The Mystery of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Disappearance: 80 Years of Unanswered Questions

On July 31, it was 80 years since the death of the famous writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, Vicomte de Saint-Exupéry) during a combat mission. He was born in 1900 into a Provençal aristocratic family. After learning to fly in private courses, he joined one of the fighter units of the French Air Force in the early 1920s. However, he quickly left the military, tried a quiet office job, and published his first literary works. But Exupéry could not live long without aviation – in 1926, he started working as a pilot on airmail routes. The job involved considerable risk: due to the imperfections of the aircraft at that time and difficult weather conditions, he repeatedly crashed and sustained serious injuries.

With the outbreak of World War II, Exupéry returned to military service. During the German invasion of France in 1940, he flew the Bloch MB.174 in a reconnaissance squadron. After his country's defeat, he lived in the United States and Canada. But in the spring of 1943, he arrived in Algeria and joined the "Fighting France" movement. He was already nearly 43 years old, and the effects of old injuries were taking their toll, but Exupéry managed to retrain on the American-made P-38 Lightning aircraft and then gained the right to fly combat missions.

Flying an unarmed P-38F-5B reconnaissance plane, he completed 8 successful missions. On July 31, 1944, Exupéry took off from an airfield in Corsica for another reconnaissance over Southern France. Since then, the famous writer was never seen again – he disappeared without a trace.

For a long time, Exupéry's fate remained unknown. Only in September 1998 did fishermen accidentally pull up his silver identity bracelet from the sea. Two years later, a special search expedition began, and by October 2003, divers managed to recover various fragments of Exupéry's plane from the seabed. Some of these were displayed in the Air and Space Museum in Le Bourget. No remains of the pilot were found, nor were there any traces of bullets or shells on the wreckage (which is not surprising, as only part of the plane was recovered). The exact cause of the iconic writer's death remains unknown.

In 2008, former Luftwaffe pilot Horst Rippert claimed that he had shot down Exupéry. However, no other sources confirm this claim, and the mystery of the "Little Prince" author's death remains unsolved.