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I lobbied the Nautilus expedition via a third party and social media to take a look at Orona. My contact says that the idea was mentioned in early planning but never was included in any expedition operations. Very low chance that it will be included. I remain hopeful.

The Nautilus has been at Nikumaroro for 6 days of exploration. The ship has AIS data turned off but you can see infrequent satellite position report at vesselfinder.com. Just expand the map around the Phoenix Islands; the blue dot is the Nautilus and the pink is a sailing yacht that provides for the land based explorers.

My observation of the ships movement so far indicates they have covered most of the island reef shelf and has not lingered for any extended period of time at one location; indicates to me nothing of significance has been located. I hope Nautilus/Ballard and crew can review all the options. I hate to see them go home empty handed.
 
Coconut crabs play a key role in TIGHAR’s hypothesis about what happened to Amelia Earhart after she and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937, on the third-to-last leg of their world flight. The group posits that when Earhart and Noonan couldn’t find Howland, the Pacific island they were aiming for, the aviators landed instead on Nikumaroro. That island, then called Gardner, is surrounded by a reef that could serve as a rough runway. Eventually, the theory goes, Noonan died, the plane floated off the reef, and Earhart was left alone on the island.

Except for the crabs.

coconut-crab-trash-can.jpg


By 1940, the British had established a colony on the island. That year, Gerald Gallagher, the island’s colonial administrator, sent a telegram telling his superiors that a partial human skeleton had been found “which is just possibly that of Amelia Earhardt [sic].” The bones—13 in total—were sent to Fiji to be examined, and subsequently lost.

There are 206 bones in an adult human skeleton—what happened to the 193 that weren’t found? Evidence points to the coconut crabs, who have earned their nickname “robber crabs.” When Gallagher described the site of the discovery he said that “coconut crabs had scattered many bones.” The omnivorous crabs will eat coconuts (of course), fallen fruit, birds, rodents, other crabs—and carrion.

TIGHAR has performed several experiments to see if the crabs would drag bones back to their burrows. In one, they brought a pig carcass to the island and filmed what happened to it. Crabs—coconut crabs plus the smaller, more numerous strawberry hermit crabs—swarmed the body, removing most of the flesh within two weeks.

A year after the experiment they discovered some bones had been dragged 60 feet from the body, but they couldn’t account for all of the remains.

King thinks it’s likely that Earhart perished on the island as a castaway. After she died, the crabs consumed her body and dragged her bones into their burrows—except of course for the thirteen that Gallagher discovered.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/08/colossal-crabs-hold-clue-amelia-earhart-fate/

maximus otter
 
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It seems that the Ladies and Gentlemen on this Forum have not seen or read this website:

DNS error results from the originally posted version of the URL. The correct URL is:

https://earhartsearchpng.com

It describes the project to re-locate aircraft wreckage seen by an Australian Army patrol in jungle terrain in 1945.
Takes a while to read it through all the chapters and contains written evidence pointing to the ownership of the wreckage.

Vinedodger...
 
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Well that particular site is apparently new to me, but I've seen the story about the find in the jungle. I took a quick look just now, but the connection does not seem any more plausible now than it did when I read about it some years ago. The whole two-way trip thing seems particularly far fetched to me.

There are many stories similar to this one, including the one in which a group of US Marines (if memory serves) were ordered to douse the Electra with gasoline and burn it in the aftermath of the war. I wonder if anyone has bothered to catalogue all the various "solutions" to the mystery that have sprung up over the last 80 years.
 
Well that particular site is apparently new to me, but I've seen the story about the find in the jungle. ...

I, too, recall reading and discussing the hypothesis that the Electra turned back and crashed somewhere in the jungle in the PNG area. However, I can't find any trace of it here on these forums. It must have been on another site ...
 
Out of curiosity, I opened my Google Maps and zoomed into Palmyra Atoll.
It was easy enough to find the aircraft, which is, I suppose, more or less the right light metallic colour.
The wing shape does't look quite right though and there seems to be the hint of some light insignia on both wings (like the WW2 star motif?).
More importantly, although the island is uninhabited, during WW2 an airstrip was built and this aircraft appears to be close to the Western end of the airstrip. Seems to me far more likely to be a wartime aircraft that misjudged its landing and spun off into the trees, than Earhart's Electra.

Lockheed.JPG
 
Out of curiosity, I opened my Google Maps and zoomed into Palmyra Atoll.
It was easy enough to find the aircraft, which is, I suppose, more or less the right light metallic colour.
The wing shape does't look quite right though and there seems to be the hint of some light insignia on both wings (like the WW2 star motif?).
More importantly, although the island is uninhabited, during WW2 an airstrip was built and this aircraft appears to be close to the Western end of the airstrip. Seems to me far more likely to be a wartime aircraft that misjudged its landing and spun off into the trees, than Earhart's Electra.

View attachment 20182
Yes. I'd have thought that some visitor on the ground would have seen it at some point. That airstrip must have been used in recent years, otherwise it would be grown over by now.
 
