Expedition to find Amelia Earhart begins in Honolulu
This undated file photo shows Amelia Earhart. A group of scientists and historians have launched a $2.2 million expedition to find out what happened to the famed aviator who went missing over the Pacific Ocean 75 years ago. / AP Photo
(AP) HONOLULU - A $2.2 million expedition is hoping to finally solve one of America's most enduring mysteries: What exactly happened to famed aviator Amelia Earhart when she went missing over the South Pacific 75 years ago?
A group of scientists, historians and salvagers think they have a good idea, and are trekking from Honolulu to a remote island in the Pacific nation of Kiribati starting Tuesday in hopes of finding wreckage of Earhart's Lockheed Electra plane in nearby waters.
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Their working theory is that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan landed on a reef near the Kiribati atoll of Nikumaroro, then survived a short time.
"Everything has pointed to the airplane having gone over the edge of that reef in a particular spot and the wreckage ought to be right down there," said Ric Gillespie, the founder and executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, the group leading the search.
Learn more about the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery and their mission in the video below
"We're going to search where it — in quotes — should be," he said. "And maybe it's there, maybe it's not. And there's no way to know unless you go and look."
Previous visits to the island have recovered artifacts that could have belonged to Earhart and Noonan, and experts say an October 1937 photo of the shoreline of the island could include a blurry image of the strut and wheel of a Lockheed Electra landing gear.
"That was the icing on the cake," said Gillespie, who said the picture added to 24 years of evidence gathering used to form the group's working theory.
The photo was enough for the U.S. State Department to hold an event to give encouragement to the privately funded expedition, and enough for the Kiribati government to sign a contract with the group to work together if anything is found, Gillespie said.
But the hunt using nearly 30,000 pounds of specialized underwater equipment is just a sophisticated way to try to prove a hunch that could be flat wrong, or not provable if the plane simply floated too far or broke up into tiny, undetectable pieces.
A separate group working under a different theory plans its third voyage later this year near Howland Island.
Earhart and Noonan were flying from New Guinea to Howland Island when they went missing July 2, 1937, during Earhart's bid to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.
Gillespie's group raised enough funds to embark on the nearly monthlong voyage through individual and corporate donors, including funds from Discovery, which plans to document the trip and air it on cable TV in August, and $750,000 worth of free shipping from FedEx of the underwater science gear, Gillespie said.
Still, the trip is nearly a half-million dollars short, said Patricia Webb, a retired Air Force colonel who helped raise funds for the trip.
If the voyage succeeds, it could add to Earhart's legacy and solve a mystery that's captured national attention since her disappearance, she said.
"If they find something, that adds a lot of credibility to her, to her navigator Fred Noonan, and to their survival skills because of the things that have been found so far on Nikumaroro," she said.
Quest to solve the Amelia Earhart mystery
The trip is planned to last roughly 26 days, including 10 days of searching and 16 days traveling between Honolulu and the atoll. The voyagers will use a ship owned by the University of Hawaii, an oceanographic research vessel named Kaimikai-O-Kanaloa, which translates into English, "The Searcher of the Seas of the God Kanaloa."
Gillespie said the group has as good of a chance as it can expect given its equipment, including an unmanned vehicle that looks like a torpedo used for mapping terrain on the ocean floor and a tethered remote-operated vehicle that will be used to take pictures and look at objects identified in the water.
And Earhart's standing as an American icon — especially to young women — and fascination in her story means it's important to solve the mystery, he said.
"That kind of inspiration matters," Gillespie said. "We want to know what happened to her."
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My prediction back in June has proven true: The latest fantasy "Search for Amelia Earhart" is on its way back to reality, skunked again!
After twenty years of escorting gullible thrill seekers to Gardner Island in the Pacific, the "IGHAR" organization has yet again come away from their fantasy island empty handed.
After making monumental fools of themselves back in May and June with their usual brand of self-serving hyperbole and claims of "evidence" of finding Amelia Earhart, "TIGHAR" as it pompously calls itself, has begun their voyage of shame back to the U.S., and, also in their now predictable pattern, they are saying little about their colossal failure, as they begin the months of preparations for what one could be forgiven for predicting will be yet another issuance of claims of "evidence" followed by the announcement of, yes, another fantasy expedition to "Nikkumororo" after bulking up on financial contributions.
In late spring, as they began breathlessly hyping their latest exploit to the news media, the IGHAR posted a plea on their website for more money, promising, this time, to really, really, really, really bring home the definitive evidence that Amelia Earhart landed and died on "Nikkumororo," leaving her Lockheed Electra lying upside down with its landing gear sticking up out of the Gardner Island lagoon in plain sight of any of the scores of people who have lived on or visited Gardner in the last seventy-five years to see. (There were, of course, no reports).
