FINDING AMELIA? Island Where Flyer's Bones Found to be Probed in June
January 4, 2015
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Aluminum patch found on remote island has been identified as one installed on Amelia's plane during a stop in Miami.
A 77-year-old mystery may be closer to resolution.
The mystery: What happened to intrepid flyer Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan?
Were the bones found in 1940 by a British searcher from the lost pair?
And what, really, was the flyer up to?
The History Channel speculates:
"In the seven decades since Earhart's disappearance, a number of hypotheses have emerged, some with scientific evidence behind them and others based on more dubious claims.
"Some theorists, for instance, believe Earhart was actually a secret agent working for the U.S. government, pointing to her close friendship with Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor. They suggest that the plane crashed after its pilots intentionally deviated from their course to spy on Japanese-occupied islands in the Pacific, or that Earhart and Noonan landed on one of them and were taken prisoner.
"Yet another theory holds that Earhart returned safely to the United States, changed her name and lived a long life in obscurity."
According to some researchers, new discoveries on the Pacific island of Nikumaroro may bring us closer than ever before to an answer.
Not only is the story getting more intriguing as the years pass, it is growing eerily so.
The Earhart Project, a division of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), has been combing the island since 1989.
Artifacts collected include improvised tools, fragments of shoes and aircraft wreckage that is consistent with Earhart's Electra.
Fox News reported last October that researchers had found an aluminum patch that has been identified as one installed on the Electra during the aviator's eight-day stay in Miami, which was the fourth stop on her attempt to circumnavigate the globe.
Even more fascinating, soon after Earhart vanished, a British colonial officer found the remains of a human castaway on Nikumaroro. The bones the officer found were sent to Fiji for analysis, but reportedly, and strangely, were misplaced.
Curses, foiled again!
During TIGHAR's 2010 expedition, the team came across three pieces of a pocketknife, shells that had been cut open, fragments of a glass cosmetic jar, bits of makeup and -- perhaps most intriguing of all--bone fragments that may be from a human. With the help of DNA technology, the new items could finally help reveal how Earhart and Noonan spent their final days.
A piece of aluminum aircraft debris found on the remote atoll, believed to have come from Amelia's Lockheed Electra, has bolstered speculation that a sonar anomaly detected at a depth of 600 feet off the west end of the island is the lost aircraft.
In June 2015, TIGHAR will return to Nikumaroro to investigate the anomaly with Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) technology. During the twenty-four day expedition, divers will search for other wreckage at shallower depths and an onshore search team will seek to identify objects detected in historical photographs that may be relics of an initial survival camp.
Growing evidence suggests that Earhart landed her aircraft safely on the reef at Nikumaroro and sent radio distress calls for at least five nights before the Electra was washed into the ocean by rising tides and surf leaving Earhart and Noonan cast away on the uninhabited atoll.
Several months after the 2012 expedition a member of TIGHAR's online Amelia Earhart Search Forum spotted an unusual feature in the sonar imagery. The object rests at a depth of six hundred feet at the base of a cliff just offshore where TIGHAR believes the Earhart aircraft was washed into the ocean. An analysis of the anomaly by Ocean Imaging Consultants, Inc. of Honolulu -- experts in post-processing sonar data -- revealed the anomaly to be the right size and shape to be the fuselage of Earhart's aircraft.
If Artifact 2-2-V-1 is from the Earhart aircraft, as it appears to be, it seems to have had a different history from the rest of the aircraft. It matches the Miami patch put on her plane, but researchers soon will see if the sonar blip in the sea is the rest of the aircraft.
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