Next year, he will have been missing for as long as he was a lot.

And it's as if the missingness itself is a life or it's a president 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 unsolved mysteries or americas most wanted that those came in the

later 80s missing persons was, in most people's minds,

it was lore, you know, like Amelia Earhart. She was like a legend. Or Jimmy Hoffa,

D.B. 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,

are these aspects of

lore that were real but you didn't really think of them as real they were like legends or

myths and 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.

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 Vero 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 ferrying airplanes from a dealer in Florida to buyers. After Jim left, his family never heard from him

...