Amelia Earhart's attempt to become the first woman to fly around the globe at the equator ended in mystery when she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in July 1937. With the 90th anniversary of her disappearance on the horizon, a new expedition is setting out to finally determine what happened over the vast Pacific. This expedition has what it believes is crucial new evidence.
The team from Purdue University in Indiana and the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI) is scheduled to depart for the uninhabited island of Nikumaroro on Saturday to determine if an anomaly in the island's lagoon is Earhart's missing plane. Part of the low-lying Pacific island nation of Kiribati, Nikumaroro has long been considered the place where Earhart and Noonan died. The pair took off from New Guinea on July 2, 1937, on the leg to the island of Howland, where they were to refuel before continuing on to Hawaii and completing the circumnavigation in California.
Something went amiss en route, however, and even though a US Coast Guard ship could hear Earhart's radio transmissions and her Lockheed Electra must have been tantalizingly close, she was never found. One of the last messages said she was running on a north-south navigational line that gave her the best chance of finding land before her fuel ran out. That line went through Nikumaroro.
In 1988, researchers from the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) were the first to suggest that Earhart could have reached Nikumaroro and landed on its fringing coral reef. TIGHAR's first visit to the island was in 1989, and the group has returned seven more times, turning up compelling artifacts, including lengths of aircraft aluminum and plexiglass from a windscreen. The group found a scent bottle, a zip made in Pennsylvania in the mid-1930s, parts of a pocket knife of the same brand listed in the aircraft inventory, and the heel of a woman's shoe.
Archive research discovered that human remains discovered on the island in 1940 were initially believed to be of Earhart or Noonan — but were lost in the chaos of the Pacific war. Despite the searches, no one has yet found the "smoking gun" artifact, an item that could only have come from the doomed flight. Expedition leader Rick Pettigrew, executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI), believes the elements may have uncovered incontrovertible evidence.
A powerful tropical cyclone tore through the central Pacific in 2015, shifting geographical features on the island and in its lagoon. Satellite images taken over the following years showed what might be the outline of an aircraft fuselage and wings in shallow water off the Taraia promontory. "This object in the satellite images is exactly the right size to represent the fuselage and tail of the Electra," the ALI website states.
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