The Cannibal Killing of Michael Rockefeller

hello everybody today we are going to be looking into the odd disappearance of michael rockefeller to me this story is especially interesting because despite happening to one of the most prolific families in american business history almost no one knows about it not only that but the details of it are so grisly i was shocked that this doesn't appear more in sort of the realm of creepy youtube videos so because that i decided to come on here and tell you all about one of the most brutal missing person cases to ever exist and also since my anthill kids video got demonetized i am clearly stating out that this video is for educational purposes and i do not condone or recommend any of the activities including cannibalism mentioned in this video i hate that i have to say that but i also need money and also to everyone in the comments of that ann hill kids video who says i have to be a psychopath to look up and enjoy these things what about it without further ado we're gonna go ahead and get into it but as always thank you for watching michael rockefeller was the son of new york governor and later vice president nelson rockefeller and michael himself was the great grandson of john d rockefeller one of the richest people to ever live who started the standard oil company michael himself went to harvard with the eventual goal of studying politics however shortly after college he realized that his interests lie more in the artistic specifically that of ancient or tribal art forms this was spurred on whenever michael's dad opened up the museum of primitive art now i understand that calling it primitive art is a little bit mean but it was the 1960s and no one really cared at the time so sorry in the museum of primitive art michael came across things like aztec and mayan sculptures and face mask and became enamored with them it's seen that michael began to discuss his interest with anthropologists who thought it'd be a good idea to begin bringing michael on their expeditions eventually michael chose to journey to the country that was at the time known as dutch new guinea and now known as papua new guinea there he hoped to meet a newfound group of people known as the azmat people and bring their art back to the united states now i am not a historian i am not an expert on different cultures beliefs and forms of religion and the research for this has been done over the course of the past couple days so forgive me if i'm off on some of what i'm about to describe but i promise it matters later the asmat people were at the time newly introduced to people from the industrialized world part of their belief system was that life itself exists on the island and everything that comes from off of the island is a spirit in one form or the other so whenever the at the time indigenous people of dutch new guinea made contact with the dutch and british sailors who would come to the island they assumed them to be spirits now from the research i've done that kind of faded away as they begin to interact more and more with the white settlers that came in but it goes to show how alien their traditions were from the people of the island another big deal that got brought up a lot is they had a very eye for an eye form of governance for example the azmat people were composed of several different tribes so if one tribe attacked another and killed two it was then customary for the tribe that was attacked to go and kill two of theirs to them whenever something like murder happened it offset the spiritual balance so the spiritual balance needed to be reset in order to make everything right i promise it's going to matter in a minute so whenever michael first got to the island of dutch new guinea he first visited a village known as austin nep uh for someone who doesn't know how to pronounce foreign words i should sure do put a lot of them in the scripts austrian ontogenet up okay oxygen app we're going with that after arriving at the village the people told michael that they could take pictures of them but he could not take any of the artwork he found back home it's there that with a full expedition crew michael took several pictures with him and everything seemed to be going fine and from all the writings michael seemed totally understanding of the fact they wouldn't let him have their art to bring back home as they were still weary of outsiders and he seemed respectful of their customs in several of the diary entries that he wrote while he was over there he talked about how fascinated he was with the people and how much he enjoyed being there rather than back home so after a short return home michael gathered himself got another anthropologist and returned back to the island in 1961. it was then on the night of november 19th of 1961 that a strong wind came in and caused the currents of the waters around the island to become very thrashy and it capsized the boat that they were in michael the anthropologist as well as two other guides had to get onto the hull of the boat that was now flipped upside down and hang out the storm the issue was the boat they were on was so small it didn't have a radio or any other communication functions so no one knew what had happened to them after about 24 hours michael figured that they could set out there in the water forever so he tied two empty gas cans to his waist to act as buoys so that he could swim to shore keep in mind shore was about 12 miles away the last official words michael ever spoke to someone was when he turned to the anthropologist said i think i can