Amelia Earhart: Has a scrap of metal solved one of the world’s great mysteries?

A scrap of aluminum found on a Pacific atoll may be the best evidence yet that Amelia Earhart was able to land her aircraft as it was running out of fuel, surviving for a time before disappearing into history and speculation.

|
AP
An undated file photo shows pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart, who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937 trying to circumnavigate the globe.

Ric Gillespie has always been pretty sure about the fate of pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart, who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937 trying to circumnavigate the globe.

Now, a scrap of aluminum that washed up on an atoll 23 years ago, but never seemed to prove anything, may be the critical evidence solving one of the 20th century’s great mysteries.

“This is the first time we’ve ever found something we can link directly to Earhart’s aircraft,” Mr. Gillespie, who heads The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), told Wired. “And we’re going to treat it as a piece of her aircraft.”

Over the years, several theories have emerged about Ms. Earhart and Fred Noonan, her navigator. The main one is that winds blew the twin-engine Lockheed Electra hundreds of miles off course as it headed for Howland Island, causing it to crash and sink into the ocean when it ran out of fuel. Some have speculated that Earhart may have been on a secret spy mission for her friend President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and that the pair may have been captured by Japanese forces.

Gillespie’s working assumption is that Earhart and Noonan did fly off course, but that they were able to land on an uninhabited atoll, becoming castaways when tides and heavy surf washed their aircraft off the atoll, causing it to break up and sink, scattering parts over a wide area.

Using what fuel remained to turn up the engines to recharge the batteries, they continued to radio distress signals for several days until the aircraft was swept off the reef.

With equipment not available more than 70 years ago – digitized information management systems, antenna modeling software, and radio wave propagation analysis programs – TIGHAR concluded that 57 of the 120 signals reported at the time are credible, triangulating Earhart’s position to have been the atoll now known as Nikumaroro Island.

War in the Pacific made search and recovery efforts difficult. There were tantalizing bits of physical evidence, including shoes, a zipper, and broken pieces of a jar appearing to be the same size and unusual shape as one holding “Dr. Berry's Freckle Ointment.” (Earhart was known to dislike her freckles.)

Partial skeletal remains found in 1940 were subsequently lost, “but computerized re-evaluation of the bone measurements by forensic anthropologists suggests that the skeleton was probably that of a white female of northern European descent who stood roughly Earhart’s height,” TIGHAR reports on its website.

But the three-foot-square piece of aluminum may be the best clue yet.

The essence of TIGHAR’s report this week is that the piece of aluminum was a patch replacing a navigational window. News photos at the time show the shiny patch on the side of Earhart's Electra, which was installed during an eight-day stopover in Miami.

 “The Miami Patch was an expedient field repair,” Gillespie told Discovery News. “Its complex fingerprint of dimensions, proportions, materials and rivet patterns was as unique to Earhart’s Electra as a fingerprint is to an individual.”

The search for more evidence continues with the next expedition scheduled for June 2015. Meanwhile, the current focus is on that aluminum patch.

“It seems plausible,” Dr. Les Kaufman, a Boston University biology professor who has spoken as an expert witness about wreckage linked to Earhart, told the Huffington Post. “I have been impressed with Ric Gillespie, who seems to me to be an honest broker, a knowledgeable enthusiast, and generally cautious in drawing conclusions based upon limited evidence.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Amelia Earhart: Has a scrap of metal solved one of the world’s great mysteries?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2014/1030/Amelia-Earhart-Has-a-scrap-of-metal-solved-one-of-the-world-s-great-mysteries
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe