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Amelia Earhart was the most celebrated aviatrix in history and was one of the most famous women of her time.
As America's charismatic “Lady of the Air,” she set many aviation records, including becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic in 1928 as a passenger, the first woman (and second person after Lindbergh) to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932, and the first person to fly alone across the Pacific, from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Oakland, California, in 1935. In an era when men dominated aviation, she was truly a pioneer.

Amelia Mary Earhart was born on July 24, 1897 in Atchison, Kansas. During her early years, she was constantly hampered by lack of funds and worked at a variety of jobs to fulfill her desire to fly. She held positions as a teacher, nursing assistant, photographer, secretary, and social worker. Earhart even bought a truck and hauled gravel to earn money to buy a plane.

AE, as she was called by her friends, was a modern woman. She was courageous, independent, and had a strong social conscience. She fought for international peace, equality for women, the advancement of women in aviation, and the viability of commercial aviation. During her lifetime, she was a role model to millions of people whom she motivated and encouraged through her actions.

In 1937, Earhart attempted to become the first person ever to fly around the world at its longest point—the equator—a challenging trip of 29,000 mi.. She intended this feat to be the last record-setting flight of her legendary career. It was to be her swan song. Amelia was accompanied on the trip by a highly experienced navigator, Frederick J. Noonan.

On July 2, 1937, after successfully completing 22,000 mi. of the journey in her silver twin-engine Electra, she took off from Lae, New Guinea, on the longest and most dangerous leg of her flight, some 18 hours and 2,556 mi. across the vast ocean to Howland Island where the U.S. government had constructed an airfield and stored fuel supplies for her use.

Howland Island is uninhabited, a tiny island in the North Pacific about one and a half miles long and a half mile wide. The United States Coast Guard had stationed the cutter, Itasca, off Howland to maintain radio communications with the Electra and assist Earhart in locating the minuscule atoll.

When the plane was due to reach its destination, Earhart reported to the Itasca that she thought that she was flying over Howland, but couldn't see it below. Evidently lost and confused, with her plane running low on fuel, she asked for help in “homing in” by radio to the tiny island. Her last words were, “We are running north and south,” presumably flying in a search pattern in hope of seeing the island. She lost critical radio communications with the Itasca and the cutter's radio operators could not get a bearing on her position. Repeated efforts by the Itasca to contact the fliers were unsuccessful and they were presumed out of fuel and lost at sea. An extensive land, air, and sea search lasting over two weeks failed to find them and no trace of the world's most famous female pilot, her navigator, or their plane has ever been found.

WHAT HAPPENDED TO THAT PLANE???

Was she taken by Ufc's?(not a typo) Or was it a more earthly fate that befell Amelia Earheart?

http://pub89.ezboard.com/benderbyparanormalsdisscusionboards
 
I was watching something the other night about her, it was reported that on an island close to where she disappeared some soldiers found her papers in a safe. They were handed over to the commanding officer and never seen again. Her plane, or a similar one was seen burning in a disused hanger in an American airbase.

It is thought that she was spying for the US government and after her plane went down she was captured by the Japanese and excecuted.
 
It was on Discovery or History or some such I think. I only saw part of it and think she actually landed in Saipan in the Northern Marianas islands. They interviewed one of the locals who, when she was a girl, reckoned she saw some Japanese soldiers escorting a white woman to a pit, where they shot her in the head and buried her.

Carole
 
Digression

The Handsome Family do a really good song about her........
 
I'm teaching my class about explorers at the moment. Amelia Earhart is one of their favourites because of the mystery surrounding her disappearance. Yes, there are some things even our teacher doesn't know! lol ;)
I don't suppose anyone has any good links with pics of Amelia? They would be useful for next weeks History lesson. :)
 
I think she was off course slightly and given the tiny strip of land she was to land on I think the answer is more mundane than so many of the more exotic tales as to her fate/survival/execution etc.She knew the flight from Lae to Howland Island was to be the toughest part of the entire trip.She and her navigator would not have taken any chances and the notion that they could have been thousands of miles out in their calculations can surely be discounted.It is likely they were no more than a hundred miles adrift.But this was more than enough to miss Howland Island.

It is even possible that before the engines gave out they may have made a ditching and survived for a day or so.Then came the storm.By the time the searching planes from the Colorado and Lexington reached the area all trace of the plane and its occupants would have been swept away.