make it and jumped into the water to which michael was never seen again tragically about another 12 hours later a boat managed to spot them and rescue arrived to which whenever they went to shore to look for michael he was nowhere to be found this sparked a massive manhunt because you know he's a rockefeller and for two weeks a series of boats airplanes helicopters and everything else you could think of comb through every part of the jungle as a means to find him the issue also was that this is the middle of the jungle and it's not like everything was necessarily mapped out so what it pretty much came down to was a bunch of dutch soldiers just running through the tree line and screaming michael really loud so that's totally efficient also on top of the entire military that the rockefellers enlisted in order to help them find their son that family offered a 250 000 reward for anyone who could find him however due to it being in the middle of a mostly uncharted jungle and the fact that there was 12 miles of ocean in between them that was full of sharks and crocodiles the chances were pretty slim as a matter of fact after nine days the minister of dutch to the island of dutch new guinea said there is no way we're ever going to find him and after two weeks search parties cleared the area and michael was officially declared dead with the cause of death being drowning now officially that's as far as the story goes as far as any correct records michael made the shot for sure and then drowned on the way there however that wasn't good enough for the family and those around him who wanted to figure out more and that's where things get interesting well interesting for us 50 years later reading about it for michael it was the opposite of that most of the information that i have is thanks to a man by the name of carl hoffman who in 2014 went back over everything related to this case in order to write a book and better examine the full story behind michael rockefeller between the personal expeditions he made the stories of dutch missionaries on the island as well as a private investigator hired by the rockefeller family it puts together a fairly certain picture of what happened and what's even more damning is the fact that it turns out the dutch government had classified files about what happened to michael but wouldn't let anyone else read them including the rockefeller family now i have to explain some of the politics that went into the island that explains why the dutch government was building a secret file about michael rockefeller by 1962 when all of this big search party was going on indonesia had taken half of the island of dutch new guinea the reason being the people of dutch new guinea were seen by the u.n and the first world powers as frankly savages and of course i'm not condoning that i'm not saying that's what they were but in the 50s and 60s the idea of the u.n wasn't let's see how many people we can help it was an idea of let's see how many people we can control which it kind of still is but that's besides the point so when it came to these underdeveloped countries that had a population of people who weren't caught up with the modern times they kind of delegated control of them other two more established powers so as papua new guinea began to be settled they said that the dutch can handle it but then indonesia was moving in and sort of rapidly expanding on the island so the dutch were panicking that they would eventually lose control of the entire thing so in the middle of that big turmoil that the dutch are worried about the son of one of the most wealthy families in america disappears on the island near a group of known cannibals so they panicked it's even believed by many that the dutch forces on the ground in the jungle conducting the search party were told that if they find any evidence that michael met a tragic fate to cover it up hence the reason the dutch minister after nine days was like well never find him gotta go home bye so sorry also the cannibalism thing wasn't an approximation whenever the first settlers got to the island it was an openly known fact that they would just eat people all the time to the point it constantly became an argument for the dutch who said that no no no they don't eat people anymore because we made it illegal which they knew was bs the people on the island knew it was bs i'm sure the u.n knew it was bs but that didn't stop them from saying it we're now going to get into the big reports of what exactly happened to michael but the reason it took until 2014 for this to come out was mostly due to cover-ups because of world politics like most cool stories one testimony comes from an investigator who was hired by the rockefeller family to go to the island and see what he could find while on the island the investigator traded a boat engine for three human skulls who the local told him are the skulls of three white men who were killed by the indigenous people of the island and whenever the investigator inquired well who are the skulls they're like oh michael rockefeller you know that big famous guy there's the big search for a couple years ago yeah that's him so why that can't be proven with like 100 certainty the investigator came back to the united states and supposedly gave the skulls to the rockefeller family and while there's no evidence that he gave them there is evidence that the family gave him 250 thousand dollars which is what you'll remember the reward money if anyone found their son so following the paper trail it seems like they at least thought the skulls