Out of curiosity, I opened my Google Maps and zoomed into Palmyra Atoll.
It was easy enough to find the aircraft, which is, I suppose, more or less the right light metallic colour.
The wing shape does't look quite right though and there seems to be the hint of some light insignia on both wings (like the WW2 star motif?).
More importantly, although the island is uninhabited, during WW2 an airstrip was built and this aircraft appears to be close to the Western end of the airstrip. Seems to me far more likely to be a wartime aircraft that misjudged its landing and spun off into the trees, than Earhart's Electra.

View attachment 20182
To my amazement, this seems to be shoddy journalism from the Express </heavy sarcasm>. 5 minutes' googling tells me that the plane in question is a Lockheed Model 18 Lodestar which crashed in 1980 as it was ferrying a group of radio hams to the island. Thankfully, there were no fatalities.

Photograph source

Lockeed on Palmyra.jpg
There's a much more interesting story about Palmyra without having to shoehorn Earhart into the place.
 
To my amazement, this seems to be shoddy journalism from the Express </heavy sarcasm>. 5 minutes' googling tells me that the plane in question is a Lockheed Model 18 Lodestar which crashed in 1980 as it was ferrying a group of radio hams to the island. Thankfully, there were no fatalities.

Photograph source

View attachment 20183
There's a much more interesting story about Palmyra without having to shoehorn Earhart into the place.

Well spotted! Well it was a Lockheed I suppose.
 
Your picture is all smudges.

How can you identify the bits so positivley?
 
Your picture is all smudges.

How can you identify the bits so positivley?

A picture that's smudged is exactly what is expected of an aircraft underwater for 80+ years and covered with sand, algae, and all sorts of marine growth. I can be positive about the major components of the airframe because the Google Earth measurements match that of the missing L10E aircraft. The measurements and methods of analysis can be reviewed at https://aquariusradar.com/AmeliaEarhartsplane.html or one can go to PacificWrecks-forum plane in the lagoon at Orona for more discussion. If you have GE on our computer you can go to that location I initially posted and make measurements yourself. I would welcome any results you get and post here.
 
Is it just my wary mind or is anyone else put off by the blog name?
 
I work for an Aviation company and once had my office in a building that supposedly had an Amelia Earhart conference room. Unfortunately, I could never find it. ;)
That joke reminds me of the chap who went on Stars in Their Eyes: "Tonight, I'm going to be Glenn Miller."

He walked off into the fog and was never seen again.

For those who don't know: it's a talent show where the contestants dress as and impersonate famous artists. They introduce themselves, say, "Tonight I'm going to be..." and walk off stage through some dry ice fog to get changed/made up before performing.
 
Having been suspicious, I wonder what might happen to a foreigner who innocently stumbled upon something suspicious in a strange country in the late 30s....
 
Having been suspicious, I wonder what might happen to a foreigner who innocently stumbled upon something suspicious in a strange country in the late 30s....


or got a bit lost and ditched their plane into the sea having run out of fuel? Mind you some people reckon Amy Johnson was shot down.
 
Scientists at Penn State University have a new plan to help unearth clues about Amelia Earhart’s doomed flight around the world—and it involves a nuclear reactor.

On July 2, 1937, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were en route to Howland Island in the Pacific, about 1,700 miles southwest of Honolulu. They were six weeks and 20,000 miles deep into their trip around the world.

But Earhart and Noonan never made it to Howland. Somewhere along the way, Earhart’s Lockheed Model 10-E Electra [was lost] in the middle of the ocean. No one knows exactly what happened next.

People have long searched for any sign of the Electra in a huge swath of the Pacific Ocean, and there’s an entire cottage industry of Earhart theories and hoaxes out there. Skeletons, crabs, firsthand accounts of people who might be Earhart, and even suspected pieces of debris emerge and are considered in the public eye.

That includes one particular piece of metal that enthusiast Ric Gillespie found in 1991 in a location 300 miles from Howland Island.

Daniel Beck, the manager of the engineering program for the Penn State Radiation Science and Engineering Center (RSEC), invited Gillespie and the famous piece of metal to the university. Beck told Gillespie they could try to [perform neutron radiography on the sample.]

Using some of the reactor’s neutron beams, which operate like an X-ray, Beck’s laboratory can see trace amounts of things like paint that have worn off to the naked eye.

“A sample is set in front of the neutron beam, and a digital imaging plate is placed behind the sample,” Penn State says in a statement. “The neutron beam passes through the sample into the imaging plate, and an image is recorded and digitally scanned.”

In this case, the Penn State scientists can also study the edges of the patch to backform a story of how the patch was removed. One side of the patch, they say, appears to have axe marks. If so, the neutron beam can identify any scrapes of axe material that could be left.

The other edge, which appears to have been wiggled back and forth until it snapped off, likely wouldn’t have any trace metals. The patch will likely take months more to study in detail.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a35492760/amelia-earhart-disappearance-nuclear-reactor/

maximus otter
 
Maximus Otter said "People have long searched for any sign of the Electra in a huge swath of the Pacific Ocean....."

I consider this image a "sign of the Electra". Does anyone else think so?
Oronaraftandplane2.png
 
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