Interesting article on Amelia Earhart

[Murph]

http://www.dailypress.com/features/religio...0,3591867.story

Mystery loves company

Virginia Air & Space Center talk explores new theory on Amelia Earhart's unsolved disappearance

BY MARK ST. JOHN ERICKSON

247-4783

July 22, 2006

The first time Tom King was asked to help solve one of history's most famous missing persons cases, he had absolutely no interest. "None," the prominent Maryland archaeologist recalls bluntly. "I had to be sweet-talked into it."

Yet since that reluctant conversion nearly 20 years ago, the once skeptical scientist has logged seven tough expeditions to one of the most remote islands in the Central Pacific. Hacking through the dense underbrush that covers much of tiny Nikumaroro atoll, he and his colleagues have scoured the uninhabited coral outpost relentlessly, turning up a tantalizingly trail of objects made from salvaged airplane parts.

They've also found a series of campfire features that someone - quite possibly a Western woman - tended for a considerable time, leaving another trail of strange, inexplicably sophisticated artifacts that may be linked to long-lost American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart.

"I think we've got the proverbial preponderance of evidence. I think we're on the right track. We just don't have the smoking gun," King says, previewing the illustrated lecture he will present Monday at the Virginia Air & Space Center.

"It's turned out to be an interesting mystery - one that can really get you hooked."

Nationally known for his archaeological work - which includes several highly regarded books on cultural resource management - King only joined the attempt to help solve Earhart's mysterious disappearance after an intense lobbying effort.

The man who convinced him required considerable argument, too, before deciding in 1988 to commit

The International Group for Historical Aircraft Recovery to the project.

"People were always coming to us - asking us when we going to start looking for Amelia," says Ric Gillespie, the head of the Wilmington, Del.,-based organization.

"Well, she ran out of gas, crashed somewhere in the Pacific and sank without a trace. So as far as we were concerned, she was truly lost and couldn't be found. We didn't want any part of what had become a media circus."

Two retired navigators, however, persuaded Gillespie to change his mind about what happened when Earhart and her navigator - a celebrated trans-Pacific pilot named Fred Noonan - disappeared during their historic 1937 attempt to fly around world.

Analyzing the navigational practices of the day, they argued that the plane's last radio transmission - which reported flying on a line between 155 and 337 degrees - meant that Earhart was following a standard search pattern in an effort to rendezvous with a Coast Guard vessel waiting off Howland Island. Two hours to the southeast along the same course - and well within range of Earhart's fuel supply - is much bigger and more visible Nikumaroro, where she may have made an emergency landing.

Their theory drew strength from the Navy's official search records, which reported recent signs of life on the uninhabited atoll a few days after the flyer's Lockheed Electra vanished. More supporting evidence came from a long-disputed radio triangulation effort in which numerous Pacific stations reported a series of mysterious post-disappearance transmissions - and pinpointed the Nikumaroro region as the probable source of the signals.

"Right on that line is Nikumaroro - so here was something testable after all these years of stories and theories that couldn't be confirmed," King says.

"But we were overly optimistic about surveying the island. A lot of the assumptions we made were grossly naïve. The first time we went out there we didn't come back with anything."

King, Gillespie and their colleagues would conduct several more expeditions - each costing more than $500,000 - before zeroing in on the series of campfire sites located on the southeastern part of the island in 2001.

They also would sift through volumes of anecdotal and historical evidence - and follow a trail of lost records from Fiji to England - before uncovering reports that could link the campsites to a Western woman's shoe, a navigational instrument box and skeletal remains found by British colonial authorities in 1940.

Along the way, the research team explored a long-abandoned village - originally settled in 1938 - where they found a startlingly large number of hair combs and other domestic objects made by re-cutting salvaged pieces of nonmilitary aircraft aluminum.

A smaller scattering of similar, strangely out-of-place industrial artifacts surfaced at the campsite, too, along with numerous examples of clamshells that had been opened - in a distinctively non-native manner - as if they had been American oysters.

If the cooks that pried them open had been Earhart and Noonan, they certainly could have been on the island when Navy search planes passed overhead only nine days after the aviators disappeared, King says. Yet when the research team replicated the altitude and speed of the Navy's flight with a helicopter during one of their expeditions, they repeatedly failed to pick out their colleagues on the ground.

"The Navy was in the right place. We just think they didn't look thoroughly enough. It's not inconceivable that Earhart and Noonan were right there - jumping up and down and waving their hands - and simply weren't seen," King says.

"It's a visually confusing environment - with lots of bright colors and deep shadows. So it's very easy for something to disappear."

