Amelia Earhart's Finger Bone Recovered? A tiny bone fragment collected on a remote tropical island could be turtle -- or it could belong to the legendary pilot, researchers say.
discovery - A tiny bone fragment could provide crucial information about the fate of Amelia Earhart, the legendary pilot who disappeared 73 years ago while flying over the Pacific Ocean in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator.
Collected on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, the bone has raised the interest of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has long been investigating the Earhart mystery, as it may be from a human finger.
The phalax was found together with other artifacts during a month-long expedition last June to the tiny coral atoll believed to be Earhart's final resting place.
"At first we assumed it was from the turtle whose remains we found nearby. Indeed, sea turtles have finger bones in their flippers. But further research suggests it could also be human," Ric Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR, told Discovery News.
TIGHAR's investigations and theories challenge the assumption that Earhart's twin-engined Lockheed "Electra" crashed in the ocean when running out of fuel on July 2, 1937.
Their findings, along with historical reconstructions of Earhart's disappearance and the futile massive search that followed, are detailed in "Finding Amelia," a Discovery Channel documentary that airs Saturday at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The Discovery Channel.
"After 22 years of rigorous research and 10 grueling expeditions, we can say that all of the evidence we have found on Nikumaroro is consistent with the hypothesis that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan landed and eventually died there as castaways," Gillespie said.
Indeed, a number of artifacts unearthed on the uninhabited island provide strong circumstantial evidence for a castaway presence.
Among the most interesting features are the remains of small fires with birds and fish bones, giant clams that had been opened like a New England oyster, empty shells laid out as if to collect rain water, pieces of a pocket knife, pieces of rouge and the broken mirror from a woman's compact, and pre-war American bottles with melted bottoms that had once stood in a fire as if to boil drinking water.
Discovered near turtle remains on the island's remote southeast end, in an area called the Seven Site, where campsite and fire features were also found, the mysterious tiny finger bone is one of the most promising pieces.
Initially, Gillespie and his team did not pay much attention to the tiny fragment, assuming it belonged to the turtle. It was only when archaeologist Tom King catalogued the turtle bones that questions began to arise.
"We discovered that the turtle remains consisted only of parts of the carapace and plastron (the shell and underbelly). There were no limb bones. If whoever brought the turtle to the Seven Site didn't bring the legs, how did a phalanx get there?" said Gillespie.
Densely vegetated in shrubs known as Scaevola frutescens, the Seven Site site is where the partial skeleton of a castaway was found in 1940.
Recovered by British Colonial Service Officer Gerald Gallagher, human remains were described in a forensic report and attributed to an individual "more likely female than male," "more likely white than Polynesian or other Pacific Islander," "most likely between 5 feet 5 inches and 5 feet 9 inches in height." Unfortunately the bones have been lost.
Gillespie believes that many of the bones might have been carried off by crabs, suggesting an unmerciful end for Earhart.
However, parts of the skeleton not found in 1940 may still remain at the site.
"We know that none of the hand bones of the castaway were found in 1940. Could that bone be a human finger?" Gillespie said.
Forensic anthropologist Karen Ramey Burns, a specialist in the identification of human remains, examined the phalanx. She could not say with certainty that it was or was not human.
"Human and turtle phalanges are easily distinguishable when they are whole and complete. The problem with that bone is the fragmentation and disintegration. Many key morphological details are not visible," Burns told Discovery News.
The mystery will be soon solved when the finger bone is examined at the Molecular Science Laboratories at Oklahoma University in Norman, Okla.
"Whether or not the phalanx bone yields human DNA, there is a sufficient preponderance of circumstantial evidence to continue our research with hope and determination," Gillespie said.
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June 2010
Signs of Amelia Earhart's Final Days?
Three pieces of a pocket knife and fragments of what might be a broken cosmetic glass jar are adding new evidence that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan landed and eventually died as castaways on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati. The island was some 300 miles southeast of their target destination, Howland Island.
"These objects have the potential to yield DNA, specifically what is known as 'touch DNA','" Ric Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), told Discovery News in an email interview from Nikumaroro.
Gillespie and his team will be searching the tiny island until June 14 for evidence that Earhart's twin-engine plane, the "Electra," did not crash in the ocean and sink, as it was assumed after the futile massive search that followed the aviatrix's disappearance on July 2, 1937.
Tall, slender, blonde and brave, Earhart was flying over the Pacific Ocean in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator. In her final radio transmission Earhart reported that her aircraft was running low on fuel.
According to Gillespie, recent advances in the ability to extract DNA from touched objects might help solve the enduring aviation mystery.
"If DNA from the recovered objects matches the Earhart reference sample now held by the DNA lab we've been working with, we'll have what most people would consider to be conclusive evidence that Amelia Earhart spent her last days on Nikumaroro," Gillespie said.
