By now, you have probably seen the headlines (there was one in the L.A. Times this morning, for instance) about the “discovery” of Amelia Earhart.
The story is complicated and misleading, so for those who do not obsess over historic mysteries as I do, I thought I would relate the short version (yes, I know it’s long, but trust me. It’s short).
There are several “schools” of Earhart mystery thought. Some are on the kook fringe: Earhart returned to the United States and lived under the name Irene Bolam. Some are close to that fringe: the oft-discredited Japanese capture theory. The mainstream theory is known as the “Crashed and Sank School,” which needs no explanation.
Then there is TIGHAR.
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) is either on the cutting edge of Amelia Earhart research or is a band of shady, manipulative grifters; it depends on your source. Officially, TIGHAR does what the name suggests. In reality, Earhart is, by far, their largest project, and since her Lockheed Electra has never been found, one could argue that they have not done much of anything in terms of aircraft recovery. I don’t know their non-Earhart history, so I will reserve judgment on the matter.
Since the late 1980s, TIGHAR has promoted what is now known as the Nikumaroro (“Niku”) Hypothesis to explain the disappearance of Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan. The “Niku Hypothesis” states that Earhart, lost and running low on fuel on July 2, 1937, somehow overshot her landing party on Howland Island and, following a straight line, flew to Nikumaroro (then known as Gardner Island). Perhaps lured to the island by some factor (more on that later), she made a rough landing on the “fringe reef” there, which would have been relatively dry, firm, and reasonably flat. Assuming they would be rescued, Earhart and Noonan left the plane and waited, going back, at low tide to run the engines, charge the batteries, and broadcast distress messages. In time, a higher tide came in, swallowed the plane, and hid it almost entirely from view, later tearing it apart and washing it in pieces to the bottom of the island shelf. The flyers eventually died of thirst, starvation, injury, exposure, or some combination thereof. The enormous, nightmarish crabs that inhabit the island devoured and scattered their bodies or perhaps even killed them.
Many, especially the establishment types in the Crashed and Sank School, ridicule TIGHAR and its director, Ric Gillespie, and suggest that the Niku Hypothesis is founded on nothing. Gillespie is certainly a showman, and he loves to raise and spend money, but it is disingenuous to say his theory is baseless. After Earhart’s disappearance, later in 1937, a search party flew over Niku and saw signs of “habitation,” though it is unclear what they might have meant (a coconut plantation had been there decades earlier; with a few exceptions, hardly anyone had been there since). In 1940, a British expedition found a partial skeleton under a tree on Niku. Nearby was a “sextant box” supposedly similar to one owned by Noonan. The crew sent a wire (still in existence) to their headquarters telling of the bones and asking the recipient to keep the story under wraps, since the bones might be Earhart’s. That same year, a doctor in Fiji measured and documented the dimensions of the bones and said they appeared to be those of a stocky male. The written documents survived, but the artifacts themselves were lost in the chaos that was already engulfing Asia and the Pacific.
In the 1990s, TIGHAR began regular visits to Nikumaroro to search for signs of Earhart. These trips are terribly expensive. They consume most of the organization’s budget, and raising money for the trips consumes much of its time. That, a dearth of ironclad evidence, and Gillespie’s alleged penchant for exaggerating what he does find, has led to the charge that the organization exists simply to raise money and travel to Niku, though the place is filled with pestilence, and it is difficult to grasp why anyone would go there intentionally, absent a compelling reason.
On their many visits, Gillespie and his crew have cobbled together a few intriguing artifacts: remains of a camp fire; burned mollusk shells, opened in a way common to Americans and Europeans but not islanders; a woman’s shoe sole, supposedly corresponding to a type owned by Earhart; a glass jar that once held a 1930s “freckle cream”; a bit of aircraft glass; and—significantly—a rectangular piece of aluminum that may be a patch Earhart had installed over a window on her plane before it left Miami at the beginning of the journey. Some years ago, an old photo of Nikumaroro, taken months after the disappearance, was in the news. Researchers had discovered an “anomaly” in the photograph: something sticking up out of the water—something believers think matches the profile of a Lockheed Electra aircraft wheel. Hillary Clinton called on the State Department to cooperate with the investigation of this anomaly. TIGHAR also conducted anthropological research, interviewing people who lived on Nikumaroro after it was briefly colonized in the 1940s and 1950s. Some spoke of aircraft parts. One woman even said there was a plane wing in the surf and that her father told her to stay away from it, as it was haunted by the ghosts of a man and a woman. This is folklore, of course, not science or even history, but difficult to ignore nonetheless.
