Both on the campaign trail and in the White House, President Joe Biden has regaled the American public with ever more eyebrow-raising anecdotes of his apparently storied life. His latest one: cannibals may have been responsible for the disappearance of his uncle during World War II.
During a campaign visit to Scranton, Pennsylvania, last week to talk to local steelworkers, the president brought up his uncle, 2nd Lt. Ambrose Finnegan, affectionately known as “Uncle Bosie.” Finnegan was serving in the Pacific theater of World War II when he and several of his crewmates went missing on May 14, 1944, after their flight from Los Negros Island to Nadzab Airfield in New Guinea crashed.
“He got shot down in New Guinea and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea,” Biden said during his speech. Biden had also repeated the story almost verbatim earlier that day during a visit to a WWII memorial in Scranton.
Of course, the Pentagon gives a slightly different account of Finnegan’s disappearance, stating that “For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea. Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard.”
“Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash,” the report continues. “One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. An aerial search the next day found no trace of the missing aircraft or the lost crew members.”
Like many of his other now-infamous tall tales about Corn Pop (he was a bad dude), getting arrested in South Africa while trying to see Nelson Mandela, and his ever-changing “honorary” membership in various ethnic groups, Biden’s suggestion that cannibals gobbled up his uncle may at first glance seem disrespectful, out-of-place, and even downright cockamamie.
But, out of all the other fables he’s told, this one actually may be the most plausible.
In fact, it wouldn’t be the first time a powerful American politician’s relative possibly ended up on the dinner menu of a New Guinean tribe.
Michael Rockefeller could have been anything he wanted. A scion of the extremely powerful Rockefeller family, he graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1960 with majors in history and economics.
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Michael’s father, Nelson Rockefeller, was a member of the extremely powerful Rockefeller family and one of the most influential Republican politicians of the mid-20th century. After getting his start during the Franklin Roosevelt administration, Nelson served as Undersecretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Dwight Eisenhower. He then served as governor of New York from 1959 to 1973, unsuccessfully ran for the GOP presidential nomination three times (in 1960, ’64, and ’68), and became vice president under Gerald Ford.
A whole wing of the Republican Party, the “Rockefeller Republicans,” was named after him. Rockefeller’s followers represented the more liberal faction of the party and held sway primarily in the Northeast during the 1950s and ’60s. By the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the Rockefeller Republicans had lost most of their influence within the party.
Michael became fascinated by primitive art after he was appointed at age 19 to the board of a new museum his father had just opened — the Museum of Primitive Art in New York City. Almost immediately after graduation from college, he joined a Harvard-sponsored expedition to a remote part of New Guinea, during which he acted as a sound recordist for a documentary about the Dani tribe. He also made a foray into a remote part of southern New Guinea alongside an anthropologist to study the Asmat people. The two visited over a dozen villages and collected hundreds of cultural items.
Upon his return from that expedition, Michael planned a new one to more thoroughly document the tribe’s culture and bring back even more pieces of their art for the museum.
At the time of Michael’s first expedition, the Asmat people of southwestern New Guinea had little contact with the outside world and survived without iron, paper, roads, and other technologies. They were also well-known headhunters, and cannibalism was practiced largely as a ritual to gain the power of fallen enemies. Ritual cannibalism was practiced by several other remote New Guinean tribes for centuries, perhaps millennia.
During the second expedition on November 18, 1961, Michael, Dutch anthropologist Rene Wassing, and two native guides set out on a makeshift raft to sail down the coast to collect more artifacts. Though Michael had previously used the craft to travel on the nearby river, it proved to be unseaworthy and the raft capsized a few miles offshore. The two natives decided to swim to shore to get help, and Michael and Wassing spent the night on the capsized raft.
Unbeknownst to them, the natives had successfully reached shore and alerted a nearby Dutch station. However, the search party dispatched by the Dutch failed to find the raft and turned back.
By morning, they had drifted very far from shore, around 10-12 miles according to most reports. Michael decided to try to make the swim to shore, despite the distance. He strapped empty gas cans to his back to keep himself afloat and set out. It was the last time Michael was seen alive. He was 23-years-old.
A Dutch patrol found Wassing still adrift later in the day on the 19th, but the only trace ever found of Michael after an extensive government search was a single gas can.
Rumors that Michael had reached shore and fallen prey to the Asmat headhunters began almost immediately. The Rockefeller family has always maintained the official cause of death: drowning.
American journalist Carl Hoffman published a book in 2014 about the disappearance, and he alleged that Michael was indeed killed and eaten by cannibals. Hoffman reported that the Dutch colonial government at the time had attempted to crack down on headhunting and cannibalism in the region, resulting in the deaths of several natives. He theorized that Michael may have been killed in revenge. Hoffman also claimed that several natives had told him that a man matching Michael’s description had been killed and eaten, but no hard evidence has ever surfaced.
Of course, there are plenty of alternate explanations for Michael’s presumed death. He may have drowned during the long swim to shore, succumbed to heat exposure, or he may have been attacked by a shark or saltwater crocodile (known maneaters). He may have made it to shore but became lost or unable to reach help before succumbing to the elements. We’ll probably never know exactly what fate befell the young man, but it’s technically a possibility that he was killed or his dead body was cannibalized by natives.
Admittedly, it’s highly unlikely either Michael Rockefeller or “Uncle Bosie” ended up as a snack for some New Guinean tribesmen, but there’s enough of a kernel of plausibility to make it one of Biden’s more believable yarns.