Can people truly disappear?

They can just make stuff up, so you don't know it's fake

One would need legal help. There are all kinds of instances in life in which one needs to prove one's origin so this wouldn't be possible unless the person is willing to be totally self containing, financially, and also law abiding. Til death.

I don't even know how someone would even begin to do this in this day and age.

This guy is missing from the Maryland area. Not much news about it. Maybe the parents can’t afford publicity but anyway, god only knows what happens to these people.

Daniel Mcdonald

According to the website, they’re are dozens of others missing just from the same area. I’ve been listening to a lot of missing persons podcasts and it never ends well.

R3, television shows make it look amazingly easy with the right connections ... everything from Burn Notice to The Americans to Mr. Robot. New identity papers printed up, and the deal is done. It's a mystery to me.

Hmmm. I think you *could* fuck off to some place and live off the grid and say you were born in a cult and your parents didn’t believe in the establishment so they never gave you a SS# or whatever. You’d be relegated to cash under the table, There are little societies in pockets of rural America like the Pacific Northwest where it’s rather lawless. It’s dangerous, too, but if you had a valuable skill, they might allow you to become part of them.

In the USA at least a Social Security # is needed for everything. We will soon need a passport for internal air travel. Give it time and it will be required for all travel, I am convinced. Even now, you must identify yourself and show ID to use Amtrak.

So, no, I don't believe it is possible to truly disappear in today's world. Just do a google search on yourself.

The only way might be to do what a previous poster said and go to a fairly lawless probably rural place and live under the table. Eventually that will fail, too. IMO, eventually you will need a hospital or some other legal matter and then it is all over.

They would have to change their name, wouldn't they?

Yeah...it's called stealing someone's identity. Maybe identity theft is on the rise because murdering someone and hiding the body is an easy way to just walk into another life. Has to be the right person, someone who won't be missed, won't be declared dead, etc.

Regardless of what the original person did with their identity, as long as it doesn't involve felonies, someone else can take the ID in a different direction.

It was definitely easier before the Internet and before people routinely received Social Security numbers as young children.

Ask Michael Obama.

R9, I took Amtrak yesterday. I was never asked for ID.

Are you a “Marnie?”

I think the Amtrak ID requirement is one of those 9/11 generated rules that's fallen into disuse.

What happens in 5 or 10 years when facial recognition technology is widespread? I can see a time when the camera on the ATM machine does an id as part of the verification, so how do you stay lost when just appearing in public is a huge risk?

I agree that it would have been much, much easier to do before the Internet. I'm old and I have a couple of friends whose fathers never talked about their early lives. One didn't find out until thirty years after he died that he was illegitimate and had to grow up in an orphanage (the fate of most kids born to single mothers in those days)--he ended up being the beloved father of a big happy family. The other never did find out where the father came from. He was a miserable SOB with borderline personality disorder.

R14 is right, R9: I've never had to show ID riding domestically on any Amtrak train. When I went from NYC to Montreal, I had to show a passport because I was going to another country. But as for ID on any American Amtrak destinations, all they do is look at your ticket to prove you paid for the trip. And that's after you've already boarded.

It’s better to do outside of a big city. Big cities can become the biggest small towns in a very short amount of time as anybody living in one knows.

R17, your comment reminded me of “Minority Report”.

It used to be much, much easier. Even 50 years ago it was easier, and 100-150 years ago, forget about it. When I was doing genealogy last year, I hit a brick wall on a couple of my male ancestors. They both had very, very common names, so perhaps that's why I couldn't find anything on them (I found records for those names, but they didn't match other information I had on their whereabouts at certain points in time). I strongly suspect in at least one case that the surname my great-great-grandfather was known by, and that many of my cousins are still using, was not the name he was born with.

If you lived in a frontier state, which he did, it was so easy to come out there and begin all over again. There were no electronic records, birth certificates, drivers licenses, etc. A brand-new you any time you felt like it. I bet some people did it repeatedly.

How about those still practicing home births using a midwife? My adopted grandmother was born at home and never knew her exact birth date. Assume she had to get a SS # when she was part of the original Ziegfeld Follies dancers.

Others I knew who were born at home were able to lie to get into the armed forces at 13 or 16 to escape a bad home life. US Military always knew the truth somehow but understood the alternatives for the enlistee were far, far worse.

My mother, who was born in a rural area in the late 40s, had that problem, R23. She was born at home and the local doctor was an alkie who was bad about filing the required papers with the county. It caused her a lot of trouble later in life. Eventually, they took her baptismal records as proof of birth and issues her a proper birth certificate, but they didn't really like it.

My uncle disappeared 35 or so years ago. He had a drug problem and owed thousands in child support and other debts. He was a yacht salesman in the Key West area, and one day he was gone with a yacht he supposedly sold. Real Elmore Leonard-type stuff, I know.

