Member Since: 2/2/2014
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There was an Australian Prime Minister who disappeared while swimming at the beach in the 60's and they never found his body, the popular theory is he got abducted by aliens.
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On the morning of Sunday 17 December 1967, Holt together with friends Christopher Anderson, Jan Lee and George Illson and his two bodyguards, drove down from Melbourne to see the British yachtsman Alec Rose sail through Port Phillip Heads in his boat Lively Lady to complete a leg of his solo circumnavigation of the globe, which started and ended in England. Around noon, the party drove to one of Holt's favourite swimming and snorkelling spots, Cheviot Beach on Point Nepean near Portsea, on the eastern arm of Port Phillip Bay. Holt decided to go swimming, although the surf was heavy and Cheviot Beach was notorious for its strong currents and dangerous rip tides.
Ignoring his friends' pleas not to go in, Holt began swimming, but soon disappeared from view. Fearing the worst, his friends raised the alert. Within a short time, the beach and the water off shore were being searched by a large contingent of police, Royal Australian Navy divers, Royal Australian Air Force helicopters, Army personnel from nearby Point Nepean and local volunteers. This quickly escalated into one of the largest search operations in Australian history,[6] but no trace of Holt could be found.
Two days later, on 19 December 1967, the government made an official announcement that Holt was presumed dead. The Governor-General Lord Casey sent for the Country Party leader and Coalition Deputy Prime Minister John McEwen, and he was sworn in as caretaker Prime Minister until such time as the Liberals elected a new leader.
Holt was a strong swimmer and an experienced skindiver, with what Holt's biographer Tom Frame describes as "incredible powers of endurance underwater". However, his health was evidently far from perfect at the time of his death — he had collapsed in Parliament earlier in the year, apparently suffering from a "vitamin deficiency", and this had raised fears among some senior Liberals that he might have a heart condition.
In September 1967, Holt had suffered a recurrence of an old shoulder injury, which reportedly caused him agonising pain, and for this he was prescribed strong painkillers. He ignored recent advice from his doctor Marcus de Laune Faunce not to play tennis or swim until the shoulder healed and reportedly obtained a prescription for morphine from another doctor. Tom Frame also records that Holt had already got into trouble twice while skindiving earlier in 1967 — on the first occasion, while snorkeling at Portsea in May, he got into severe difficulties because of a leaking snorkel and had to be pulled from the water by friends, gasping for breath, blue in the face, and vomiting seawater.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Holt
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