Amelia once said"When I go out I should like to go quickly,in my own plane".
The chances are that she probably did.
 
A little splash in a very big ocean, and in a plane not designed to float.
Amy Johnson had better dress sense, if you ask me.
 
Amy Johnson

Caught the tail-end of a news item about Amy Johnson on local radio (Radio Humberside) today
It seemed to suggest that she was accidentaly drowned by one of her (would-be) rescuers
Anyone else heard this story?
How come it's taken this long to come to light?
 
I'm afraid it's far more likely they missed Howland and flew around searching for it until their fuel gave out.

It is one of the most difficult things to navigate an aircraft to a spot in the ocean. Francis Chichister (yes the same one that also sailed around the world. Why do you think his boats were called Gypsy Moth? After the famous De Havilland aircraft of the same name in which he tried to fly around the world) developed a system called Deliberate Error. With this you plotted a course that would definately take you, say, east of the target. Then when you had flown the elapsed time that should get you to the target you turned west and the target should appear.

Pilots used dead reckoning before this. Problem is though, if the target isn't there after elapsed time which way do you turn to look for it? You don't know, you're lost! That's what happened to Amelia and many others.

Has anyone ever noticed the strikingly similar looks of Amelia and Charles Lindberg? I have a photo of the two of them together and they could be brother and sister.

Here's something Amelia wrote that I've always enjoyed:

Courage is the price that life extracts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not knows no release from little things.
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights, where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings.

— Amelia Earhart
 
I remember reading a short story about an airline pilot who picked up ghostly morse code messages that turned out to be the call-sign of a missing aviatrix (Fae Nolan, I think was the name); 'The Sound of Wings' was its title.
 
On PBS last night they had a show....

Basically, the theory the experts on the show had looked at the whole trip. Here are a number of interesting facts:

1) The first attempt at the round the world flight ended in a crashed plane (she was going into the Pacific at first). After the crash, (which was really minor, but caused a fair amount of damage to the plane), her long term navigator quit, saying later that he didn't trust her judgement anymore. After the crash, she also took out much of the safety equipment in the plane like the part of the radio that would have allowed people to track the plane. She also decided to go in the opposite direction of the original trip, which left the most dificult leg of the journey last.

2) Her husband was a publicist who was trying to push Amelia into doing the flight for publicity, so there wasn't much time for rest or reflection, and it was an exceptionally wearing trip.

3) Noonan, the replacement navigator, was a brilliant navigator but a heavy drinker.

4) During the trip, when they got to the edge of Africa from South America, Amelia completely ignored the navigator, prefering to use her instincts to find the landing stip and it took them hours off course, which lead to Amelia and Noonan having a falling out which she cabled her husband about. (It may have exacerbated Noonan to drink more since he was haing trouble getting Amelia to listen).

5) Before they went up the last time, Amelia got rid of the parachutes, claiming they wouldn't need them over the Pacific.

6) The island they had to find was tiny, and it was fairly foggy.

7) Noonan had a flight plan that took them straight to the island. In fact, they left earlier than usual for this leg because, using the instruments of the time, he could use the time and place where the sun would come up to accurately pinpoint where they were at.

8) There was a battleship fairly close that was there to provie assistance. According to the comunications betwen Amelia and the boat show that Noonans plan to accurately find the island had them on the right track.

9) Inexplicably, either because of the strain of flying, because of Noonan's drinking, an overreliance on her own hunches about flying, or the fog obscuring the island, she went off and, convinced they weren't where they were supposed to be, she started flying in circles trying to spot the island.

10) Since she removed the tracking portion of the radio, the ship couldn't trace her.

11) The expert on the show, looking at the way Amelia flew, her mistake over the African coast where she refused to listen to the navigator, and the island itselt, thinks she just circled further and further north from the island, although if she had listened to the navigator and flown straight they would have had made it to the island.
 
Experts flock to Tinian for Earhart excavation

By Katie Worth
Pacific Daily News; [email protected]

THE MYSTERY

Amelia Earhart was a great aviator of her day and broke many flight records in the 1920s and '30s, becoming the first person to make a solo flight from Hawaii to California and the first woman to cross the Atlantic alone. On May 20, 1937, she and navigator Fred Noonan set out on the epic quest to circumnavigate the planet. They had completed all but the last portion of their journey when they were last heard from as they were approaching tiny Howland Island in the central Pacific. A massive search found no trace of the plane or its crew.

