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What Happened to Amelia Earhart?
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Donna McGuire The Kansas City Star |
| August 31, 2001 |
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When Earhart reported being low on fuel, she could have meant the amount remaining before she possibly invoked a contingency plan, some say. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR, based in a house on the outskirts of Wilmington, Delaware, has believed for more than a decade that Earhart abandoned hope of finding Howland and turned southeast, toward the Phoenix Islands about 350 miles (563 kilometers) away. Explaining his theory recently in a Delaware restaurant, TIGHAR executive director Rick Gillespie used a saltshaker to represent Howland. His small tub of coleslaw became the plane. A knife represented the line along which Earhart said she was flying north and south. "If you don't see this island, you explore in both directions," Gillespie explained, moving the coleslaw up and down the knife. An island with a large lagoon would have been easy to spot because lagoon water is a different hue than the ocean, Gillespie said. Based on witnesses who place a plane wreck there, and other evidence, Gillespie believes there's a 95 percent chance Earhart landed on a coral reef at Nikumaroro, formerly known as Gardner Island. Exploration Launched Gillespie leaves Friday with a 12-member team to explore that island for the sixth time since 1989. Over the years, TIGHAR has raised and spent about U.S. $2 million trying to solve the Earhart puzzle on Nikumaroro. If Earhart reached Nikumaroro, it would explain why radio operators hundreds of miles away later claimed to have heard distress calls days after she vanished, Gillespie said. She couldn't have made radio calls if her plane was in the water, Lockheed experts have said. Back in 1937, U.S. officials labeled the distress calls hoaxes. Gillespie, who has plotted the calls on a map, believes some were real. He thinks waves bashed the plane apart before searchers flew over it days later. The current TIGHAR team includes a great-nephew of Earhart's, a forensic specialist and three divers, who will check the reef. A recent satellite photo appears to show something embedded there, Gillespie said. Team members also will look for bones from a castaway whose remains were reported to the British in 1940, before the island was inhabited. After deciding the bones were not Earhart's, the British never told the United States about them, Gillespie's research shows. Having consulted a U.S. expert, Gillespie thinks the British were wrong. He'd like to find a tooth and then seek a DNA match with Earhart's niece, Kleppner, who lives in Vermont. But Kleppner says she will need convincing evidence before providing DNA. Theory Challenged Opponents of TIGHAR's theory argue that the only known runway within 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) was on Howland. If Earhart had extra fuel, wouldn't she have spent it searching for that runway? Earhart had no reason to head so far southeast, they say, and if she had, subsequent survey crews or Nikumaroro's later inhabitants would have found evidence that she had been there. Some also criticize Gillespie for claiming to have found Earhart after an earlier trip, when his team recovered a slab of airplane aluminum and the heel of a woman's shoe. The aluminum's rivets did not match the spacing on a standard Electra, and the heel was too big for Earhart's size-six feet. Gillespie keeps those and other island artifacts in a back room of his house-turned-office. He has a rectangle of metal matching a part used inside an Electra and a Plexiglas chunk that could have been from a cabin window. What he needs is something definitive, such as an engine part bearing Earhart's serial number. Or a DNA match. "Some people don't want it solved," Gillespie said. "They'd rather have the mystery to play with than have it reduced to history." "I've been convinced we got the right place for some time." Copyright 2001 The Kansas City Star What Happened to Amelia Earhart? Theory 1: She plunged into the sea at the place where she made her last radio contact. Go>> Theory 2: She had a contingency plan, and would have made sure she had enough fuel to find another runway. She made land, but died on an uninhabited island. Theory 3: She somehow made it to the Marshall Islands where she was photographed sitting on a beach. She was arrested by the Japanese who may have executed her for being a spy. Or she may have returned to the United States after the war under a new name. Go>> Return to the beginning of this series, the day Amelia Earhart disappeared; includes a sidebar about her life. Go>> |
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