Alternate theory of Earhart’s death getting new life
Nonprofit thinks her plane crashed on 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 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 somewhere in the Pacific as she tried to become the first woman to circle the globe.
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.
Stranded after a crashlanding, Gillespie believes, Earhart 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 last month and recently touted “New Research, NewEvidence, 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 saymost likely emanated froman 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.
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.
“Earhart made a relatively safe landing at Gardner Island and sent radio distress calls for six days,” Gillespie said in the YouTube presentation. “There are 47 messages heard by professional radio operators that appear to be credible.”
In 1928, Earhart became the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean. Nine years later, she sought to fly around theworld. But she encountered trouble somewhere over thePacific.
Some think Earhart’s LockheedModel 10 Electra ran out of fuel and plummeted into the Pacific. Others say she and navigator Noonan were captured by the Japanese, who thought theywere spies.
But Gillespie thinks Earhart and Noonan made it to the ground injured but intact.
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 lowtide— a serviceable landing strip.
Gillespie said he thinks the landing was rough but survivable. Earhart had minor injuries; Noonan’s were worse, based on Earhart’s alleged radio calls, which TIGHAR has studied.
(Gillespie and his wife are the only paid members of the Pennsylvania-based group, although he says TIGHAR has a team of experts and more than 1,000 members.)
And the airplane still had fuel — not enough to get anywhere, but enough to power the plane’s battery and work the radio, Gillespie said. . “She’s out there calling for help,” Gillespie said, adding that radio operators he talked to — and others written about in published reports — felt certain they were listening to Earhart. “They recognize her voice. There’s no doubt in their mind.”
In their expeditions, TIGHAR members think Aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
they have of days.
According of London:
“His group has found improvised tools, shoe remains and aircraft wreckage, as well as pieces of a pocket knife, bits of makeup and bone fragments. Mr. Gillespie said that credible radio operators recognized Earhart’s weak voice in a message about six hours after she went missing. She said that she was injured but not as badly asNoonan.
TIGHAR posted its conclusions about Earhart’s demise on itswebsite.
“Earhart (and possibly Noonan) lived for a time as castaways on the waterless atoll, relying on rain squalls for drinking water,” the site says. “They caught and cooked small fish, seabirds,
found other evidence Earhart’s final
to
the
Times
turtles and clams. Amelia died at a makeshift campsiteonthe island’s southeast end. Noonan’s fate is unknown.”
Their plane was washed into the Pacific, TIGHAR claims. During a previous expedition, Gillespie says the group found a piece of what appears to be the Electra.
“Whatever remains of the Electra lies in deep water off the island’s west end,” he said.
Gillespie’s Gardner Island theory has its critics.
“This group (TIGHAR) comes out every year or two with this info or something like it, show us the proof please!” one tweeted.
Elgen Long, a Navy combat veteranandanexperton Earhart’s disappearance, wrote a book saying her plane crashed into the Pacific
and sank.
The metal piece was from a different plane, he toldNationalGeographic.
Long criticized Gillespie in 2014, telling The Washington Post’s Justin Wm. Moyer: “You’ll never convince true believers that they aren’t right. You’re just confusing them with facts.”
But Gillespie, who has referred to Long as “the patron saint of ’crashed and sank,’” told The Post that scientific discovery has never been linear.
“This is what science really is like,” he said. “You develop a hypothesis. You see if it’s wrong. It’s failure after failure after success after failure. If you do it right, you domake progress. ... I am passionate about figuring stuff out. I’m an investigator, a detective at heart.”