THE HYPOTHESIS

There are several popular hypotheses on Earhart's demise. One is that Earhart and Noonan were captured by the Japanese, who had control of much of the Pacific at that time, and killed because they thought she was engaged in espionage. Several people who were on Saipan at the time say they saw an American woman in a flight suit in Japanese custody. Last year, World War II veteran Saint John Naftel of Alabama came forward with a story he had heard in 1944 when he was stationed on Tinian, a small island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. At the time, he met a worker who said he had participated in the burial of the two aviators in 1937, and the man had pointed out the burial site to him.

THE PROJECT

Last year, local historians brought Naftel to the region and he identified for them what he believes may be the burial site. Later this week the group, with the aid of archaeologists and other professionals, will begin the Tinian Amelia Earhart Project, and will start excavating the site.

WHO'S INVOLVED

Leading the project is historian Jennings Bunn, who retired from the Marianas Military Museum this year. Veteran Saint John Naftel will also come out for the project, as will archaeologist Thomas King and forensic anthropologist Karen Burns of the University of Georgia, Athens. Also on scene will be archaeologists from the Saipan firm Swift and Harper Archaeological Resource Consultants, University of Guam faculty and several UOG students, and the CNMI Historic Preservation Office.

An author and well-known archaeologist whose 15-year-long quest has been to unravel the mystery surrounding the disappearance of famed pilot Amelia Earhart is on Guam and will join other regional and national archaeologists and historians in Tinian later this week with the hope of proving -- or disproving -- the latest hypothesis on her disappearance.

Archaeologist Thomas King, author of five books, including "Amelia Earhart's Shoes," published in 2001, said he would be "very surprised" to find Earhart's remains on the tiny island of Tinian, two islands to the north of Guam in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, but said he doesn't rule the possibility out.

The hypothesis King and others will be exploring rests on a story told by 82-year-old World War II veteran Saint John Naftel, who says he was shown, while stationed on Tinian in 1944, Earhart's gravesite by a worker who'd helped bury her. Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared on an attempted around-the-world flight in 1937 and their remains have never been found.

Spearheading the Tinian excavation team is historian Jennings Bunn, who arranged Naftel's return to the region a year ago. Among the other participants will be forensic anthropologist Karen Burns of the University of Georgia, archaeological consultants from Saipan, the CNMI Historic Preservation Office, and faculty and students from the University of Guam.

King, who is on Guam this week giving a seminar on historic preservation for regional historians and other professionals, said his own preferred hypothesis on Earhart's disappearance asserts that her life likely ended not in the CNMI, but rather on tiny Nikumaroro island in the Phoenix Island group, north of the Samoan islands.

King and Burns are both members of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery Amelia Earhart Project, better known as TIGHAR. That project has searched for and found clues that point to her death on Nikumaroro.

Evidence includes records of the bones of a northern European woman of Earhart's stature being found on the island in 1940, but those bones were sent to Fiji and have never been found, King said. Other evidence includes parts of a plane that could have been the one Earhart and Noonan were flying -- as well as parts of planes that were not.

"We don't have a smoking gun yet, but we're working on it," he said.

Among other advantages, King said, the Nikumaroro theory has the benefit of not requiring any assumptions of espionage, Japanese involvement, prolonged secrecy or other conspiracies, which would have had to exist were her final resting place on Tinian.

"We continue to think the best hypothesis points in Nikumaroro's direction, but I believe any hypothesis that can be tested should be tested," he said. "I won't be surprised if we find bones (in Tinian) -- there are bones all over the Northern Mariana Islands for obvious reasons. But I will be surprised if they turn out to be Amelia Earhart's.

"And the problem is that even if we don't find the bones (in this excavation), it doesn't mean she's not there. It might only mean we dug in the wrong place. These things are problematic because they're never really answered until you have definitive evidence," he said.

King explained the motive for his continued commitment to his expensive "hobby" as its intellectual challenge, its puzzle. But he can't explain why so many others around the globe have remained interested in the aviators' unexplained fate for the last 67 years.

"Solving the mystery is not going to end AIDS or get us out of Iraq or anything useful like that, it's simply an engaging mystery," he said.

Regardless of the result, the excavation on Tinian is likely to turn attention to Guam's neighborhood for a while. And if the hypothesis turns out to be true, it would likely be a boon for the region's tourist industry, King said.

