intresting article on wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_mysteriously_disappeared



2007

Jim Gray (63), database pioneer, Microsoft Research scientist, and Turing Award winner, left San Francisco Bay in his 12 m (39 ft) sailboat Tenacious to scatter his mother's ashes at the Farallon Islands, a wildlife refuge 43 km (27 mi) away, and was reported missing when he failed to return later the same day. No Mayday call was heard, his distress radiobeacon was not activated, and, despite one of the most ambitious search and rescue missions of all time, no trace of Gray or his yacht has ever been found.[105]
Kaz II, a 9.8 m (32 ft) catamaran, was found adrift with its three-man crew, owner Derek Batten (56) and brothers Peter Tunstead (69) and James Tunstead (63), missing. The yacht's sails were up and its engine running, and the global positioning system showed the yacht had been drifting since around the time of their last known radio contact, about 11 hours after they departed Shute Harbour for Townsville, Queensland, five days earlier.[106]
Madeleine McCann (3) disappeared after being left unsupervised in the unlocked ground-floor bedroom of her family's rented holiday apartment in the Algarve (Portugal) while her parents dined with friends at a local restaurant; there have been no confirmed sightings of her since then.[107]

The mods on Wikipedia are like bloody rottweilers where the McCanns are concerned, anything not sympathetic gets whooshed PDQ. Somebody's obviously found a sneaky way round it.