were evidence enough also i couldn't find any like official reports of this but there is one offhanded story the investigator told that while interviewing people on the island he went to an old man and keep in mind this is an indigenous tribe in the middle of the jungle and asked if he knew michael rockefeller and the man said no and then the investigator goes aren't you wearing glasses and the old man goes yes and the investigator says where'd you get him and the old man goes i don't know i found him and then sure enough matching on pictures it seems those glasses were michael's glasses so the guy i mentioned earlier carl hoffman who compiled all of this decided to go directly to the island and ask people for himself they arrived at the village that i couldn't pronounce earlier and immediately as soon as they got there carl's interpreter overheard someone say don't tell the white man about the one we killed so the interpretator taps carl on the shoulder he's like i think we want to go talk to those guys so they go over there and they ask who do you mean and the guy goes oh well since you asked how we killed michael rockefeller which had to be satisfying for carl imagine like you've studied this thing for years so then you finally go there and like two steps into the village someone's like hey we did it just saying no and upon talking to the guy he said it was common knowledge everyone in the village knows that 50 years ago this village killed michael rockefeller but there's a bit more to the story than just michael landing on the island and a bunch of cannibals tearing him apart over three years before michael made his expedition in 1957 there was a large war going on between two separate villages on the island over something or other and it was killing a bunch of the indigenous population that whole thing i talked about earlier with the dutch worried that they were going to lose control of the island was still going on so the dutch dispatched a military force to the island to make everyone stop so the soldiers marched into the woods with guns and were like hey cut that out and then i guess after getting there they're like oh wait we can't speak their language so the native people just assumed it was a fight and they started chanting and like grabbing spears and running at them so the dutch just shot him keep in mind this is a group of people who already think or at least some of them think that the white men they're seeing are spirits and they've also never seen guns before so it goes from like oh we gotta fight the spirits and then they shoot these really loud cannons at you and now five people are dead and then the dutch soldiers left and said what happened and i guess that caused the natives to quit fighting as much because now there's a bigger concern so the dutch government was like good job team another one for the books that happened on the specific strip of land where michael's boat had overturned and after talking to the people of the village as well as confirming his story with two dutch missionaries to the island who had lived there for nine years and very well understood the language they were pretty much able to put together the story of what happened to michael on the early hours of november 19th a group of warriors from the village were walking along the bank looking for food whenever they saw something crawling up on shore initially they thought it was a crocodile but upon running up to it they saw that it was in fact michael rockefeller choked up and tired but still alive which might i say swimming 12 miles through a storm to shore the dude was a chad initially the men were scared by him crawling up on shore because again the idea at the time was still that these are spirits or at least supernatural people of some sort but then they started talking to each other and figured out that they could kill him as revenge of what the dutch did to their people three years earlier and while it's not confirmed a bunch of stories go with the idea that these were quite literally the sons of the warriors who were killed so after talking themselves into it they then speared michael to death on the banks of dutch new guinea before taking his body back to the village and then once there and i'm reminding you for the last time content warning they popped open his skull ate his brain stripped all of the flesh off of him before cooking and eating it used his bones to make the heads of spears and daggers and then drained his blood and used it for a sort of ritual in which they dance around and flick it on each other which you can say what you want about the cannibal tribe but wasteful they were not now a few days after this is when the search began so this group of people went from seeing one white guy after several years to then seeing helicopters and airplanes and boats and militaries and tanks and other things that they had never seen before and thought it was the spirits punishing them for killing michael which in a really like roundabout sort of cosmic way yeah this would explain that despite all the search parties and news coverage they were never able to find a trace of him not only that but a couple weeks after everyone left a cholera outbreak hit the island which they continued to say was the spirits punishing them for killing michael which if the cholera was brought over by the dutch in the search parties then again in a cosmic sort of way yeah and in all of carl's research everyone on the island has said that's what they had heard and been told forever had happened but no one came forward