"She was such a fascinating person when she was alive -- she was an articulate speaker and writer, an articulate advocate that women can do anything that men can do. She was a charismatic figure and when she disappeared it really shocked people," he said.

"I don't know. Why do these things seize the imagination? That's probably the bigger mystery."


-----------------------
Originally published Wednesday, November 10, 2004

http://www.guampdn.com/news/stories/20041110/localnews/1562030.html
 
Am I right in thinking that she didn't take adequate, or indeed any, navigational equipment on her last flight? No wonder she crashed. Also, in her first transatlantic flight, didn't she end up in Ireland instead of France?
 
Marine Explorer Hunts for Earhart's Plane

By STEPHEN MANNING, Associated Press Writer

At 17,000 feet beneath the surface, the temperature of ocean water is just above freezing, oxygen is sparse and currents are relatively calm. In other words, ideal conditions for preserving an airplane that might have crashed into the depths nearly 70 years ago, according to marine explorer David Jourdan, who hopes to answer one of aviation's greatest mysteries — the fate of famed pilot Amelia Earhart.

Jourdan and his Maine-based company, Nauticos, plan to launch an expedition in the spring using sonar to sweep a 1,000-square-mile swath of ocean bottom west of tiny Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean. It is the latest in a string of missions to learn what happened to Earhart when she, her navigator and their Lockheed Electra plane disappeared on a flight around the world.

"Things tend to last a time" in the deep ocean, said Jourdan. "Our expectation is the plane will be largely, if not completely, intact." That is, if the plane is even in the ocean. There is a host of theories about what befell Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan in 1937 as they made one of the final legs of their widely heralded flight.

Some have searched the sea, believing the plane ran out of gas. Others think she survived a crash landing but died on a deserted island. Another theory is that the Japanese captured and executed her. The conspiracy-minded claim Earhart survived and lived out her life under an assumed name as a New Jersey housewife.

This much is agreed on — Earhart and Noonan vanished July 2, 1937, as they approached an air strip on Howland Island, roughly midway between Australia and Hawaii. They had taken off from Papua New Guinea, just 7,000 miles short of their goal to make Earhart the first woman to fly around the world.

A fearless flyer, Earhart set a string of altitude, distance and endurance records in the 1920s and 1930s, proving the still-young world of flying wasn't reserved for men. She captivated a Depression-era America eager for heroes, was feted by presidents and was compared to Charles Lindbergh. The press dubbed her "Lady Lindy." The Navy launched a weeks-long search of 250,000 square miles of ocean around Howland and a nearby chain of small islands. No trace was ever found of the plane.

One of those going along on the Nauticos mission is Elgen Long, a former commercial pilot who has spent 30 years researching the mystery. Long, 77, of Reno, Nev., believes the answer to Earhart and Noonan's fate lies in their radio communications with a U.S. Coast Guard cutter that was tracking their course near Howland Island. Using Coast Guard radio operator's logs, Long concluded Earhart was perilously low on gas because a headwind was much stronger than she had anticipated. One of her last radio calls said she had only a half hour of fuel left and couldn't see land.

"We can follow her all the way across the Pacific," he said of the radio records. "She ran out of gas just when she said she was going to." This is Jourdan's second search of the area west of Howland; a 2002 mission was aborted because of technical problems. The same general area was searched in 1999 by another mission that found nothing conclusive, but Jourdan said his new expedition, costing about $1.5 million, will use better sonar technology and more accurate information on where the plane may have crashed.

The shortage of oxygen and the fairly still water means a metal airplane likely would not have completely corroded, he said. Any human remains would have long vanished, but Jourdan hopes to find clues such as Earhart's jewelry in the pilot's seat, or perhaps even Earhart's leather jacket.

"That would be eerie," he said. If he finds it, Nauticos would plan another mission to raise the plane, which would become the centerpiece of a traveling exhibit on Earhart's life, Jourdan said. Earhart's stepson, George Putnam, was 16 years old when her plane disappeared. Putnam, now 83 and living in Florida, said he supports the mission partly because it could end the wild speculation about what happened to her. He doesn't mind if Nauticos salvages the plane.

"Let's see what happens," he said.

To Long, it could be his last chance to solve one of the 20th-century's biggest mysteries. "We need the true story of what happened," he said. "The history we read needs to be correct."

