At 10am on July 2, 1937, precisely 88 years ago, the following happened:
An overloaded plane, 5,000lbs over its normal weight, rumbled down a grass runway.
Observers at the airport thought the plane had actually fallen down the cliff at the end of the runway, but a few moments later, the plane reappeared, apparently airborne, and gradually rose up into the clouds.
Aboard, there were only two passengers: a navigator, named Fred Noonan, and the most famous female aviatress of all time, Amelia Earheart.
Earheart and Noonan were completing the final leg of their round-the-world flight, crossing the Pacific from Melanesia back to the U.S.. If successful, Earheart would become the first woman to fly all the way around the world.
But Earheart and Noonan never made it to the next stop. Some 20 hours later, also on July 2 (thanks to crossing the international date line), they disappeared somewhere over the Pacific, never to be heard from or seen again.
Except… maybe they were heard from or seen again?
A woman in Texas picked up an SOS radio transmission the next day, in which she heard a woman who claimed to be Earheart, and a man groaning in background. The two were supposedly stranded on an uninhabited island in the Pacific.
Then again, a Japanese woman on the island of Saipan claimed she had personally witnessed Earheart and Noonan, following their crash on the island, being executed by the Imperial Japanese Army.
There were also claims that Earheart was captured but not executed by the Japanese. In this scenario, she was forced to work as Tokyo Rose, an English-speaking radio broadcaster used to spread Japanese propaganda during WWII.
And finally, there was the theory that Earheart completed her flight as planned but immediately chose to go into obscurity, only to reappear years later as a New Jersey banker.
All in all, around 100 books have been written about Earheart and what really happened to her.
Organizations and well-funded expeditions have been established to really get to the bottom of it.
Numerous TV shows and documentaries have tried to shine light on the mystery. I’m surprised Angelina Jolie never made a movie about Earheart.
Now I think you will agree with me, because I happen to be right about the matter, that none of this would have happened had Earheart simply crashed and burned in a certain death, or had she even managed to complete her round the world tour as expected.
There’s something about the mystery of not knowing what really happened, a lack of closure, which drives intense attention or even obsession, which cannot be created in any other way.
If you have basic knowledge of copywriting, you are familiar with this human quirk, and you probably even exploit it via “open loops” in your copy.
What you might not be familiar with is the underlying neurology of why we feel the need for closure so strongly, or how the same neurology can be exploited by magicians (if you ever hear a magician tell a corny joke, that’s why), by negotiators (Jim Camp’s advice to “negotiate in the bathroom”) or by hypnotists (to perform a rapid induction that gets 5 weeks’ worth of hypnosis down into 3 minutes).
If any of that sounds intriguing to you, take a look at Commandment X of my new 10 Commandments book, waiting patiently for you here: