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.
After spending $2 million on five expeditions, the grouphas uncovered little physical evidence other than a rubberheel, some pieces of aluminum and a forensic report suggestingthat bones discovered on the island decades ago and now lostmay have belonged to a woman of northern European extraction.
A $400,000 Expedition
Critics says the bones and other paraphernalia belonged toEuropean castaways from a shipwreck that occurred a decadebefore Earhart's perilous flight.
"In the eyes of reality, there's nothing there. Otherpeople have scoured the island and none of us has ever everfelt that she was there," said retired Air Force Col. RollinReineck, a member of the Amelia Earhart Society who believesshe was captured by the Japanese in the Marshalls.
Gillespie will lead a sixth, $400,000 expedition to theisland on Aug. 24, and hopes to know by the first week inSeptember whether ferrous metal from a 1930s-vintage airplaneis responsible for the satellite images. He and his team aredue to return to the United States on Sept. 24.
Images taken on April 16 by Lockheed Martin-built Ikonos 2satellite do not register anything as distinct as the shape ofan airplane. But at maximum resolution, TIGHAR researchersnoticed two rust-colored computer pixels off the island'sshoreline that Gillespie is convinced is metal debris.
While the shipwreck lies just nearby, Gillespie hopes tofind the rusting steel engine mounts, landing gear legs andgear rods of a plane like the one flown by Earhart.
"We can certainly tell what kind of airplane it was," hesaid. "I know the insides of a Lockheed Electra like the backof my hand by now."
The satellite images were taken by Space Imaging ofThornton, Colo., the same company that supplied news outletswith satellite images of a U.S. Navy surveillance plane on arunway in China where it landed after a midair collision witha Chinese fighter in April.