Investigations into Michael Rockefeller’s disappearance suggest he might have endured a gruesome end in the Asmat region of southwestern New Guinea.
Born in 1938, Michael was the son of Nelson A. Rockefeller, a prominent American businessman and former Vice President. His great-grandfather was John D. Rockefeller, the co-founder of Standard Oil.
After completing his studies at Harvard, Michael traveled to the Asmat region, now part of Indonesia’s Papua province, to work on a documentary.
In 1961, seven months into his research, the canoe carrying the 23-year-old and anthropologist René Wassing overturned.
Michael chose to swim to shore, estimating the distance to be between three and ten miles, but he was never seen again.
Though Rockefeller was officially declared dead by drowning, author Carl Hoffman offers a much darker theory about the fate of the young ethnographer in his research.
In his 2014 book “Savage Harvest,” Hoffman proposes that Rockefeller was killed and eaten by the cannibalistic Asmat tribe.
Hoffman suggests that the Dutch authorities, keen on maintaining their colonial power and showcasing governmental efficiency, covered up the investigation into Rockefeller’s death.
During an interview with NPR, Hoffman said he had seen ‘hundreds and hundreds of pages of original memos and cables and letters’ exchanged between the Dutch and the Catholic Church.
“It was this huge paper trail that showed that within, really, two weeks almost of Michael’s disappearance, two priests on the ground and Asmat-speaking people — men who had been in the area for years and knew the villages and the men who lived in them well — heard rumors that Michael had swum ashore, encountered men from [the village of] Otsjanep and he had been killed by them,” Hoffman said.
“And those priests looked into it further and wrote, actually, fairly long, detailed reports in which they named names — who had Michael’s head, who had … other parts of his skeleton.”
“They filed those reports both to their superiors in the church and to the Dutch government. And they’re all sort of saying: What are we going to do? Let’s not tell the Rockefellers.”
Hoffman continued, “The Dutch did a full investigation and sent a police officer to the village of Otsjanep to live and find out and that was all kept secret.”
In a Reddit AMA session, Hoffman recounted his time with the Asmat tribe, noting that cannibalism was historically practiced for headhunting and ritualistic purposes but started to decline in the 1960s.
Hoffman theorized that the locals might have consumed Rockefeller’s body in retaliation for a ‘Dutch government raid’ on the village of Otsjanep in 1958.
“[The raid] killed five people, four of them the most important men in the village,” Hoffman wrote.
“That made the world unbalanced, in the Asmat cosmos, and ultimately the men who took their places as the heads of the jeu, or longhouses — think of them as clans — were there when Michael swam up exhausted and vulnerable and alone. They killed him.”