My mother (his sister) used to get regular hang-up phone calls late at night I always figured were from him. Ten years ago when she remarried, her new husband didn't understand why she demanded she keep the same phone number she has had since the 80s. She never told him why she needed them to switch to her number, but I know its because of the hang-up calls.

I have no idea if she actually ever talks to him at all, but since she still keeps the same number, I assume she knows more than she lets on.

I pretty much assume he is dead though, but who knows.

As we approach the total surveillance state in which we're headed, it will become more and more difficult to truly disappear. Not that it won't be possible; afterall, the government will still operate a witness protection program and our spies will maintain their ability to hide, but it will all have to be done with the cooperation of both government and private industry (as under capitalism private industry is elevated to a superior position than "we, the people") which is unlikely to happen.

Once industry gets their hands on being able to control individuals' fate, from birth to death, they will not let go of it, ever. It will be sold to us like cell phones were: these amazing devices of convenience, connectivity and production when the reality is a magnificent means of watching and controlling our behavior (see: protests disrupted by authoritarian governments by simply cutting off access to social media). And just like with our phones. we'll all happily line up and pay exorbitant rates so that corporations can track, trade and control our lives like any other asset.

tl;dr: if you want to hide, do it now. It's probably already too late, but it's never going to get easier.

Well, what about undocumented immigrants/refugees who just show up on a foreign shore in a boat or shipping container? They don’t have ID or papers.

Anyway, I believe in human/criminal ingenuity. There will always be workarounds, and human nature being what it is... it’ll always be possible.

Whitey Bulger hid in plain sight in Santa Monica for 16 years, renting an apartment using a homeless guy's Social Security number.

It ended badly, as these things often do. He blames feeding a stray cat for getting caught.

People can't disappear the way they could in old black & white movies.

No one comes to town with one suitcase and gets a room at a boarding house and has a scotch neat in their single-bed-and-a-sink-in -the-corner-room before getting up in the morning and finding an odd job. No one can do anything without triple identification and credit card charges or other recorded means of payment that make one traceable.

R4 says voluntarily missing.

Hhjkk

Random chance will get you eventually. My old boss used to tell a story about his first divorce--he picked up a hooker in a Vegas casino and as he was taking her to his room the elevator doors opened and his wife's best friend and her husband were standing there looking at him. How you going to beat Murphy's Law?

I think you could do it on a social level. Change your name legally to something common, and be vague about your backstory. Say you are from a large-ish city and attended a big state university. That would work if you didn’t have anyone looking hard for you.

There are survivalists types who do home births specifically to keep their kids if the grid. Link is interesting.

r32 I once ran into a co-worker of mine at a hotel in a neighboring city one weekend. He was with a woman who was not his wife (I knew his wife) and they were holding hands and were obviously romantically involved with each other. My co-worker and I did not acknowledge each other, pretending we were strangers. Things were SUPER awkward at work between me and him for the remainder of the time I was at that company.

R32's story is the very definition of busted. What makes it better is that the four had to share the lift ride. What if anything could the hooker guy say?! Then he doubtless had his fun, knowing the price would be exponentially more than her fee. So maybe he really went for it. Off topic, but the story tickled me.

What I don't understand is that the younger generations don't seem to have a problem with losing all privacy. They happily give it away.

[quote]What I don't understand is that the younger generations don't seem to have a problem with losing all privacy. They happily give it away.

But what real benefit has holding tight to your privacy brought you? Excepting scare stories of drained bank accounts and financial ruin wrought by identify thieves, or not getting hired because someone blew your cover as, say, a Nazi apologist, or because of an extensive catalog of double-fisting videos, are there real instances you can point to where guarding your personal information has proved beneficial? I can understand the impulse to protect privacy, but it seems the reality seems different than what people may fear.

In a world where everyone shared everything, most people are too busy sharing to care.

Is it still possible to register in a motel/hotel under a fake name?

R37 = Mark Zuckerberg

r38 I've been asked for ID at every hotel/motel I've ever checked into, no matter what kind of place it was.

Well, that’s a bummer.

I think the only way a person could disappear and not get caught in this day and age would be to have other people helping that person. They would have to be completely taken care of financially by others, they couldn't get a bank account or a place to live in their own name, and certainly no job. It would be next to impossible to do it otherwise, I think.

Well, unless they lived 100% as a homeless person on the street.

How does one use an alias? What if you want to use your maiden name after you get married even if your bank accounts and bills have your married name?

Back in the 1940s, my grandmother's cousin abandoned his family and disappeared from the small rural town in the South where they lived. Sometime in the 1950s, my grandmother and other relatives were on a trip to New York City. Since they had an usual family name, on a whim, they looked up the family name in the NYC phone book. To their surprise, there was someone with the cousin's name in the phone book. They phoned that number and when the person answered, my grandmother immediately recognized it as her cousin's voice.

They arranged a face to face meeting and the cousin gave some convoluted reason for why he abandoned his family and disappeared. They maintained some minimal contact after that. A few years later he died.

Unlikely that could ever happen today.