Guest Blogger Robin Acker, M.D.

If Amelia Earhart was alive today, she could only be proud that a recent survey (USA Today, Feb. 4, 2008) of teenagers from the 50 states named her the 6^th most famous American (not counting Presidents) since the days of Columbus.

Now more than 70 years after her disappearance, researchers may be closing in on the final whereabouts of Earhart and the Lockheed Electra in which she was lost.

Since her disappearance in 1937, thoughts of Earhart’s last hours have been the focus of numerous articles, books and movies. Gradually, the theories have coalesced into three main groups:

1. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, ditched their plane in the sea and floated some time before drowning. This is the official opinion of the US Navy.
2. Earhart managed to land somewhere, but she and Noonan were never found and they subsequently expired.
3. Whether after ditching in the sea or finding land, Earhart and Noonan were captured by Japanese soldiers, and died either due to dysentery or by execution.

Although theories one and three seem to have been the most popular, I, and a group to which I belong (TIGHAR), believe that the evidence points most strongly to the second.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery got into the “Earhart game” (as Barney Fife might have put it) a little more than a year after it was formed in 1987. The founder, Ric Gillespie, initially believed that there was no hard evidence that could justify a search for Earhart and her plane. But when two members of TIGHAR, knowledgeable of “old school” celestial navigation, told Gillespie the implications of her final radio transmissions, the head of TIGHAR was hooked.

For myself, I learned of Earhart when I was 10 years old in 1966, growing up in a town of about 4,000 in central California. Though I wasn’t in an enrichment class, we were blessed with a teacher who was indeed gifted. She encouraged my interest, which gripped me for years, but by April, 2007 had grown dormant. Dormant, that is, right up until my wife casually mentioned one day, “There’s something here in the news about Amelia Earhart.”

A few weeks later, I found myself the team physician on TIGHAR’s fifth major expedition to tiny, uninhabited Nikumaroro of the Kiribati nation, doctoring an epidemic of seasickness on the five-day motor-sail voyage to the atoll, a piece of land almost directly on Earhart and Fred Noonan’s last described line of position, some 300 miles southeast of their intended destination of Howland Island. Niku is just as hot as one would expect from a lava rock baking just 4 degrees south of the equator.

Why do we believe Earhart and Noonan died on Nikumaroro? Both Gillespie and Thomas H. King, chief archaeologist of TIGHAR, have written books that lay out the evidence quite nicely (Finding Amelia and Amelia Earhart’s Shoes, respectively). The notion that Earhart and Noonan ditched in the ocean doesn’t stand up to the fact that well-documented radio broadcasts received in the days after her loss virtually had to come from Earhart, whose plane was incapable of broadcasting from water. And while anecdotes have indicated a Japanese military capture, Earhart’s last transmissions to Howland were so strong that Coast Guardsmen ran out of the radio shack to look up in the sky, a circumstance unexplainable if the Electra was more than a thousand miles away.

Pursuing a site first explored on earlier trips, in 2007 we continued work on a section that appears to match contemporary colonial records of a skeleton discovery in 1940. The section, stained by the detritus of multiple campfires, has borne evidence of one or more castaways, including American-manufactured bottles from the 1930s, clumsily opened clams, and now the most recently confirmed substance--early 20^th century cosmetic.

As laboratory testing continues on other items found on the island in 2007, I and other TIGHAR members have our fingers crossed for a major breakthrough that could lead to the mystery’s resolution, and finally bring Earhart and Noonan home.

Thanks Robin for this fascinating article on your Amelia Earhart experience.

Something about the Amelia Earhart story resonates with many people. The above story came to me out of the earlier blog postings about our Friend's annual meeting program of Ann Birney portraying Amelia Earhart. Interest in the story of Amelia Earhart will continue. -- Pete