___

On the Net:

Amelia Earhart: http://www.ameliaearhart.com

Nauticos: http://www.nauticos.com/

International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery: http://www.tighar.org

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=7&u=/ap/20041218/ap_on_sc/hunt_for_earhart
 
LINK
Faint calls heard

As the news that the aviators were missing flashed around the world, confusion, official bungling and missed opportunities had only begun.

Itasca searched along the "line of position" northwest of Howland, wrongly assuming the plane's empty fuel tanks would keep it afloat.

The Navy ordered six warships into the hunt, including the battleship USS Colorado from Pearl Harbor and the aircraft carrier USS Lexington from San Diego, 4,000 miles away.

On July 3, a day after Earhart vanished, her technical adviser, Paul Mantz, suggested to reporters that she had crash-landed in the Phoenix Islands. Even if the plane's undercarriage was damaged, Mantz said, "the fliers could have walked away ... uninjured."

Meanwhile, several shortwave radio listeners as far away as the U.S. mainland were picking up the faint voices of a woman and a man, sending apparent distress calls. And both the Itasca and a New Zealand cruiser, HMS Achilles, reported what seemed to be Morse code "dashes."

When Pan Am's Pacific stations triangulated the signals to the Phoenix Islands, the Achilles, less than 48 hours away at its top speed of 32 knots, was ignored. Instead, the Colorado was sent south, but by the time it reached the area a week later, the radio calls had ceased.

After a float-plane search of eight atolls, senior pilot Lt. John O. Lambrecht reported that "signs of recent habitation were clearly visible" at Gardner Island, but "repeated circling and zooming failed to elicit any answering wave from possible inhabitants, and it was finally taken for granted that none were there."

Had Lambrecht known that the island had been uninhabited for more than 40 years, he might have looked more closely. In an interview years later, he described the signs only as "markers," without elaboration. Inexplicably, the final report by Colorado's captain said no sign of habitation had been found.

Among reports of voice messages, two from teenagers using shortwave antennas rigged by their fathers were most disturbingly credible.

In Rock Springs, Wyo., Dana Randolph, 16, heard a voice say, "This is Amelia Earhart. Ship is on a reef south of the equator." Radio experts, aware that "harmonic" frequencies in mid-ocean often could be heard far inland, viewed the report as genuine.

Turning the shortwave dial in St. Petersburg, Fla., 15-year-old Betty Klenck was startled to hear a woman say, "This is Amelia Earhart Putnam," followed by pleas for help and agitated conversation with a man who, the girl thought, sounded irrational.

Having heard Earhart's voice in movie newsreels, she had no doubt that it was her.

"In my mind, a picture of her and what she was saying lasted for years. I remembered it every night of my life," Betty Klenck Brown, now 84 and widowed, said in a recent telephone interview from her home in California.

The man, she recalls, "seemed coherent at times, then would go out of his head. He said his head hurt ... She was trying mainly to keep him from getting out of the plane, telling him to come back to his seat, because she couldn't leave the radio.

"She was trying to get somebody to hear her, and as the hours went by she became more frantic."

Betty listened for nearly two hours, taking notes in a school composition notebook as the signals faded in and out. They ended when the fliers "were leaving the plane, because the water was knee-deep on her side," she said.

She believes she may be the last living person to have heard Earhart's distress calls.

Her father, Kenneth, who also heard the voices, contacted the Coast Guard at St. Petersburg, but was brushed off with assurances that the service was fully engaged in searching for the fliers, she said. "He got mad and chucked the whole thing because of the way he was treated."

Both teenagers' accounts would support TIGHAR's premise that Earhart crash-landed on Gardner's flat reef at low tide, was able to run its right engine to power the radio, and escaped the aircraft before tides eventually carried it off the reef into deep water.

On July 18, 16 days after Earhart and Noonan disappeared, the Navy and Coast Guard ended what the AP called "the greatest search ever undertaken in behalf of a lost flier." To justify the official finding that the Electra was lost at sea, the government dismissed the radio distress calls as hoaxes or misunderstandings.

Betty Klenck Brown's response today: "I know I am right."

'A real note-keeper'

Last September, Arthur Rypinski, a TIGHAR volunteer who regularly scans the Internet for Earhart-related material, found a woman in West Virginia offering an "Amelia Earhart Original Flight Plan" for sale on eBay.

