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Next year he will have been missing for as long as he was alive. And if the missingness itself is alive or into present,

it's fascinating to me how things have changed regarding missing persons. In 1982 we didn't even have milk carton kids yet.

That came, I think, a year or two later. We didn't have unplugged mysteries or America's most wanted. That came in the later 80s.

The missing persons was mostly in most people's minds, it was lore. Like Amelia Earhart, she was like a legend.

Are Jimmy Hoffas, D.D. Cooper, yeah, they were legends, they were like folk heroes.

And I think that people, if you thought of missing persons, you thought either of film noir movies, or mystery stories,

or these aspects of lore that were real, but you didn't really think of them as real. They were legends or myths.

I think then in later years, especially in the internet era, suddenly it became possible to share information in radically different ways.

And of course technologies were changing GPS and DNA and surveillance cameras. And I think that has created a strange evolution of the very concept of going missing.

People still go missing, of course, but the ways we talk about it, the ways we imagine it have changed radically in these 40 years.

On October 3, 1982, 42-year-old James Lewis left his home in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Jim told his family that he planned to drive to Viro Beach, Florida for a job interview.

Jim was a decorated veteran who had recently retired from the army. He was a skilled pilot who was looking for something to do in the next phase of his life post-retirement,

and said that he was interviewing for a position-faring airplanes from a dealer in Florida to buyers.

After Jim left, his family never heard from him again, something that was very unusual for Jim.

Months later, in January of 1983, Jim's wife received a call from a local airport stating that his car had been parked there since early October, just days after her husband had vanished.

Had Jim really driven to Florida? Had he taken a flight somewhere? And why had his car been left at the airport?

These questions have haunted his family for more than 40 years.

I'm Arissa, and from Wondery, this is episode 401 of The Vanished. James Lewis' story, part 1, The Hero.

Well done. You've sorted through the embarrassment of riches that is the modern podcast landscape, and found me Rob Briden on my podcast.

In this series of Briden and I talk to, among others, Harry Hill, Ben Elton, Charlotte Church, Steve Cougan, and Dame Harriet Walter. And that's just a few.

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