The Search for Amelia Earhart

PHILADELPHIA, July 13, 2001 — -- A U.S. researcher hopingto solve the mystery of aviator Amelia Earhart's fate saidtoday that satellite pictures may have located the wreckage ofan aircraft near the remote Pacific island where he believesshe crash-landed 64 years ago.

Satellite images of Nikumaroro Island in the southwesternPacific republic of Kiribati appear to show rusting metal underwater just offshore, in an area where native fishermen are saidto have once seen the wreckage of an airplane.

"It's the best lead we've ever had," said RichardGillespie, executive director of The International Group forHistoric Airplane Recovery, or TIGHAR, which has been searchingthe tiny coral atoll for evidence of Earhart's fate since1989.

"I can't sit here and tell you that's the wreckage ofAmelia Earhart's airplane. But it's an anomaly that's in theplace where an anecdotal account said there's airplanewreckage," he told Reuters in an interview.

Earhart, an aviator of near mythic proportions who was thefirst woman pilot to cross the Atlantic, disappeared over thePacific Ocean with her navigator Fred Noonan and their LockheedA-10E Electra aircraft on July 2, 1937, while trying to flyaround the world.

Theories of Her Fate Abound

Most researchers believe her plane ran out of gas andcrashed into the Pacific near Howard Island, less than an hourafter Earhart radioed that they were lost and low on fuel.

But theories about her ultimate fate abound.

Some believe she and Noonan were captured by the Japanesewhile gathering military intelligence for the United States. Asource no less illustrious than the late U.S. Navy Adm. ChesterNimitz has been quoted as saying, just before he died, thatEarhart and Noonan went down in the Marshall Islands and werecaptured by the Japanese.

But Wilmington, Del.-based TIGHAR says there is strongreason to suggest Earhart's plane made it to Nikumaroro,formerly known as Gardner Island, hundreds of miles from itslast point of radio contact.