The expedition marks TIGHAR's tenth visit to Nikumaroro since 1989. During the previous campaigns, the group uncovered a number of artifacts which, combined with archival research, provide strong circumstantial evidence for a castaway presence.
The ongoing excavation is now focusing on the island's remote southeast end, in an area called the Seven Site. Densely vegetated in shrubs known as Scaevola frutescens, the site appears to be where the partial skeleton of a castaway was found in 1940.
Recovered by British Colonial Service Officer Gerald Gallagher, the human remains were described in a forensic report and attributed to a white female of northern European extraction, about 5 feet 7 inches tall, a stature consistent with that of Amelia Earhart. Unfortunately the bones have been lost.
Gillespie believes that many of the bones might have been carried off by giant coconut crabs, suggesting an unmerciful end for Earhart. However, parts of the skeleton not found in 1940 (the spine, ribs, half of the pelvis, hands and feet, one arm, and one lower leg) may still remain at the site, scattered in the bush.
The researchers have just carried out an experiment to test the hypothesis.
"In 2007 we conducted a taphonomy experiment with a small pig carcass to see how quickly the crabs would eat the remains, and how far, if at all, the crabs dragged the bones. The primary answers were 'pretty quickly' and 'all over the place,'" Patricia Thrasher, TIGHAR's president, told Discovery News.
"This trip, they went back to the site to look at the bones that were left. It's now been three years that these mammal bones have been out in the weather on Nikumaroro. If Gallagher found Amelia Earhart's bones, that's how long they would have been lying out," Thrasher said.
Indeed, the bones looked much older than three years, in accordance with Gallagher's report of gray, pitted, dry remains.
Gillespie dropped the pig bones on the coral rubble, and they virtually disappeared, to the point that it took some searching to find them again some 10 minutes later.
Apart from searching the coral rubble for bones not seen by Gallangher, the team is investigating an area around a big Ren tree. There, they spotted a rough ring of fire remains which prompted several questions.
Did the castaway construct a ring of fire to keep the crabs away at night? Was it an attempt to signal search aircraft?
Other questions come from the pocket knife and the glass jar fragments. Perhaps a cosmetic jar, the small container features some sort of embossing on the base, either letters or numbers now unreadable because of the dirt.
"The finds are indeed important. In the case of the knife, we found part of it in 2007 and have now found more. The artifacts tell a story of an ordinary pocket knife that was beaten apart to detach the blades for some reason," Thrasher said.
Was the castaway trying to make a fishing spear? Were the blades used for prying clams?
More questions are likely to come up in the next days. The researchers have just found another fire feature and are about to excavate the area, while other members of the team are exploring the Western Reef Slope, a strip of coral reef at the island's western end.
Using a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV), they plan to carry out an underwater search for the wreckage of Earhart's "Electra."
According to the researchers, the steep nature of the reef slope makes it likely that any wreckage lies perhaps as far as 1,000 feet down.
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October 2009
Earhart's Final Resting Place Believed Found
discovery - Legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart most likely died on an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, according to researchers at The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR).
Tall, slender, blonde and brave, Earhart disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937 in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator. Her final resting place has long been a mystery.
For years, Richard Gillespie, TIGHAR's executive director and author of the book "Finding Amelia," and his crew have been searching the Nikumaroro island for evidence of Earhart. A tiny coral atoll, Nikumaroro was some 300 miles southeast of Earhart's target destination, Howland Island.
A number of artifacts recovered by TIGHAR would suggest that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, made a forced landing on the island's smooth, flat coral reef.
According to Gillespie, who is set to embark on a new $500,000 Nikumaroro expedition next summer, the two became castaways and eventually died there.
"We know that in 1940 British Colonial Service officer Gerald Gallagher recovered a partial skeleton of a castaway on Nikumaroro. Unfortunately, those bones have now been lost," Gillespie said.
The archival record by Gallagher suggests that the bones were found in a remote area of the island, in a place that was unlikely to have been seen during an aerial search.
A woman's shoe, an empty bottle and a sextant box whose serial numbers are consistent with a type known to have been carried by Noonan were all found near the site where the bones were discovered.
"The reason why they found a partial skeleton is that many of the bones had been carried off by giant coconut crabs. There is a remote chance that some of the bones might still survive deep in crab burrows," Gillespie said.
Although she did not succeed in her around-the-world expedition, Earhart flew off into the legend just after her final radio transmission.
Books, movies and television specials about her disappearance abound as well as speculation about her fate. Theories proliferated that she was a spy, that she was captured by the Japanese, that she died in a prisoner-of-war camp, and that she survived and returned to live her life as a New Jersey housewife.
