Posted on 06/21/2017 1:40:59 PM PDT by BenLurkin
The expedition’s destination is Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island some 1,000 miles north of Fiji. The members of TIGHAR have devoted the last three decades to testing what they call the Nikumaroro hypothesis—that when Earhart and Noonan couldn’t find Howland, they landed on Nikumaroro.
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The coral atoll is 350 nautical miles southwest of Howland, on the line of position (157 NW 337 SE) that Earhart identified in her last confirmed radio message. Up the northwest line, there’s nothing but empty ocean for thousands of miles. To the southeast are the Phoenix Islands, which include Nikumaroro. “If you don’t know where you are,” says Ric Gillespie, the executive director of TIGHAR, “that’s the logical direction to head.”
Nikumaroro, then called Gardner Island, has a reef flat where Earhart could have landed the Electra during low tide. More intriguingly, when the island was temporarily colonized in 1940, during the last gasp of the British Empire, 13 bones were discovered, shipped to Fiji, measured—and subsequently lost. The colonial administrator suspected they might be Earhart's, and the TIGHAR researchers suspect they know the site where the bones were found.
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That’s where the dogs come in. Human remains detection dogs from the Institute for Canine Forensics (ICF) have nosed out burial sites as deep as nine feet and as old as 1,500 years. “No other technology is more sophisticated than the dogs,” says Fred Hiebert, archaeologist in residence at the National Geographic Society, which is sponsoring the canines. “They have a higher rate of success identifying things than ground-penetrating radar.”
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“The dogs are not effective when the ground temperature is over 80 degrees,”
“The crabs are our friends,” says Hiebert... If their stash includes human bones, “that would provide the environment to retain those decomposition smells.”
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
I think it would be really cool to finally find her remains. Quite the mystery!
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Not really. She was poorly prepared for that leg of the trip and almost guaranteed to fail. There’s a lot of ocean out there and very little land. She was more of a daredevil than a pilot and it eventually caught up with her.
I think it would be really cool to finally find her remains. Quite the mystery!
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Not really. She was poorly prepared for that leg of the trip and almost guaranteed to fail. There’s a lot of ocean out there and very little land. She was more of a daredevil than a pilot and it eventually caught up with her.
I think the answer to your question is rather self evident. Verification would reveal what happened to her on her last flight. It may not matter to you, and such a detail of history may not make much impact on our daily lives, but human curiosity drives the quest to find the answer. In the same way the search to find the remains of Noah’s Ark, or proving the identity of Jack the Ripper or the Zodiac Killer, or determining what happened to Judge Crater holds fascination to this day.
Yeah, that’s what it says here in the excerpt.
Well, dead IS dead, but it would be fun to finally solve the mystery.
Ask the Russians! They prolly hacked her airplane for spying for the Japanese. If Putin hasn’t destroyed her KGB dossier. </satire possibly>
My dad sez Hoffa went in the trunk of a car to the crusher and then onward to the furnaces (on Zug island?). Nothing much left.
I agree with the theory they crashed in the Japanese mandate islands (Carolines) and were taken to Saipan and executed and/or died there of disease. See Fred Goerner’s “The Search for Amelia Earhart”
https://www.amazon.com/Search-Amelia-Earhart-Fred-Goerner/dp/0385074247
http://articles.latimes.com/1987-06-28/news/vw-2_1_amelia-earhart
Beautiful Electra on display at one of the Chino CA Airport museums.
So why not wait until January to go smelling for them?
There are old pilots, and bold pilots.
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