Hero may have landed on remote Pacific island
As America endured the drab years of the Great Depression, Amelia Earhart’s exploits were a bright spot.
She broke gender barriers by completing solo flights most male pilots hadn’t accomplished and traveled the country speaking of women’s empowerment and the glorious promise of air travel. Then, she vanished. Her mysterious disappearance over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 has vexed historians and fueled conspiracy theories for decades. Earhart was declared dead after the U.S. government concluded that she crashed.
But an alternate theory of what became of Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, has recently resurfaced in the news.
Ric Gillespie, the director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, thinks Earhart spent her last days as a castaway on a desolate Pacific island.
Gillespie’s group says Earhart’s bones may have been discovered on Gardner Island in 1940, three years after he suspects she crash-landed there.
‘Virtually identical’
British officials discovered a partial human skeleton in 1940 and wondered whether it might belong to the famed aviator. So officials shipped the 13 bones to a medical school in Fiji, where they were examined by Dr. D.W. Hoodless.
Hoodless took measurements and concluded that the bones were likely those of a short, stocky European man — not Earhart’s.
The bones were then discarded.
But TIGHAR investigators think Hoodless was wrong.
In 1998, the group took the measurements from Hoodless and ran them through a more robust anthropological database. The bones, they determined, could have belonged to a taller-than average woman of Euro- pean descent. Earhart was 5-foot-7, or, by some accounts, 5-foot-8 — several inches taller than average.
Curious to know whether the bones could have been Earhart’s, TIGHAR recently asked Jeff Glickman, a forensic examiner, to determine if the measurements matched the missing aviator’s.
Glickman located a photo of Earhart from the Lockheed Aircraft Corp. that has her arms mostly exposed. After rotating the photo and removing distortions, Glickman made educated guesses about Earhart’s upper arm bone — then concluded that the corresponding bone found on Gardner Island could have been Earhart’s.
“Jeff found that Earhart’s humerus to radius ratio was 0.76 — virtually identical to the castaway’s,” according to a TIGHAR statement.
‘The oldest theory’
The new research provides a counterargument to the widely held belief that Earhart crashed into the Pacific Ocean.
TIGHAR believes Earhart was stranded after crash-landing on Gardner Island and used the radio from her damaged plane to call for help for nearly a week before the tide pulled the craft into the sea.
Gillespie, a pilot and accident investigator, has made 11 expeditions to Gardner Island, in the Western Pacific. He’s trying to raise money for a 12th to support this theory — and maybe find Earhart’s plane.
He posted a video presentation about the Gardner Island theory on YouTube in August and recently touted “New Research, New Evidence, New Understanding.”
But, he said: “We’ve been testing this hypothesis for 28 years. ... This supposed new theory is actually the oldest theory.”
“We found a tremendous amount of support for it,” Gillespie added.
Some of that support comes from Earhart’s radio signals seeking help, which investigators say most likely emanated from an area near Gardner Island, Gillespie said.
And a 1937 British expedition exploring the island for settlement snapped a photo of what Gillespie said shows part of the landing gear from Earhart’s plane sticking out of a reef.
“On an uninhabited island, there shouldn’t be anything sticking up out of the water,” Gillespie said.
Adding to the body of evidence, Gillespie said, the radio in Earhart’s plane could not work if it had been in the water as suspected, yet she sent out radio signals for nearly a week after apparently crashing.
In 1928, Earhart became the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean. Nine years later, she sought to fly around the world. But she encountered trouble over the Pacific.
They were looking to refuel at Howland Island, halfway between Hawaii and Australia, but strong winds had thrown them off course, and nighttime navigation was impeded by an overcast sky, Gillespie said.
Gillespie said he thinks that as the plane’s fuel tanks emptied, Earhart and Noonan spied a landing spot on Gardner Island, now called Nikumaroro, about 400 miles south of Howland. The coral atoll has a wide reef that is dry at low tide — a serviceable landing strip.
‘True believers’
Gillespie’s Gardner Island theory has its critics, though.
Elgen Long, a Navy combat veteran and an expert on Earhart’s disappearance, wrote a book saying her plane crashed into the Pacific and sank.
The metal piece was from a different kind of plane, he told National Geographic.
Long criticized Gillespie in 2014, telling The Post: “You’ll never convince true believers that they aren’t right. You’re just confusing them with facts.”