saying they did it which i mean yeah if like you're afraid of the white spirits killing you and then a white spirit's like did you do it i promise i won't hurt you you're still not gonna tell him and then to top it all off as carl had finished his research and was beginning to leave the island he overheard a native telling several children a story in which he was visualizing spears and stabbing and all of that and then he quickly got out his recorder or film camera which at the time it was like a whole ordeal to get one out so he managed to record the end of the whole story that this man was telling and in it you can hear him saying whatever you do do not tell the white spirits of the white spirit we killed they'll kill us they'll come back they'll send sickness to us yada yada again just another cherry on top of the huge cake that says he was probably eaten by the islanders but that can never be officially written down because it's all here saying stories however given how much that fits the fact they never found evidence and all of the compiling information of people there that it happened probably however it would be a miss if i did not tell you about my favorite theory from the entire thing in 2008 a documentary director known as fraser heston was doing work about the case of michael rockefeller while trying to find footage of the island to basically use as b-roll in the documentary he came across in a warehouse in england tons and tons of unused film from 1969 whenever a research crew went to the island and just began filming the natives after coming through about 10 hours of footage fraser came across this image in which eight years after michael disappeared onto the island you can see a shockingly white man in the middle of the indigenous tribe with the spear wearing the face paint performing part of their ritual which led many to believe that perhaps michael who was brought in by the tribe and not eden decided to become part of the people that he loved so much rather returning to the life that he saw as less back home everyone thought that this was michael so much that this image is still referred to as big michael and even though it was just caught for a quick second on a blurry side shot of a film from 1969 this still frame has given many people the hope that maybe michael made it and maybe he left the life of the sophistication to become a part of the people that he was so enamored with that or they ate him and then cooked his bones which either way he technically became a part of them either way that is the story of michael rockefeller and i hope you enjoyed and thank you so much for watching um what do i think i think he was almost definitely eaten by the cannibals because there's like there's those stories and a bunch of people on the island had said the story was passed down and it's like all that evidence saying this and then the one like screen cap saying that it wasn't but man i really hope so that would be so much sweeter if like everyone on the island was just covering for him and saying that they ate him when instead he's just living there and has been living there um which would be really nice but you know probably not it would also be kind of a jerk move to his family to just be like oh i got a sorry mom um but yeah i think it's a really interesting story i think it's cool well not cool i think it's interesting that despite happening to one of the most famous families in american history happening to the great grandson of the john rockefeller you never hear about it like until i came across this like one brief second of it in research i had never heard this story and it's such a wild story to not hear about so i wanted to bring it to you all i hope that you enjoyed if you stuck around this long thank you so much we're continuing to grow you guys are fantastic i'm getting ads i'm doing the youtube thing um and it's really cool and it's all thanks to you guys so sincerely thank you so much to what thank you so much for watching thank you to my subscribers we're around like 415 and the number is huge and i can't comprehend it but thank you so much for it thank you to my patrons thank you to my top tier patrons as you can see here um i can't do it without you guys you all keep me going i swear you do and it means the most so thank you all so much for that so i hope you all enjoyed um thank you for watching the video i don't believe i have anything else to say um no that should do it so there will be more videos that soon i got the big collaboration video coming uh so stay tuned for that not sure when it will be out as well as more as well as more iceberg stuff but i hope that you enjoyed i hope you have a good day thank you for watching and i will see you in the next one bye

Channel: Wendigoon

Views: 1,389,124

Rating: 4.9245963 out of 5

Keywords: iceberg, explained, scp, analysis, breakdown, scary, spooky, horror, creepy, comedy, funny, laugh, humor, cringe, intel, deep web, dark web, hidden, tier list, secret, top ten, top 10, countdown, compilation, meme, memes, meme compilation, internet horror, reddit, ask reddit, redacted, shopify, mortgage, insurance, car insurance, cheap insurance, cheap car insurance, childhood, trauma

Id: ulBDEDP1rCU

Length: 22min 12sec (1332 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/MenacingRocket19]

Dang, I feel bad for Michael Rockefeller, he swam 12 miles after his boat was flipped, only to be speared to death after making it to shore and his corpse used in different ways. 😔

[u/Scab_Thief]

Gives a literal meaning to "Eat the Rich"...