"I was deeply intrigued," says Rypinski, of Rockville, Md., and he bought the document for $26.

The "flight plan" proved instead to be a copy of Carey's diary, along with news clippings and other items. Stamps showed it was once owned by the U.S. Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pa. The seller, Dolores Brown, told Rypinski she probably had found it at a Goodwill store.

According to Carey's son, Tim Carey of Woodbridge, Va., his father served as a naval officer in the Pacific in World War II and had a career in public relations before his death in 1988.

His role as an AP reporter on the Earhart story became part of family history, his son says. And he adds: "The diary was completely in character for him. He was a real note-keeper."

Now raising funds for a ninth TIGHAR expedition to Nikumaroro in July, Gillespie says the Carey diary serves as a reminder to always "expect the unexpected" in the Earhart case.

"Pacific islanders don't wear shoes, so we know there was one foreign castaway, and maybe two, a man and a woman, on Gardner ... We hope this summer to recover human remains for DNA testing and find aircraft pieces that could be conclusively identified as from Amelia's plane.

"This is the expedition that could at last solve the mystery. I think we are right on the edge of knowing for a certainty what happened."
 
1) After all of this time and now that the dust has completely settled for WWII, don't you think that the Japanese would fess up if they actually captured her? Surely, there would have been records of prisoners taken.

2) Nancy Kulp (Miss Jane from The Beverly Hillbillies) should have played Amelia in a biopic. She looks nearly identical. Come to think, did we ever really see the two of them together?
 
The latest expedition has departed ...

New Search Begins for Amelia Earhart

By RICHARD PYLE, AP
Posted: 2007-07-13 09:49:06 / Filed Under: Nation, Science

NEW YORK (July 13) - Hoping modern technology can help them solve a 70-year-old mystery, a group of investigators will search a South Pacific island to try to determine if famed aviator Amelia Earhart crash-landed and died there.

...

New clues have revitalized the search for pilot Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan, who disappeared somewhere over the Pacific 70 years ago.

The expedition of 15 members of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR, departed Thursday. The trip marks the group's ninth to Nikumaroro, an uninhabited atoll about 1,800 miles south of Hawaii.

Once at the 2 1/2-mile-long island, the group was to spend 17 days searching for human bones, aircraft parts and any other evidence to try to show that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, reached the island on July 2, 1937, crashed on a reef at low tide and made it to shore, where they possibly lived for months as castaways, written off by the world as lost at sea.

The conditions during the search will be punishing, with the explorers forced to contend with dense jungle vegetation, 100-degree heat, sharks that reside in a lagoon in the middle of the island and voracious crabs that make it necessary to wear shoes at all times.

"The public wants it solved. That's why everybody on the street today, 70 years later, knows the name Amelia Earhart," said TIGHAR founder and executive director Ric Gillespie. "She is America's favorite missing person."

At the time, Earhart, 39, and Noonan, 44, were nearing the end of a much-publicized round-the-world flight that had begun more than a month earlier in Oakland, Calif. On July 2, they left Lae, New Guinea, bound for tiny Howland Island, 2,550 miles to the east, only to vanish as they neared their destination.

A 16-day search by U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ships turned up no sign of the fliers or their silver, twin-engine Lockheed Electra. Despite an official finding that they ran out of gas and crashed in the ocean, the case spawned a once-popular claim that the pair were captured and executed as spies on a Japanese-held island.

Gillespie acknowledges that some critics regard the Nikumaroro castaway theory as far-fetched, but he says there is strong evidence to suggest Earhart and Noonan reached what was then known as Gardner Island, 350 miles south of Howland, and survived a crash-landing on its wide flat reef.

"Most skeptics are not really familiar with the evidence that we've found, and they usually have a vested interest in the other theories - that they crashed at sea or were captured by the Japanese," he said.

The evidence includes radio distress signals that may have come from Earhart, bones found at a former campsite in 1940, and pieces of airplane parts that Gillespie says could have come from Earhart's plane. One of these is a shard of Plexiglas, the exact thickness and curvature of an Electra window, but with no serial number.

The bones, found by a British overseer in 1940 and first judged to belong to a mixed-race male, vanished in Fiji during World War II. But a doctor's notes, discovered in London in 1998, were reanalyzed by two American forensic anthropologists, who found the remains were more likely those of a Caucasian female about Earhart's age and height.

