Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — Author of The Little Prince Disappears on Final Reconnaissance Mission

On July 31, 1944, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — French aristocrat, pioneering aviator, and author of the beloved novella The Little Prince — took off from Corsica in a Lockheed P-38 Lightning reconnaissance aircraft on an intelligence-gathering mission over occupied southern France. He never returned. Saint-Exupéry was 44 years old and had already been grounded once due to his age and injuries from previous crashes. He had personally petitioned the Allied command for the right to fly combat missions and had obtained special authorization to fly a limited number of reconnaissance sorties despite being considered too old and too physically compromised for active duty. The July 31 mission was his ninth. No radio contact was made after his departure. No German intercept records showed any aerial engagement in the area. The aircraft simply vanished. For decades, the mystery deepened the legend surrounding the man who had created the Little Prince — the solitary prince from a distant planet who chose to leave his world. In 1998, a fisherman found a silver bracelet off the coast of Marseille engraved with Saint-Exupéry's name and his American publisher's address. In 2000, divers found wreckage of a P-38 Lightning in the same general area. In 2004, a former Luftwaffe pilot named Horst Rippert came forward claiming he had shot down Saint-Exupéry's plane, though this account has been disputed. France officially declared the recovered aircraft Saint-Exupéry's, but the final moments of his life remain uncertain.