# The brilliant Italian physicist Ettore Majorana vanished in March 1938 after leaving cryptic notes, a disappearance that has never been resolved and remains the subject of competing theories

**No verdict.** One fact is beyond dispute: Ettore Majorana, one of the most gifted theoretical physicists of his generation, boarded a night ferry between Naples and Palermo in late March 1938 and was never reliably seen again. What is unproven is everything after that, because no body was ever found and no single account has been confirmed. This file separates the documented core, a real disappearance preceded by cryptic letters and telegrams, from the competing explanations that have grown around it: suicide at sea, withdrawal into a monastery, or a deliberate escape into a new life abroad. In 2015 the Rome prosecutor's office closed a long-reopened inquiry with the view that Majorana had likely been alive in Venezuela between 1955 and 1959, living under another name; that is an official conclusion of an archived case, not a proven identification, and it is reported here as exactly that. The site asserts none of the theories. The honest rating is that Majorana vanished and the reason has never been established.

Category: Unsolved Crimes & Disappearances · Era: 1930s · First circulated: Within days of the March 1938 disappearance, when Majorana's family, his Naples colleague Antonio Carrelli, and the police began searching and the first explanations, suicide or a religious retreat, started to circulate · Believed by: That Majorana disappeared in 1938 is universally accepted. Beyond that, biographers, physicists, and Italian investigators divide between the suicide reading, the monastery reading, and the escape-abroad reading, none of which has ever been confirmed.
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/ettore-majorana-disappearance

## Summary
Ettore Majorana was a Sicilian theoretical physicist whom Enrico Fermi ranked with Galileo and Newton, a member of the Via Panisperna group in Rome and the author of the 1937 paper that gives its name to the Majorana fermion, a particle that is its own antiparticle. In late March 1938, newly installed as a professor in Naples, he withdrew his accumulated salary, took his passport, and boarded a ferry to Palermo, sending his director an unsettling letter about an inevitable decision, then a telegram appearing to retract it. He seems to have taken a return ferry toward Naples, and after that the trail goes cold. No body was recovered. In the decades since, the case has been read as a suicide, as a retreat into monastic seclusion, and as a staged vanishing into exile, most concretely in Venezuela. This file reports the documented disappearance and lays out the competing theories side by side, endorsing none.

## The claim
That Ettore Majorana did not simply die by accident in 1938 but deliberately disappeared, engineering his own vanishing for reasons he hinted at in cryptic notes, and that he may have gone on to live for years afterward under an assumed identity, most often placed in a monastery or in South America.

## Origin and timeline
- 1906-08-05: Ettore Majorana is born in Catania, Sicily, into a prominent family. He shows prodigious mathematical talent early and, in the late 1920s, joins Enrico Fermi's group of young physicists in Rome, the so-called Via Panisperna boys.
- 1932: Majorana reportedly works out the existence of a neutral nuclear particle, anticipating the neutron, but characteristically declines to publish; James Chadwick's discovery is credited that same year. Fermi later describes Majorana as a once-in-a-century genius, comparing him to Galileo and Newton.
- 1937: Majorana publishes 'A Symmetrical Theory of the Electron and Positron,' introducing what becomes known as the Majorana fermion, a particle identical to its own antiparticle. On the strength of his reputation he is appointed professor of theoretical physics at Naples without the usual competition.
- 1938-03-25: In Naples, Majorana withdraws the salary he had let accumulate and takes his passport. He leaves a letter for Antonio Carrelli, director of the physics institute, speaking of a decision that has become inevitable, and boards an evening ferry bound for Palermo.
- 1938-03-26: From Palermo, Majorana sends Carrelli a telegram and a follow-up letter that appear to walk back the earlier note, with the line often rendered as 'the sea has rejected me,' saying he will return to Naples. He is believed to have boarded a return ferry that evening.
- 1938-03: Majorana fails to arrive or reappear in Naples. His family launches an urgent search, appealing to the authorities and reportedly to Mussolini himself; police inquiries and a reward yield no confirmed sighting. No body is ever recovered from the sea.
- 1938: Two early explanations take hold almost at once: that he drowned, by accident or by suicide, on the crossing, and that he withdrew deliberately into seclusion, possibly a religious retreat, a reading his own family is said to have found plausible given his temperament.
- 1975: The Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia publishes 'La scomparsa di Majorana,' arguing that Majorana chose to disappear, and floating the idea that a man of his conscience may have fled the coming physics of the bomb; the book fixes the mystery in the public imagination.
- 2008: An Italian emigrant, Francesco Fasani, tells the RAI television program 'Chi l'ha visto?' that he knew Majorana in Venezuela in the 1950s, where the physicist supposedly lived under the name Bini. His account, a photograph, and a postcard prompt Italian magistrates to reopen the case.
- 2015-02: The Rome prosecutor's office closes the reopened inquiry, stating there is reason to believe Majorana was alive and living in Venezuela, at Valencia, at least between 1955 and 1959. The file is archived; the conclusion is an official view, not a confirmed identification.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: Majorana genuinely disappeared in 1938 and was never reliably seen again.
  Evidence: This is the settled core. He left Naples by ferry in late March 1938, sent letters and telegrams that survive, and did not reappear in his known life. His family searched, the police investigated, and no confirmed sighting of him in his own identity was ever recorded again. Whatever the explanation, the disappearance itself is a documented fact, not a rumor.
- Claim: The notes he left prove he intended to kill himself.
  Evidence: The letters are unsettling but ambiguous, which is why they anchor several readings rather than one. The first note to Carrelli speaks of an inevitable decision and of the trouble his disappearance will cause; the next day's telegram and letter appear to retract it and announce a return. Read together, they can support suicide, but they equally support a change of mind or a staged exit. The texts do not settle the question, and treating them as a clear suicide note goes beyond what they say.
- Claim: The way he prepared, taking his passport and all his money, points away from a simple suicide.
  Evidence: This is one of the strongest arguments for a deliberate vanishing. Majorana withdrew salary he had previously never bothered to collect and carried his passport, preparations that fit a planned departure better than an impulsive death. It is genuinely suggestive. It is not proof: a person intending suicide can also settle affairs, and the passport and cash were never traced to any confirmed later use. The detail deepens the mystery rather than resolving it.
- Claim: He retreated into a monastery and lived out his life in religious seclusion.
  Evidence: The monastic theory rests on Majorana's Jesuit schooling and reclusive character, and on reports that he approached religious houses around the time he vanished. Sciascia and others gave it currency, and it remains one of the serious readings. But no monastery has ever produced a verified record of him, and the often-quoted line from a friar, that what matters is only that the man is at peace, is suggestive atmosphere, not documentation. The theory is plausible and unproven.
- Claim: He escaped abroad and lived for years in South America under another name.
  Evidence: This is the reading the Rome inquiry ultimately favored. It draws on Francesco Fasani's testimony, a 1955 photograph said to show Majorana in Venezuela as a man named Bini, and a postcard from Majorana's uncle reportedly taken from that man's car. Italian forensic examiners judged the photographed face consistent with Majorana's. The prosecutors found it persuasive enough to close the case on that basis, but photographic likeness and a secondhand account fall short of an identification, and the man in the photo was never independently confirmed to be Majorana.
- Claim: The 2015 closure of the case means the mystery is officially solved.
  Evidence: It does not, and the distinction matters. The Rome prosecutor's office archived the inquiry with the view that Majorana had likely been alive in Venezuela between 1955 and 1959. That is a decision to close an investigation, expressing a prosecutor's assessment, not a court's proven finding or a confirmed forensic match. No remains, no confessed identity, and no unbroken documentary chain establish it. It is the most concrete official statement in the file, and it is still, properly, an assessment rather than a resolution.
- Claim: His scientific brilliance makes a dramatic explanation more likely than a mundane one.
  Evidence: His genius is real and well attested; Fermi's comparison to Galileo and Newton is a matter of record, and the Majorana fermion remains an active idea in physics. But brilliance is not evidence about a manner of disappearance. The romantic pull of a genius who foresaw the bomb and chose to vanish, a theme Sciascia developed, is a reason the story endures, not a reason to prefer any particular ending. The physics and the mystery are separate questions.