Metal detectors, digital cameras slung from kites, infrared-equipped surveying devices and even pig bones are among items TIGHAR planned to use for the expedition. The search will concentrate on two locations: the campsite where bones were found in 1940, and a site where aircraft parts were recovered.

Kar Burns, one of two anthropologists on the team, hopes coconut crabs native to the island - some as big as 2 1/2 feet across - will carry the pig bones to wherever human bones might have been taken by crabs. DNA from human bones could help solve the mystery, Gillespie said.

The group - mostly veterans of previous trips to the island - includes engineers, environmentalists, a land developer, archaeologists, a sailboat designer, a team doctor and a videographer.

SOURCE: http://news.aol.com/story/_a/new-search ... 0000000001
 
"A ghost of aviation
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea, like me she had a dream to fly
Like icarus ascending
On beautiful foolish arms..."

Amelia, by Joni Mitchell

maximus otter
 
...and from the same article...

95033b.jpg


Festival-goers line up at Warnock Lake Friday afternoon waiting for gates to open for Lakefest. (Jessica Stewart/St. Joseph News-Press)

She really isn't a 'common household name' but, judging by those queues, it also looks like she isn't 'someone to celebrate'.
 
Amelia Earhart Mystery Solved? New Expedition.

DNA Evidence on a Remote Island May Reveal the Truth About Earhart's Disappearance

It has been 72 years since famed aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared while attempting to fly around the world. But the mystery remains unsolved: Nobody knows exactly what happened to Earhart or her plane.

The search for the vanished flight pioneer has taken an exciting new turn.

More PhotosNow researchers at the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or Tighar, say they are on the verge of recovering DNA evidence that would demonstrate Earhart had been stranded on Nikumaroro Island (formerly known as Gardner Island) before finally perishing there.

During May and June of next year, Tighar will launch a new $500,000 expedition, continuing the archaeological work it has been doing on the island since 2001.

"We think we will be able to come back with DNA," said Tighar's Executive Director Ric Gillespie, who is working with two DNA labs in Ontario, Canada, Genesis Genomics and Molecular World. "We were out there in 2007 under the impression that in order to extract DNA we would need to find a piece of a human, and we didn't find anything like that. But we did find what's best described as personal effects of the castaway that died there."

During the 2007 trip, Gillespie and his crew uncovered early 20th-century makeup and two pieces of broken glass that match a 1930s compact mirror, among other artifacts. DNA can be extracted from such remnants as long as those artifacts aren't contaminated during the collection process. Unfortunately, in 2007, they were. Armed with a new collection protocol, Gillespie and his team will return to the site to seek out new items during their May 2010 excursion.

Earlier this year a woman directly related to Earhart, who wishes to remain anonymous, agreed to provide Gillespie's group with a reference sample of mitochondrial DNA.

Full story here:

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story? ... _pitchlist

maximus otter
 
Maybe she was eaten by giant snails? Sort of thing that happens on these islands.

But how will we know if its really her? Any good CTer knows that DNA can be planted.
 
Has anyone ever noticed the strikingly similar looks of Amelia and Charles Lindberg? I have a photo of the two of them together and they could be brother and sister.

Can't say i had, but the crazy yodelling banjo player from NY Curtis Eller does a song about her that the guy gets namechecked in, so i guess Eller had.

If anyone's fussed, it's on the album Taking Up Serpents Again, can't find a legal download of it but lyrics below:

Well the wind turned on Amelia just after sun-up
And this radio's been acting up all day
She disappeared in a cloudbank and the static never cleared
Well at least you never have to die this way

And they say she turned up again sometime in the 40's
Going by the name "Tokyo Rose"
Just a sweet voice on the airwaves floatin' out of Japan
But that doesn't seem too likely I suppose

And I wish I was Amelia Earhart
I wish I was Amelia Earhart
I wish I was Amelia Earhart
Like a tombstone worn smooth by the years
And I wish that I was Amelia Earhart
'Cause Charles Lindbergh lived his life in fears

Well the ones that stay too long run up on trouble
Like the Lindbergh Baby somewheres down the line
You know they'll bust into the house at night while everybody's sleepin'
And make off with that baby everytime

And I wish I was Amelia Earhart
I wish I was Amelia Earhart
I wish I was Amelia Earhart
Like a tombstone worn smooth by the years
And I wish that I was Amelia Earhart
'Cause Charles Lindbergh lived his life in fears
 
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