A new biopic about Earhart's life, starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere, opens this weekend.
The general consensus has been that the plane had run out of fuel and crashed in the Pacific Ocean, somewhere near Howland Island.
But according to Gillespie, the "volume of evidence" TIGHAR has gathered suggests an alternative scenario.
"Propagation analysis of nearly 200 radio signals heard for several days after the disappearance make it virtually indisputable that the airplane was on land," Gillespie said.
Eventually, Earhart's twin-engine plane, the Electra, was ripped apart by Nikumaroro's strong waves and swept out into deep water, leaving no visible trace.
"The evidence is plentiful -- but not conclusive yet -- to support the hypothesis that Amelia landed and died on the island of Nikumaroro," forensic anthropologist Karen Ramey Burns told Discovery News.
The author of a book on Earhart, Burns believes that the strongest of the amassed evidence comes from the report related to the partial skeleton found by Gallagher.
"The skeleton was found to be consistent in appearance with females of European descent in the United States today, and the stature was consistent with that of Amelia Earhart," said Burns.
According to Burns, another piece of documentary evidence comes from the accounts of Lt. John O. Lambrecht, a U.S. Naval aviator participating in the search for Earhart's plane. Lambrecht reported "signs of recent habitation" on what was an officially uninhabited atoll.
Lambrechet's report begs the question: Why did no one follow up?
"I have stood in plain sight on Nikumaroro in a white shirt waving wildly as a helicopter flew over me and was not noticed until the video tape of the flight was examined," Burns said.
"I find it very easy to believe that Amelia and Fred would not have been seen by the pilot. If the Electra was not visible at the time, their last chance of rescue was lost in Lambrecht's notes," she added.
Abandoned on a desert island where temperatures often exceed 100 degrees, even in the shade, Earhart and Noonan likely eventually succumbed to any number of causes, including injury and infection, food poisoning from toxic fish, or simply dehydration.
The coconut crabs' great pincers would have done the rest, likely removing some of the last physical traces of this pioneering aviatrix.
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Claim: Amelia Earhart's Plane, Remains Found
stuff - Seventy-three years after the aircraft flown by aviatrix Amelia Earhart went missing, the wreckage of a plane some claim is hers has been found in deep water 800 kilometres east of where she was last seen.
But claims that the Lockheed Electra – with the remains of two humans in it – is lying in the Solomon Seas, off the west coast of the island of Buka in Papua New Guinea, have provoked derision from professional Earhart hunters, who believe she got further.
"It is causing a lot of excitement here," journalist Stain Sawa, from PNG's National Broadcasting Corporation, said yesterday.
Although he has yet to see it himself, he says experts say the plane is an Electra, the type Earhart was flying when she disappeared. "The plane is still intact but is partly covered by coral reef."
The fate of the American celebrity flier and her navigator Fred Noonan has been an enduring mystery since they took off from Lae, in New Guinea, on July 2, 1937, for Howland Atoll, an uninhabited United States island 3000 kilometres southwest of Honolulu.
Some claim she fell into Japanese hands and was taken prisoner and killed as a spy, while others say she crashed on the island of Nikumaroro in Kiribati and died there.
Tighar, a foundation based in the US state of Delaware, has a contract with Discovery Television to explore Nikumaroro for Earhart, and claims it has found evidence.
Executive director Ric Gillespie said that while Buka would have been on the route Earhart flew, Tighar believed it could prove she got much further. "Someone finds an Earhart plane at least once a month," he said from Delaware.
The find at Buka, which is at the northern end of the province of Bougainville, has turned into a political drama with fears that an American group is trying to take as much of the plane as it can.
Local politicians have become involved and an expedition is to be mounted next month in a bid to confirm the identity of the plane.
It lies in waters up to 40 metres deep.
The Earhart mystery has had a tenuous New Zealand link.
In 1940, a British colonial ship, Viti, took 17 New Zealand soldiers and radio operators to the Gilbert Islands to act as coastwatchers. After dropping the men off, the ship went on to Nikumaroro, where they found two sets of human bones.
They packed them into a wooden sextant box. Back in Suva, a doctor concluded that one set must have belonged to a white man. They closed the box and the war went on.
The box has never been found but it has long been rumoured that it is in the vast attic at Government House, Suva.
As for the New Zealanders, October marks the 70th anniversary of their execution by Japanese soldiers on Tarawa atoll.
NOTE: Below are previous posts on Amelia Earhart...Lon
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Originally posted 10/8/2007
Amelia Earhart Mystery May Soon Be Solved
honoluluadvertiser - Archaeological researcher Gary Quigg thinks he's solved the mystery of what happened to Amelia Earhart 70 years ago — and he thinks the answer might lie on an island in the Pacific Ocean."I am sure we are looking in the right spot," Quigg said during a visit last week to the Aviation Museum of Kentucky in Lexington. "I think eventually we will find the smoking gun that it takes to conclusively say this is where the flight ended."
Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared in July 1937 and have never been found.
Quigg, 45, is an archaeological researcher who spent a month on Nikumaroro Island this summer looking for clues as a member of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery.
Previously, another team that went there found aluminum that could have come from Earhart's plane, along with pieces of a shoe.
The Lockheed Electra Flying Laboratory that Earhart flew on her doomed around-the-world flight was funded, in part, by the Purdue Research Foundation. Earhart had been a women's career counselor and visiting instructor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., for two years before the flight.
Nikumaroro is in the Phoenix Islands, southwest of Hawaii. It is three miles long and 1.5 miles wide.
Some historians dispute the evidence, but Quigg disagrees.
He said the Navy sent a battleship with observation planes to the area shortly after Earhart disappeared because of radio transmissions on her frequency.
"The historical evidence really points to this island," Quigg said.
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Originally posted 11/4/2009
Coverup: Amelia Earhart Died in Japanese Camp According to Relative
nevadaappeal - Wally Earhart of Carson City, the fourth cousin of Amelia Earhart, says the U.S. government continues to perpetrate a “massive coverup” about her mysterious disappearance in the Pacific 72 years ago.Because of the current surge in interest about the pilot's fate spurred by the recent release of the film “Amelia,” starring Richard Gere and Hilary Swank, it is time the American public “know the truth about Amelia's last days,” said Earhart, who will portray Abraham Lincoln as grand marshal of the Nevada Day parade today.
Amelia and her navigator, Fred Noonan, did not die as claimed by the government and the Navy when their twin-engine Electra plunged into the Pacific on July 2, 1937, Wally Earhart said in an interview.
“They died while in Japanese captivity on the island of Saipan in the Northern Marianas,” claims Earhart, a 38-year Carson City resident who often portrays Lincoln and other historical figures at appearances sponsored by groups such as the Nevada Historical Society.
“The Navy and the federal government would have you believe that Amelia and Noonan died on impact when their plane ran out of gas while attempting to reach Howland Island during their flight around the world,” Earhart said.
“Their airplane did crash into the Pacific, but instead of dying, the pair was rescued by a nearby Japanese fishing trawler. The Electra airplane was still floating and the Japanese hauled it aboard their ship in a large net.
“The Japanese then transported Amelia Earhart, Noonan and the airplane to Saipan. Noonan was beheaded by the Japanese and Amelia soon died from dysentery and other ailments,” Wally Earhart continued. He added that the Japanese troops on the island cut the airplane into scrap and tossed the remnants into the Pacific.
“There are many people, including Japanese military and Saipan natives, who witnessed all these events on the island,” said Earhart, who disputes claims by several historical researchers that Amelia Earhart and Noonan were instantly killed when their plane hit the water or they died of starvation and disease on either Howland Island, Gardner Island or in the Marshall Islands.
Why do the government and Navy continue to “cover up” the true facts of the case?
There are two major theories, according to Wally Earhart.
One is that the Navy was “inept” in not finding and rescuing the aviators after their aircraft crashed. The other is that President Franklin D. Roosevelt “wanted the whole matter kept under wraps,” Earhart said.
“Roosevelt had asked Earhart, a close family friend, to scout Japanese military installations in the Pacific during her flights in the region. This was kept a deep secret back in 1937 and it is being kept a secret today because Japan and the United States are good friends and military allies and the government doesn't want to drudge up old antagonisms,” Wally Earhart believes.
Earhart also noted that Amelia Earhart had close relations with Nevada.
“She loved Northern Nevada and often visited friends in Carson City and at Lake Tahoe. And she also made several flights across the state, stopping at a half-dozen cities,” Earhart added.
On one flight, while flying a small plane between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City in 1928, she was declared missing after making a forced landing in bad weather in a deserted area near the Nevada-Utah state line. Rescuers were called out when it was feared she had crashed into a mountain peak in isolated Lincoln County in eastern Nevada.
Searchers ultimately found Amelia sitting beside her downed plane. She was uninjured but the craft suffered a bent propeller and other minor damages.
In 1931, Earhart crossed Nevada in an autogiro, the forerunner of the helicopter, making landings at Wendover, Elko, Battle Mountain, Lovelock and Reno.
And in 1929, George Putnam, her future husband and millionaire heir to a publishing fortune, divorced his first wife, Dorothy, in Reno. Amelia Earhart and Putnam were married two years later.
The mystery surrounding the fate of Amelia Earhart may never be solved. It remains the most famous missing person case in United States history.
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