Bottle fragments and new revelations about old radio signals have scientists and historians hoping to finally solve the mystery of what happened to Amelia Earhart.
The legendary American aviator and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared on July 2, 1937, during an attempt to circle the globe.
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, better known as TIGHAR, plans to lead an expedition next month in search of the remnants of Earhart’s Lockheed Martin 10E Special Electra plane. The group detailed their research and plans to scour an area off the reef of Nikumaroro, formerly Gardner Island, a small atoll in the Republic of Kiribati, at a conference in Arlington this weekend.
For now there are only bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence — like a broken bottle found on the island that could have held anti-freckle cream popular in the 1930s. The most promising physical evidence so far is a Plexiglas window that seems to fit Earhart’s plane, said Richard Pyle, who has covered efforts to uncover the Earhart mystery for The Associated Press.
In the days following Earhart’s disappearance, people reported hundreds of radio messages from Earhart. Though many of these were likely not from her, some probably were — suggesting she survived her landing, TIGHAR Executive Director Ric Gillepsie told the group at the conference.
Nothing short of definitive evidence is going to convince Tom Crouch, the senior curator of aeronautics at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, that Earhart and Noonan didn’t run out of fuel and plummet to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
“What would convince me that she was [a castaway on Nikumaroro] would be something that you could directly connect to her,” he explained. “If you found a piece of an airplane with a serial number on it that you could connect to her airplane, that would do it.”
DNA-based proof from human remains would also work, he said. “I don’t think these guys are going to find anything like that.”
But even small archaeological clues about what Earhart’s life might have been like as a castaway hold value, Gillepsie told the group on Saturday.
“If it’s true that she died — lived and died — as a castaway on Gardner Island, it’s a whole chapter of her life, and the last chapter of her life, a fairly heroic one that’s never been known and needs to be known,” he said.
And even self-proclaimed skeptics like Crouch find it hard to tear away from one of the great mysteries of the 20th century.
“This is a romantic story. This is an adventure story. This is the stuff of fiction,” Pyle said. “But it’s real.”