## Why people believe it
- The setup reads like fiction. A generational genius, cryptic letters, a night crossing, no body: the raw facts already have the shape of a mystery, so the mind reaches for an authored ending rather than the blank of an unrecorded death at sea.
- The physical clues cut against the simplest story. Withdrawing untouched savings and carrying a passport are the acts of someone going somewhere, which makes the plain-drowning explanation feel incomplete and invites the theory that he engineered his own exit.
- A great writer shaped the legend. Leonardo Sciascia's 1975 book turned the case into a meditation on conscience and the coming atomic age, giving the disappearance a moral narrative that a mere accident could never carry, and fixing it in the culture.
- An official inquiry appeared to endorse the escape. When the Rome prosecutors closed the case pointing to Venezuela, it gave the most cinematic theory, a physicist living on in secret exile, the weight of a state document, which many read as confirmation rather than assessment.

## Open questions
- No body was ever recovered, and no death was ever registered. The absence of remains is the void at the center of the case: it neither proves he survived nor rules out a drowning whose evidence the sea simply carried away.
- The letters remain genuinely ambiguous. The inevitable-decision note and the next-day retraction can be squared with suicide, with a change of heart, or with a deliberately misleading trail, and the surviving texts do not decide between them.
- The Venezuela identification was never closed to certainty. The photograph, the postcard, and Fasani's account persuaded the prosecutors, but the man called Bini was never independently and conclusively shown to be Majorana, so the strongest survival lead stops short of proof.
- The monastery theory has never been confirmed or definitively excluded. Reports that Majorana sought out religious houses persist, yet no verified monastic record of him has surfaced, leaving that reading exactly where it has sat for decades: possible, undocumented.

## Sources
- Ettore Majorana: genius and mystery, CERN Courier (2006): https://cerncourier.com/a/ettore-majorana-genius-and-mystery/
- The mysterious disappearance of Ettore Majorana, Journal of Physics: Conference Series (IOP Science) (2009): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/173/1/012019/pdf
- 1938 disappearance physicist Majorana 'alive 1955-59', ANSA (2015): https://www.ansa.it/english/news/science_tecnology/2015/02/04/majorana-alive-1955-59-update_81753c22-b5e6-40a8-a8c0-ca0b323a5823.html
- L'eterno giallo della scomparsa di Majorana, 'andò in Venezuela', AGI (Agenzia Italia) (2015): https://www.agi.it/dalla-redazione/news/2015-02-05/l_eterno_giallo_della_scomparsa_di_majorana_ando_in_venezuela_-373164/
- Ettore Majorana: The genius theoretical physicist who disappeared without a trace, IFLScience (2023): https://www.iflscience.com/ettore-majorana-the-genius-physicist-who-predicted-neutrons-and-then-disappeared-completely-68189
- The Disappearance of Ettore Majorana: The Vanishing Physicist, Discovery UK: https://www.discoveryuk.com/mysteries/the-disappearance-of-ettore-majorana-the-vanishing-physicist/
- Enigmatic Wisps (on Ettore Majorana), American Scientist: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/enigmatic-wisps
- Ettore Majorana and his heritage seventy years later, arXiv (0803.3602) (2008): https://arxiv.org/pdf/0803.3602
- Ettore Majorana, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Majorana

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/ettore-majorana-disappearance