Australia is home to some pretty wild unsolved mysteries. I’d know, because I’m the co-host of PEDESTRIAN.TV‘s Australian unsolved mysteries podcast, All Aussie Mystery Hour. (If you haven’t listened to it yet, get amongst it below.) But the wildest mystery of them all has got to be the Harold Holt disappearance – yep, that time our actual Prime Minister just upped and vanished off the face of the planet.
Yep, I’m obviously talking about our 17th Prime Minister, Harold Holt, who exactly 51 years ago today, on December 17, 1967 went for a swim off Cheviot Beach on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula and suddenly disappeared from sight.
Despite an extensive search — at one point involving around 350 Australian Navy and police personnel, making it one of the biggest search and rescue operations in our country’s history — no trace of Holt has ever been found.
He was 59 years old and had been PM for just under two years.
Of course, since he disappeared into thin air there have been plenty of zany theories as to what happened. Did he drown? (Probably, but that’s not as fun as the others.) Was he a spy? Did he fake his own death? Is he still alive, hanging out somewhere laughing at all of us, wondering who the hell Fatman Scoop is and why he keeps being mentioned by Scott Morrison?
We go into it all in the latest ep of All Aussie Mystery Hour (except not the ScoMo bit because boring), including the events leading up to Holt’s disappearance, the immediate aftermath, and all the batshit theories that ensued.
To hear the entire episode, and plenty of other weird homegrown puzzlers, subscribe on iTunes HERE, or on Spotify HERE. Or, you can just listen / download below.