In the highly unlikely event that any of my readers have been on a truly deserted island or for some other reason not read a newspaper or watched a television news program in the last twenty years, I will spell it out for you in plain, if rather exaggerated bold-faced type for emphasis:
AMELIA EARHART DID NOT LAND ON OR ANYWHERE NEAR, BY A FACTOR OF HUNDREDS OF MILES, GARDNER ISLAND. THERE IS NOT AND NEVER HAS BEEN ANY EVIDENCE THAT WOULD CAUSE A REASONABLE PERSON TO BELIEVE THAT AMELIA EARHART AND HER NAVIGATOR FREDERICK NOONAN ALIGHTED ON GARDNER ISLAND, OR ANYWHERE WITHIN HUNDREDS OF MILES OF THAT LOCATION.
One thing is certain, she didn't land on Gardner Island or anywhere else in the Phoenix Islands. Period. That should be the end of it.
Richard Gillespie, the principal huckster behind "TIGHAR" has been living off the Amelia Earhart story for over twenty years. He's escorted his paying followers on at least ten or more of these fruitless exploits since 1990. He's not only bamboozled his fantasy cruise customers, but has conned news organizations into perpetuating interest in a theory of the Amelia Earhart disappearance that is illogical, unsupportable and for which there is not a scintilla of evidence.
I a few days, interest in the latest "TIGHAR" snipe hunt will end, and in another few months, the organizatn will be back again, generating bogus "evidence" and "claims" of scientific discovery, all in the name of generating a profit from the people whom P.T. Barnum said were born every minute.
I would invite-and challenge-all professional writers and news reporters to do a little research on the history of the "TIGHAR" organization before publishing their press releases as news.
Since the 1990s, this organization has repeatedly made claims of having discovered "evidence" of Amelia Earhart having crashed at their preferred expedition site, Gardner Island ("Nikumororo"). Again and again, they have conducted these commercial expeditions and every time, they have brought back some form of "evidence" of Amelia Earhart having been there.
This "evidence" is merely a repetition of a very old pattern of bogus findings and is not a "clue" in the Amelia Earhart story. This is but the latest in a twenty-year series of specious and misleading statements issued by this organization, "TIGHAR", designed to garner attention to itself and to promote its for-profit fantasy-expedition "research" into the Amelia Earhart story.
The entire Phoenix Islands area was thoroughly searched at the time of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, in July, 1937. Since then, here was a British colonial settlement (the last) on the island throughout much of the mid-twentieth century, as well as U.S. military installations built there and staffed during and after WWII, with scores of people living there and visitng in the intervening years. Any evidence of Amelia Earhart's having ever been there would have been discovered decades ago.
Last month, the "TIGHAR" organization issued a press release, stating that they had discovered a photograph purporting to show the landing gear of Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra sticking up out of the Gardner Island lagoon. The idea of Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra landing gear protruding out of the surface of the lagoon at low tide and not being seen at some point in the last 75 years is patently absurd.
Analyses of radio direction-finder and aeronautical navigation data, along with official documents and the testimony of credible witnesses, have conclusively shown that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were in the Marshall Islands group and never closer than a thousand miles from Gardner Island.
The "TIGHAR" organization has fixated on Gardner (aka "Nikumaroro") Island, because it suits their profit-making tour business, which escorts its customers on paid expeditions every year or so, and has for many years. A simple check of the press history of the organization will reveal many instances of so-called "discoveries" of "evidence" (airplane parts, bottles, shoes, etc.) from this same location, all of which have been swiftly debunked by actual bona fide historical experts, not "experts" associated with this commercial, for-profit company.
This latest publicity-seeking exploit, which also involves a ploy to co-opt the U.S. State Department into lending its imprimatur to the group's business activities-will die down quickly, and, in all likelihood, will re-surface in a few months with new "evidence" to compel adventurers to pay handsomely for the TIGHAR "historians" to escort them on another two-week expedition to the Central Pacific.
Ironically, CBS News, in its own production of "Lost Star: The Search for Ameila Earhart," (Air Date, January 24, 1994) based upon my book of the same title, provides a stunning visual account, and great reporting by Russ Mitchell, of what happened to Amelia Earhart in 1937. It happened nowhere near Gardner Island.
Randall Brink
Author
randallbrink.com
If you were stranded on a round atoll, to find the sun line, you would place your feet toward the sun at sunrise and look right and left. At the point where there is no beach visible to either side of you is where the sun line is tangent to the coastline of the atoll. That's what you needed in those days to identify your location on a barren island-- the sunrise point on the horizon and the beach location that is perpendicular to it. Now if you look at where they believe Earhart and Noonan died on Gardner/Nikomororo Island (the "Seven" site), it is exactly where the 157-337 navigational line runs tangent to the beach.
They were on the sun line. They died there.
I bet they really hate playing on a tropical island with lots of expensive toys, eh?