Missing But Not Forgotten Trivia Quiz

Answer: Spartacus

There were three major slave uprisings against the Roman Republic between 135 BC and 71 BC, known as the "Servile Wars". Eunus led the first, in Sicily between 135 BC and 132 BC. Salvius, latter known as Tryphon, led the second, also in Sicily, between 104 BC and 100 BC.

Spartacus led the best known of the three, in southern Italy. Born in Thrace, he had served in the Roman army for a time before being enslaved. From a small band of about 70 slave-gladiators who escaped with Spartacus, his forces grew to include more than 120,000 followers. The Roman legions under the command of Marcus Licinius Crassus finally defeated the rebellion. Spartacus is reported to have fallen in the final confrontation, the Battle of the Silarius River in 71 BC, but his body was never found.

Tacky was a Ghanaian-born slave who led one of the most important slave rebellions in Jamaica.

Answer: Henry Hudson

Henry Hudson failed to return from his fourth attempt to find a northern passage to the Orient. When his ship, the Discovery, returned from its 1610-11 voyage, Hudson, his son and seven of his loyal crew members were missing. They had been put in a boat and cast adrift by a mutinous crew. Their bodies were never found.

John Cabot, one of the other explorers in the list, also disappeared, and is believed to have died at sea during his second voyage.

Answer: "Le Petit Prince" / "The Little Prince"

While Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's book, "Le Petit Prince" / "The Little Prince", is known worldwide, his real passion was aviation. He earned his pilot's wings in 1922 and went on to serve with the French Air Force, both in France and North Africa. In 1926, he helped pioneer postal flights in France, North Africa and Argentina. He survived multiple crashes, including once in the Libyan desert while trying to break a speed record.

In 1943 he returned to the air to fly with the Free French Air Force. At the time, he was considered too old to be flying the new planes, and his role was limited to reconnaissance flights. On 31 July 1944, he set off for a mission from which he did not return. In 1998, a silver identity bracelet believed to be his was found off the coast of France, near Marseilles. Two years later, a diver found nearby the partial remnants of the same model plane Exupéry had been flying that last night. It was later confirmed to have been his.

Answer: Raoul Wallenberg

When Raoul Wallenberg arrived to take up his diplomatic post in Budapest in July 1944, more than 400,000 of Hungary's Jews had been deported to the death camps in the preceding two months alone. Wallenberg is credited with saving up to 10,000 Jews by providing diplomatic passports and by buying properties where he could offer Jewish refugees safe haven in buildings subject to Swedish diplomatic immunity.

In January 1945, as the Soviet troops were beginning to take control of Budapest, Wallenberg was detained by the Soviets, most likely on charges of espionage. While it is not definitively known what happened to him, many sources believe he died in a Soviet prison in 1947. He was officially declared dead by the Swedish government in 1952.

The three incorrect answers in this quiz are the names of other diplomats who worked during the war to save Jews in Hungary.

Answer: Alcatraz Island

Frank Morris, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin were among the 36 prisoners who attempted to escape Alcatraz during its 29 years of service as a prison. All but five were either caught, shot and killed, or found drowned. Morris and the Anglin brothers made their escape in 1962 by digging a tunnel with sharpened spoons and using a raft constructed from raincoats. The FBI, having concluded that the trio were unlikely to have survived the frigid swim, closed their file in 1979.

In 2013, however, the San Francisco Police Department received a letter which purported to be from John Anglin. The letter said that all three prisoners had survived the escape, though barely, and that the two others had died in 2005 and 2008. He was proposing to turn himself in if he was given a reduced sentence so that he could receive medical treatment for cancer. The FBI was unable to authenticate the letter and did not follow through. The letter only became public in 2018 when CBS San Francisco published excerpts.

Answer: D.B. Cooper

The unidentified hijacker, who booked a one-way ticket on a Northwest Orient flight from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington using the name Dan Cooper, was later dubbed D.B. Cooper by the media. Once in the air, he showed a note demanding a ransom of $200,000 and what appeared to be a bomb to one of the air hostesses.

The airline paid the ransom when the flight landed in Seattle and the hijacker released the passengers. After the plane was refueled, Cooper took off, the four remaining members of the crew closed in the cockpit. Approximately twenty minutes later, a warning light went off indicating that the aft door had opened. Cooper had disappeared when the plane landed.

He was never seen again, although almost $6,000 of the ransom money was found buried along the Columbia River in 1980.

The FBI suspended its investigation of the crime in 2016.

Answer: Jimmy Hoffa

Jimmy Hoffa, long-time president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, was 62 when he disappeared in July 1975. Hoffa was known for his close ties with organized crime. He had been serving prison sentences for jury tampering, attempted bribery, and fraud when he was granted a pardon by President Richard Nixon in 1971.

He disappeared from a restaurant parking lot where he was supposedly waiting to meet with two high-level mafia figures. Among the theories about his disappearance were that he had been murdered and buried under the New York Giants' stadium, murdered and buried in the foundations of the seven-skyscraper Renaissance Center complex in Detroit, or simply murdered and cremated.

Answer: Carried off into the wilderness by a dingo

Azaria Chamberlain disappeared from her parents' tent while they were camping near Uluru (Ayers Rock) in 1980. While an initial inquiry supported her parents' claim that she had been taken by a dingo, in 1982 her mother, Lindy Chamberlain, was convicted of her murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Her father was convicted of being an accessory after the fact and given a suspended sentence. All their appeals to overturn the verdicts were unsuccessful. It was only after a piece of Azaria's clothing was discovered near a dingo lair in 1986 that an Australian court overturned the verdicts and exonerated the parents.

Answer: Tsunami

The December 26, 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, caused by an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, killed more than 225,000 people in coastal areas of a dozen countries. The destruction and loss of life was devastating. Families such as that of Raudhatul Jannah were literally torn apart as the water washed children and parents out to sea. Raudhatul's mother and father, who live in Indonesia's Acheh province, thought they had lost both their daughter and son that day.

A decade later, a relative thought they saw someone who looked like the girl.

Her parents went to the village and learned that the waves had carried the child, then only four years old, to a remote island, where she was rescued by a fisherman. She had been raised by the fisherman's mother.

A few months later the parents found a boy they believe to be their son.

Answer: Argentina

From 1976 through 1983 a military dictatorship governed Argentina. It is estimated that over 30,000 people disappeared during their rule. This included over 500 babies, some in born in prison, taken from their mothers and given illegally for adoption to members and supporters of the regime.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo / Asociación Civil Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo was founded in 1977 with the goal of identifying and finding the children. Adriana was the 126th child to be reunited with her family.