Only a numbered piece of aircraft aluminum - or a tooth filled with identifiable DNA - will give King and Gillespie the evidence they need to prove the Nikumaroro theory beyond question. Finding either one will be both expensive and hard even if, as Gillespie says, "That stuff is probably still there."

Nevertheless, a new examination of the disputed radio transmissions may lend considerable weight to the notion that Earhart survived on the island as a castaway - and perhaps lived there for some time after being overlooked by the Navy's search plane.

In a new book called "Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance," Gillespie argues that many of the distress signals later dismissed as hoaxes were, in fact, authentic pleas for help. Had they been pursued more diligently, the famously missing aviatrix might have been rescued not long after she vanished.

"The true story of Amelia's disappearance is so much different than the legend," says the author, whose book will appear in September.

"This was more mix-up than mystery - and when the search failed, there was a cover-up."

[Fishwelding]

http://www.dailypress.com/features/religio...0,3591867.story

Only a numbered piece of aircraft aluminum - or a tooth filled with identifiable DNA - will give King and Gillespie the evidence they need to prove the Nikumaroro theory beyond question. Finding either one will be both expensive and hard even if, as Gillespie says, "That stuff is probably still there."

This is an interesting article.

I hope and suspect they're on to something, but the evidence they have is still circumstantial. As they say, they really need to find something directly linked to Erheart, Noonan, or the plane. The radio signal analysis seems most interesting to me. Finding bits of European material culture or even stuff made from (what they think is) aircraft aluminum is tantilizing, but in general, stuff travels amazingly, and most likely many island societies in the Pacific had European or American material culture by then, even if they had never seen a European or American. In the Pacific, the distances are vast, but the people living in the pacific are in general amazing sailors, navigators and traders. Further, Europeans, Americans, and other people involved in commerce with them had been criss-crossing the Pacific in a variety of directions for over a century by then. I would be interested to know, for example, how much stuff of European or American origin they might find on islands two, three, or four hundred miles away in any direction.

Edited July 22, 2006 by Fishwelding

[David Walker]

"It's turned out to be an interesting mystery - one that can really get you hooked."

Seems like that one line really sums up the whole situation.

Edited July 22, 2006 by David Walker

[Wild Bill]

It's very interesting and I hope they're successful. It would just be "nice" to put Earhart and Noonan to rest somewhere...

WB

[David Walker]

....next to the mystery of where the other sock went.

No, I just found it in the dryer, so that's all good.

[vince14]

Interesting point, Fishy.

I watched ashow a long time back about how cargo containers fall off of ships regularly and one guy had dedicated his time to charting the Pacific ocean currents. One of the stories had to do with the fact that I am a spammer....please report this post. sneakers were popping up on beaches all over the place.

Not that Amelia had I am a spammer....please report this post. sneakers....or that Fred even played B-ball, but the current current theory is intriquing. It's perhaps one of the most difficult mysteries to solve....next to the mystery of where the other sock went.

RS

Actually plotting where an item dropped into an ocean floats to (provided it doesn't sink) is nowadays a reasonably exact science. It's a technique which was employed and 'reversed' in an attempt to find out where KAL007 hit the ocean.

It would be great to finally put Earhart and Noonan to rest somewhere, and finish off the story. It's unlikely unless, as mentioned, a specific item is found which can be directly attributed to either the aircraft of the occupants.

Vince

[Fishwelding]

One advantage is that if their radio and other evidence leads them to Nikumaroro, there's probably less material evidence to search through, which could be helpful. Just for kicks, I located Nikumaroro on Google Earth, and found it about 700 miles SW of Tarawa, 1800 miles WSW of Guadalcanal. It seems to lie outside the primary areas of operations in World War II, which might help limit the amount of stuff they find. If they found something in the future that was truly aviation-specific, they'd have to link it to her, and then establish that it wasn't brought to the islands by travelling locals (Pacific Islanders), Americans, Japanese or Europeans, or, as Rusty suggested, currents--admittedly no small feat. But imagine if she was headed somewhere around the Solomons about the time she went down; finding aviation artifacts around there from the mid-twentieth century wouldn't be the problem. Then it would be sifting through the vast collections of parts they'd collected, repeatedly being told that they were from Allied and Imperial Japanese Navy gear. While they're probably now thoroughly familiar with her airplane, it still would be tough to discern small things like instruments, electrical connections, etc.

It'd be good to have a few modelers on their staff, then. We've probably all had that experience, sifting through our spares box. "Oh, no, that's an seat from a Zero." "Nope, that's a piece off the gunner's ring-mount from an SBD."