Michael Rockefeller claims, no remains or other proof of his death have ever been discovered. Rockefeller was the fifth and last child of Mary Todhunter Rockefeller and Nelson Rockefeller. He was the third son of seven children fathered by Nelson Rockefeller, and he had a twin sister, Mary. After attending The Buckley School in New York, and graduating from the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he was a student senator and exceptional varsity wrestler, Rockefeller graduated "cum laude" from Harvard University with a B.A. in history and economics. In 1960, he served for six months as a private in the
John Sterling Rockefeller Yale University, where he was a member of the Scroll and Key Society. He graduated from Yale in 1928. In July 1928 Rockefeller, his Yale classmate Charles B. G. Murphy, and the Canadian collector and taxidermist Allan Moses went to Africa on an ornithological expedition to collect specimens for the American Museum of Natural History. The survey was funded by a grant of approximately $150,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation. The main goal of the expedition was to find and collect the rare Grauer's broadbill, which was known only by one 1908 specimen in the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum in England,