Posted on 12/17/2010 12:46:01 AM PST by Jet Jaguar
US aircraft history buffs are hopeful that tiny bones along with artefacts from the 1930s found on a remote Pacific island may reveal the fate of pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart. In one of aviation's most enduring mysteries, Earhart took off from Lae, in what is now Papua New Guinea, while attempting to circumnavigate the globe via the equator in 1937 and was never seen again.
A massive search at the time failed to find the flyer and her navigator Fred Noonan, who were assumed to have died after ditching their Lockheed Electra aircraft in the ocean, according to the Amelia Earhart Museum.
Now aviation enthusiasts from US-based group The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) say they have evidence suggesting the pair made it safely to Nikumaroro Island in Kiribati and lived as castaways.
TIGHAR executive director Rick Gillespie said the group, which has carried out 10 expeditions to Nikumaroro over the past 22 years, found three small bone fragments on the uninhabited island earlier this year.
Gillespie said the bones appeared to be part of a human finger, although they could also be from a turtle, and had been sent to the Molecular Science Laboratories at Oklahoma University for DNA analysis.
"We're very hopeful that this will produce the result we're looking for," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Thursday.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
They found him. He was last seen wearing a fright wig and a frumpy dress, calling himself “Janet Napolitano”!
Neat!
It was either a woman’s finger or a turtle’s finger.
They lost the original bones, and these are “new” ones?
No. They found a skeleton [or most of it] in 1940 on Gardner Island. It was sent to Fiji for autopsy [declared to be a Polynesian woman], then the skeleton was lost.
These are additional bones found in recent archeological digs ...
Good God, that is the creepiest thing I have ever seen. Looks like a gigantic tick. I had to google it to make sure your pic wasn’t some Photoshop prank...bbrrrrr!
I like that picture!
That’s what I said/meant. Have a good weekend.
Except that he couldn't figure out how to fix a two-foot hole in the boat.
Either Americans will finally learn the fate of one of their most famous women, or a turtle family out there somewhere will know what happened to grandpa.
Same here.
So, I went back and looked for definitions and references.
The AUTHOR did refer to a SEXTON BOX, and not a SEXTON.
IMHO, the author screwed up, as all other references to a 'box' recovered from that area are of a SEXTANT BOX.
"Sextant box found on Nikumaroro"
(source: http://tighar.org/wiki/Sextant_box_found_on_Nikumaroro#Dovetailed_sextant_boxes)
As I read more about this, I come to two conclusions. First, these TIGHAR people seem to be convinced that they've discovered where Earhart died. That is likely shading what they're 'discovering' and NOT 'discovering' at this point.
Second, if everything reported is true, this could well be where Earhart pul her Electra down on a reef. There have apparently been other findings, including a piece of plexiglass the exact thickness, curvature, and shape of a rear window of an Electra. All these items - a woman's shoe from the 1930's, of the type Earhart wore, with an American (Cat's-Paw) heel; the same model pocket knife carried on Earhart's last flight; a 1930's compact; an American zipper pull from the 1930's; cut-up pieces of aircraft aluminum with the same type of rivet used on the Electra; pieces of a hand lotion bottle manufactured in the US circa 1935; and more - suggest there was a 1930's era Western woman castaway on the southeast point of the island.
Earhart? Who knows.
Also, remember that it was the bones and part of a sextant box (and perhaps part of a shoe) that was found in 1940. Everything else has been found over multiple expeditions to the island since the 1990s, bit by bit. And in 1940, speculation that the skeleton was that of Amelia Earhart was put to rest when the bones were examined on Fiji. They were determined to be of a mixed-race man, if I remember correctly. The bones and sextant box are long-since lost.
It's only been since the measurements taken in 1940 or so were entered into a computer that researchers concluded the skeleton was that of a white woman approximately 5'7". That researcher was part of the team trying to find Earhart and wasn't independent. She didn't have the bones, only measurements made on Fiji 50 years earlier.
The thing that I found interesting was he was tight with the Carnies, used to do their electrical hook ups, Mass Electrical Inspectors can be real A-Holes, and Carnies Trust no one except one of their own.
I got an insite into a culture that I did not know existed, similar to the Travelers.
A sexton box - wow - and a female one at that :o)
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