Eng'iti
Elder Lister
In November 1961, the promising young ethnographer Michael Rockefeller vanished along the southern coast of New Guinea.
His disappearance captured the world’s attention — not just because he was the great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, one of the wealthiest men in history, but because of the disturbing rumors that followed.
Officially, he was declared dead by drowning, but over the decades, a darker story has emerged.
Investigators, journalists, and even missionaries have gathered testimony suggesting that Rockefeller survived the wreck of his boat, reached shore — and was killed and eaten by members of the Asmat tribe.
The truth remains one of the most haunting mysteries of the 20th century.
Michael Rockefeller during his 1961 expedition to New Guinea.
Early Life of Michael Rockefeller
Michael Clark Rockefeller was born in 1938, the youngest son of Nelson Rockefeller, New York’s governor, and a direct descendant of the legendary industrialist John D. Rockefeller.
Raised in privilege, Michael was expected to step into a role within the family’s vast political and business network.
But from an early age, he displayed a temperament more drawn to exploration, culture, and art than to power and finance.
Michael Rockefeller among the Asmat in New Guinea in 1961.
After graduating from Harvard University in 1960, Michael resisted the idea of spending his life in boardrooms.
Instead, he gravitated toward the art world, inspired in part by his father’s newly founded Museum of Primitive Art.
The museum’s collection, which included striking works from Nigeria, the Aztec Empire, and the Maya civilization, fascinated him.
Michael took a position on the museum’s board and began imagining how he could make a unique contribution.
New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller (seated) with his first wife, Mary Todhunter Clark, and children, Mary, Anne, Steven, Rodman and Michael.
Karl Heider, a Harvard anthropology graduate student who worked alongside him, later recalled Michael’s ambition to do something unprecedented — to gather a major collection for New York from a culture few outsiders had ever encountered.
Having already spent extended periods in Japan and Venezuela, Michael yearned for a destination even more remote.
Conversations with representatives from the Dutch National Museum of Ethnology led to a bold plan: a journey to Dutch New Guinea to study the Asmat people and collect examples of their art.
The Harvard-Peabody expedition to New Guinea in 1961, with Michael Rockefeller seated second from right.
The First Expedition to Dutch New Guinea
By the early 1960s, Dutch colonial officials and missionaries had made some inroads into Asmat territory, but many villages remained virtually untouched by outside influence.
The Asmat worldview held that distant lands were inhabited by spirits, and pale-skinned outsiders arriving from across the sea were sometimes regarded as supernatural beings.
When Michael and his small team arrived in the village of Otsjanep, one of the larger Asmat communities, they were tolerated but not fully welcomed.
While the villagers permitted photographs, they refused to part with sacred cultural objects such as bisj poles — intricately carved wooden pillars used in religious ceremonies and headhunting rites.
Asmat people.
Rather than turning him away, these restrictions seemed to deepen Michael’s fascination. He saw in the Asmat a culture that existed entirely outside Western norms, operating according to its own rules and traditions.
His diary entries from the time describe the region as more remote and untamed than anything he had previously experienced.
The Asmat’s customs were striking to outsiders. Inter-village conflict could be brutal, and victorious warriors sometimes decapitated enemies, consumed their flesh, and crafted weapons from their bones.
Ritual practices included sexual rites unfamiliar to Western society and bonding ceremonies that involved the communal drinking of urine.
Michael returned from the first expedition determined to create an in-depth anthropological record of the Asmat, supported by an extensive collection of their art for the Museum of Primitive Art.
The Second Expedition and Disappearance
Michael set out again for New Guinea in late 1961, this time accompanied by René Wassing, a Dutch government anthropologist.
Their destination was once again Otsjanep, where they hoped to further their research and secure artifacts for the museum.
On November 19, their small boat encountered sudden rough weather. Heavy winds and crosscurrents overturned the craft, leaving Michael and Wassing clinging to the upturned hull. They were about 12 miles from shore.
After hours in the water, Michael made a decision that would become infamous. “I think I can make it,” he reportedly told Wassing before slipping into the sea and swimming toward land.
The next day, local men rescued Wassing. Michael, however, had disappeared.
What followed was an unprecedented search effort: ships, planes, and helicopters scoured the region, and Nelson Rockefeller and his wife flew to New Guinea to oversee operations. Despite these efforts, no trace of Michael was found.
Nine days into the search, the Dutch interior minister announced there was no hope of finding him alive. His official cause of death was listed as drowning, though no body was ever recovered.
The lack of closure fueled intense speculation in the press, with theories ranging from shark attacks to voluntary disappearance into the jungle.
New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller speaks to reporters during a press conference about his missing son, Michael, on Nov. 29, 1961.
Testimonies and Theories of a Violent End
In the months following Michael’s disappearance, rumors began to circulate that he had reached shore — only to meet a violent fate.
Dutch missionaries who had lived in the region for years, fluent in Asmat languages, gathered accounts from villagers in Otsjanep.
According to these testimonies, Michael was captured while wearing only his underwear. A dispute broke out over whether he should be spared, but he was eventually stabbed in the abdomen and killed elsewhere.
Witnesses told Dutch minister Hubertus von Peij that Michael’s remains — including his head, bones, and personal items like his shorts and glasses — were divided among about 15 men.
Nelson Rockefeller holds a press conference in Merauke, Indonesia, about the disappearance of his son Michael.
In March 1962, the Associated Press published the first public report suggesting Michael had been killed and dismembered, his bones fashioned into weapons and fishing tools.
A year later, Dutch police officer Wim van de Waal investigated and concluded the same, even producing a skull the Asmat claimed was Michael’s.
Journalist Milt Machlin’s 1969 investigation supported the idea that Michael had been killed, noting that such an act would fit within the Asmat’s traditional cycle of revenge warfare, in which violence was often retaliatory and ritualized.
The south coast of New Guinea, where Michael Rockefeller went missing. Photo by Eliot Elisofon/The LIFE Picture Collection.
Later Investigations and Chilling Accounts
More than fifty years after Michael Rockefeller vanished, journalist Carl Hoffman revisited the mystery.
In his 2014 book Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art, Hoffman presented interviews and archival evidence suggesting that the Dutch government had known the truth but suppressed it to avoid political and cultural fallout.
According to accounts Hoffman collected — which echoed those heard by missionaries decades earlier — Michael had reached Otsjanep, where a group of men decided to kill him as an act of retribution for a violent incident in 1958 involving Dutch authorities and local warriors.
In these stories, Michael’s head was removed, his skull split open to consume his brain, and the rest of his flesh cooked and eaten.
His thigh bones were fashioned into daggers, tibias into spear points, and his blood was used in ritual dances and sexual rites intended to restore spiritual balance.
Soon after, a cholera outbreak struck the area, which many Asmat interpreted as divine punishment for the killing.
Michael Rockefeller on his first trip to New Guinea in May 1960, just one year before his death. Photo by Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology.
An Asmat ancestor skull, often used as a pillow to keep the spirits at bay, has the lower jaw intact, unlike the skulls of those who have been headhunted.
Michael Rockefeller
How the Asmat people decorate the skulls of their enemies.
A native of New Guinea holds a piece of primitive art.
Location of Otsjanep, Asmat Regency, South Papua, Indonesia.
Today, the mystery of Michael Rockefeller’s disappearance remains unresolved in the official record.
Many of the artifacts he collected are now housed in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his photographs from New Guinea are preserved at the Peabody Museum.
Yet the haunting possibility that his life ended in ritual violence continues to overshadow his legacy.
(Photo credit: As referenced / Wikimedia Commons / The Smithsonian Magazine).
Last edited:
