26 Facts About Michael Rockefeller

Michael Clark Rockefeller was a member of the Rockefeller family.

Michael Rockefeller was a son of New York Governor and later US Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, a grandson of American financier John D Rockefeller Jr.

In 2014, Carl Hoffman published a book that included details from the official inquest into the disappearance, in which villagers and tribal elders admitted to Michael Rockefeller being killed and eaten after swimming to shore in 1961.

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

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

Michael Rockefeller 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.

Michael Rockefeller served for six months in 1960 as a private in the United States Army.

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

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

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

Michael Rockefeller's body was never found, and he was declared legally dead in 1964.

However, because headhunting and cannibalism were still present in some areas of Asmat in 1961, and still are, there has been widespread speculation based around local testimony that Michael Rockefeller was killed and eaten by tribespeople from the Asmat village of Otsjanep.

The account repeated by a number of villagers was that Michael Rockefeller was pulled out of the water wearing underwear, and despite a dispute about whether or not he should be killed, he was non-fatally stabbed in the abdomen and later finished off somewhere along the Jawor River.

In December 1961, four locals told minister Hubertus von Peij that Michael Rockefeller's remains and personal effects, including his head, long bones, ribs, shorts, and glasses, had been divided amongst 15 Asmats.

The first public report that Michael Rockefeller was killed and dismembered, and his long bones turned into weapons and fishing equipment, was published by the Associated Press in March 1962.

Michael Rockefeller 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 Michael Rockefeller's mother hired a private investigator in 1979 to go to New Guinea and try to solve his disappearance.

However, the History Channel program Vanishings reported that Michael Rockefeller's mother did pay a $250,000 reward to the private investigator, which was offered for final proof of whether Michael Rockefeller was alive or dead.

In 2014, Mary Michael Rockefeller Morgan wrote of her twin brother's disappearance:.

All the evidence, based on the strong offshore currents, the high seasonal tides, and the turbulent outgoing waters, as well as the calculations that Michael Rockefeller was approximately ten miles from shore when he began to swim, supports the prevailing theory that he drowned before he was able to reach land.

Christopher Stokes's short story "The Man Who Ate Michael Rockefeller", published in the 23rd issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, presents a fictional account of young Michael's demise.

The 2007 film Welcome to the Jungle deals with two young couples who venture after Michael Rockefeller, but meet grisly demises.

Jeff Cohen's play The Man Who Ate Michael Rockefeller, based on the short story by Christopher Stokes, had its world premiere in an Off Broadway production at the West End Theatre in New York.

In 2011, Agamemnon Films released a documentary titled The Search for Michael Rockefeller, based on journalist Milt Machlin's book of the same name released in 1974.

The film introduces a third theory, that Michael Rockefeller survived and was living among the locals.

In 2012, Michael Rockefeller's surviving twin sister Mary published a memoir, titled Beginning with the End: A Memoir of Twin Loss and Healing, about coping with her grief after the death of her brother.