

Rockefeller briefly served in the U.S. Army and later took the opportunity to work with Harvard professor Robert Gardner on the Harvard University Peabody Museum expedition, according to The New York Times. A trip which also spawned the documentary Dead Birds.

Rockefeller signed on a photographer and sound engineer for the project, which explored the lives of the Dugum Dani people from the Baliem Valley of New Guinea. In the spring of 1961, a crew embarked on a journey to New Guinea with the support of the Dutch government.

Rockefeller then headed to visit the Asmat people, along with a small crew that included a government-appointed anthropologist named Wassing and Dr. Adrian A. Gerbrands, the deputy director of the Dutch National Museum of Ethnology. (The latter later shared his first-person account in a foreword, per the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

Rockefeller and his team eventually returned to work with Gardner, but they made plans to go back to Asmat. In the fall of 1961, Rockefeller and Wassing resumed their venture and amassed a collection of items.

“In his letters home, he was completely thrilled about what he was doing. He felt very comfortable with the people. He would sit in the fields and talk to the children,” his sister Mary recalled to PEOPLE. “He was fascinated by their culture and how their art sprang from everyday life. He bartered for art objects with tobacco and axes.”

But tragically, Rockefeller would never return home with his findings.

What happened to Michael Rockefeller?

Several weeks after returning to Asmat, Rockefeller and his group ran into trouble when their catamaran stalled on the Betsj River on Nov. 18.

While two crew members swam miles toward the shore for help, Rockefeller and Wassing stayed back. Eventually, the catamaran capsized, and the men clung to the boat’s overturned hull for their lives.

Concerned that they would eventually drift out to sea, Rockefeller decided to attempt to swim to shore the next morning on Nov. 19. After tying two empty jerrycans to help him float, he set out on what he believed was a three to 10-mile swim to shore and was never seen again.

Was Michael Rockefeller ever found?

Despite efforts from the Dutch government and the Rockefellers’ family, he wasn’t found.

His traveling partner, Wassing, was rescued by a Dutch warship 22 miles off the coast, per The New York Times.

Meanwhile, Rockefeller’s father and sister made their way to New Guinea by way of a privately chartered Boeing 707 after receiving the news on Nov. 20. The family arrived as the search continued, with boats and planes combing the coast to no avail, the outlet reported.

Although the inquest continued, there was no further sign of the young Rockefeller. In the end, his family believed he drowned.

“We were there about 10 days. I accepted that Father and the Dutch officials felt that it was time to call the search off. The prevailing thought was that he had drowned,” Mary later told PEOPLE.

She continued, “In a seaplane over the dense jungle coastline, I realized how unbelievably difficult it was to make it to shore.”

What are the other theories about Michael Rockefeller’s disappearance?

While it has never been proven, some claim that Rockefeller was taken captive by the Asmat people and later killed.

Although headhunting, the practice of killing a human and severing the head, was outlawed in 1954 and had been almost entirely eradicated from Asmat culture, there were allegedly rare instances where it still occurred.

While Rockefeller’s family strongly believes he drowned, researchers have delved into alternate theories. In particular, Hoffman, who authored Savage Harvest, and traveled to New Guinea to speak to descendants of the men who were rumored to have killed Rockefeller.

Before his trip, Hoffman uncovered reports from the Dutch government, which alluded to the possibility that Rockefeller had been killed, but there was a lack of conclusive evidence.

During his journey to Asmat, Hoffman claims that members of the Otsjanep village appeared scared to talk to him. While he had not told his guide his true mission of researching what had happened to Rockefeller, his translator, Amates, admitted that villagers were frightened because an American tourist had been killed there years ago.

Hoffman also allegedly received confirmation from several other sources, including a Dutch Catholic priest named Hubertus von Peij, who had lived in Asmat at the time Rockefeller went missing. In a conversation in 2012, von Peij recalled several villagers confessing to killing Rockefeller in retribution for a Dutch raid on their village several years prior.

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Von Peij shared the information with Cornelius van Kessel, a priest Rockefeller had reportedly intended to meet before disappearing. While they weren’t permitted to contact Rockefeller’s family, a third priest wrote to Rockefeller’s father, penning a letter to say that he believed his son had been killed.

The Associated Press published the news, but the Dutch minister of foreign affairs told the family that it was nothing but an unproven rumor, according to Hoffman.

Mary Rockefeller was very clear that there was no proof about such a claim.

“There have been many tales over the years about his disappearance … all about mainly one story: that he made it to shore and was killed and cannibalized,” she told PEOPLE. “New archival research makes it clear that the Dutch government didn’t want cannibalism talked about.”

Mary added, “Nobody knows what happened to Michael, and that leaves our family in a terrible place of not knowing.”