There are many other enticing bits of anecdotal evidence that seem, to believers, to support elements of TIGHAR’s theory. One of the most chilling (and disputed) is known as “Betty’s Notebook,” the supposed handwritten notes of a teenage girl in Florida, transcribed in 1937 as she breathlessly listened on shortwave radio to a woman, claiming to be Earhart, begging for help, saying the water was rising, and reprimanding a meddling and seemingly incoherent man in the background. Other examples are too numerous and complex to relate here. Because they dribble out on a gradual basis, corresponding to TIGHAR’s expeditions, they motivate and excite the organization’s supporters while inviting increasing ridicule from its detractors.
One might ask why Earhart would land on Nikumaroro. There are hundreds of islands in the area, and while the island’s fringe reef offered a survivable landing site, it was not particularly unique or inviting. Did Nikumaroro have some distinct feature that might have led Earhart to think it was safe or inhabited?
It did.
On November 29, 1929, less than eight years before Earhart’s flight, the S.S. Norwich City, a 397 foot British freighter, ran aground on Nikumaroro, about four miles from the area where the bones were later found and right next to the “airplane wheel” photographic anomaly (the ship is clearly visible in the anomaly photo). Eleven men died in the accident. The rest were rescued in a few days (possibly accounting for the “habitation” statement made by Earhart searchers in 1937). The ship’s superstructure burned, but the vessel itself remained upright for many decades, finally falling apart and scattering out to sea in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, only the keel, an engine, and a few pieces of debris remain on the beach.
If Earhart were looking for a place to land on July 2, 1937, the huge ship, still upright, would have been a comforting site. If she were exhausted and afraid, she might not have noticed its condition. Even if she did, the ship would have provided an enticing landmark, a link to civilization and rescue. In her “notebook,” “Betty,” described above, alleged that Earhart repeatedly broadcast “N.Y.” by shortwave. Was the Norwich City’s name visible on the wreckage? Assuming the notebook is a legitimate account, did Betty hear “N.Y.,” as she wrote, or did she hear “New York”? Indeed, was “N.Y.,” as Gillespie suggests (with no evidence) really shorthand for “New York City,” and if so, was the speaker really shouting, frantically and through static, “Norwich City”? With the veracity of Betty’s Notebook in doubt (but with no explanation as to why an old woman would maintain such a hoax), there is no way to resolve that mystery.
So, we are left with bones, or, rather, descriptions of bones, found in 1940 and lost soon thereafter.
Twenty years ago, two forensic anthropologists, Karen Burns and Richard Jantz, studied the measurements done on the bones in 1940 and determined that they were not the remains of a stocky male, but of a tall woman of European descent (Noonan was quite tall and did not fit any description of the bones). Fourteen years later, in 2012, anthropologists Pamela Cross and Richard Wright, publishing in a peer reviewed journal, asserted that the original 1940 finding that the bones were consistent with a stocky male was correct. Since no one knows where the bones went or if they will ever be found, that could have been the end of the debate. However, Jantz, a University of Tennessee researcher, was not happy with the challenge to his work. Just days ago, he released a detailed study showing that the bones, as described in 1940, are more consistent with Amelia Earhart (her characteristics being extrapolated from photographs) than with “99 percent of individuals in a large reference sample.”
At present, TIGHAR celebrates, but TIGHAR celebrates anything that even remotely supports its theories. Media outlets are again buzzing with Earhart stories, though one wonders, as they herald the “discovery” of Earhart’s “bones,” if they have read their own material and know that what they really have is a 2018 refutation of a 2012 refutation of a 1998 refutation of a 1940 account of bones that have not been seen since.
I have been on record for years as having a gut feeling that Gillespie and his band of indefatigable explorers are on to something on Nikumaroro, but I fear that this time next year there will be ten new books disputing their claims, and the Earhart case will be back where it has been since July 2, 1937. Until someone finds a plane part bearing a serial number, this mystery, drawing ever closer to its centenary, will continue its slow metamorphosis from history into legend.