Michael Rockefeller

Michael Clark Rockefeller (May 18, 1938; disappeared November 19, 1961) was a member of the Rockefeller family.

He was the son of New York Governor and later U.S. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, a grandson of American financier John D. Rockefeller Jr. and a great-grandson of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller Sr.

Rockefeller disappeared during an expedition in the Asmat region of southwestern Netherlands New Guinea, which is now a part of the Indonesian province of South Papua.

Michael Rockefeller was born on May 18, 1938, the fifth and last child of Nelson and Mary Todhunter Rockefeller.

He was the third son of seven children fathered by Nelson, and he had a twin sister named Mary.

Michael attended the Buckley School in New York City and graduated from the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he was a student senator and exceptional varsity wrestler.

He then graduated cum laude from Harvard University with an A.B. in history and economics.

Several leaders of the village, where Rockefeller likely would have arrived had he made it to shore, had been killed by a Dutch patrol in 1958, thus providing some rationale for revenge by the tribe against someone from the "white tribe".

Neither cannibalism nor headhunting in Asmat were indiscriminate, but rather were part of an eye-for-an-eye revenge cycle, so it is possible that Rockefeller found himself the victim of such a cycle.

He also served for six months in 1960 as a private in the United States Army.

Following his military service, Rockefeller went on an expedition for Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to study the Dani tribe of western Netherlands New Guinea.

The expedition filmed Dead Birds, an ethnographic documentary film produced by Robert Gardner, for which Rockefeller was the sound recordist.

Rockefeller and a friend briefly left the expedition to study the Asmat tribe of southern Netherlands New Guinea.

After the expedition ended, Rockefeller returned to New Guinea to study the Asmat and collect their distinctive woodwork art.

"'It's the desire to do something adventurous,' he explained, 'at a time when frontiers, in the real sense of the word, are disappearing.'"

Rockefeller spent his time in New Guinea actively engaged with the culture and the art while recording ethnographic data.

In one of his letters back home, he wrote:

"I am having a thoroughly exhausting but most exciting time here ... The Asmat is like a huge puzzle with the variations in ceremony and art style forming the pieces. My trips are enabling me to comprehend (if only in a superficial, rudimentary manner) the nature of this puzzle ..."

On November 17, 1961, Rockefeller and Dutch anthropologist René Wassing were in a 40 ft dugout canoe about 3 nmi from shore when their double pontoon boat was swamped and overturned.

Their two local guides swam for help, but it was slow in coming.

After drifting for some time, early on November 19, 1961, Rockefeller said to Wassing: "I think I can make it."

He then swam for shore.

The boat was an estimated 12 nmi from the shore when he made the attempt to swim to safety, supporting the theory that he died from exposure, exhaustion or drowning.

Wassing was rescued the next day, but Rockefeller was never seen again despite an intensive and lengthy search effort.

At the time, his disappearance was a major world news item.

However, because headhunting and cannibalism were still present in some areas of Asmat in 1961, there has also been speculation that Rockefeller may have been killed and eaten by tribespeople from the Asmat village of Otsjanep.

His body was never found, and he was declared legally dead in 1964.

It was originally reported that Rockefeller either drowned or was attacked by a shark or saltwater crocodile.

In 1969, journalist Milt Machlin traveled to the island to investigate Rockefeller's disappearance.

He dismissed reports of Rockefeller living as a captive or as a Kurtz-like figure in the jungle, but concluded that circumstantial evidence supported the idea that he had been killed.

Author Paul Toohey, in his book Rocky Goes West, claims that Rockefeller's mother hired a private investigator in 1979 to go to New Guinea and try to solve his disappearance.

The reliability of the story has been questioned, but Toohey claims that the private investigator swapped a boat engine for the skulls of the three men that a tribe claimed were the only white men they had ever killed.

The investigator returned to New York and handed these skulls to the family, convinced that one of them was the skull of Rockefeller.

If this event did actually occur, the family has never commented on it.

However, the History Channel program Vanishings reported that Rockefeller's mother did pay a $250,000 reward to the investigator which was offered for final proof whether or not Rockefeller was alive or dead.

In the documentary film Keep the River on Your Right, Tobias Schneebaum states that he spoke with some Asmat villagers at Otsjanep, who described finding Rockefeller on the riverside and eating him.

In 2014, Carl Hoffman published a book that went into detail about the inquest into the disappearance, in which villagers and tribal elders admit to Rockefeller being killed after swimming to shore in 1961.

No remains or physical proof of him dying have been discovered.

In 2014, Carl Hoffman published the book Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art in which he discusses researching Rockefeller's mysterious disappearance and presumed death.

During multiple visits to the villages in the area, Hoffman heard several stories about men from Otsjanep killing Rockefeller after he had swum to shore.