<![CDATA[Amelia Earhart's disappearance: a tiny Pacific atoll and its smoking gun]>
The disappearance of American aviator Amelia Earhart remains one of the world's great unsolved mysteries. In 1928, Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, garnering her international acclaim " then, in 1937, on an attempt to fly around the globe, she vanished.
This is where Ric Gillespie comes in. Over the past 31 years, he believes his International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has catalogued sufficient evidence to convince even the most ardent sceptic that the remote Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro is where Earhart crash-landed and subsequently died.
"We already have several 'smoking guns', but the public wants what we jokingly call an 'any-idiot artefact' " something that any idiot can look at and see its authenticity," he told the South China Morning Post.
It is Gillespie's hope that bringing together a battered patch of aircraft aluminium measuring 48cm by 58cm with a few seconds of footage on a brittle acetate film might serve as just that evidence.
This week, TIGHAR announced that it had raised the US$2,000 required to scan and digitise the film. In 2008, the Delaware-based organisation was contacted by a woman who said she had still images and some footage taken at the airfield in Lae, New Guinea, on July 1, 1937 " the day before Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan took off on the leg of their flight that was due to take them to the Pacific island of Howland.
Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan. Photo: History.com
The woman, who has not been named, said the footage and stills were taken by a mining engineer who was a relative of her husband, and she had acquired them as part of a divorce settlement. The authenticity of the film was proved by an accompanying letter from the engineer, who described having dinner with Earhart and Noonan before their departure and subsequent disappearance.
Most significantly, the footage includes images of the rear of Earhart's Lockheed Model 10E Special Electra, where a patch of aluminium was used to replace a small window in the fuselage.
Gillespie believes this patch is the very one that TIGHAR researchers found on Nikumaroro during one of their earliest trips to the island.
"After 28 years of puzzling over a piece of aircraft aluminium that we found on Nikumaroro in 1991, this film may allow us to make a final determination of whether the artefact came from the Earhart aircraft," he said. But Gillespie is already anticipating naysayers' efforts to shoot down TIGHAR's work.
"Aluminium doesn't float," he pointed out, meaning that it could not have drifted to the island. "If the artefact turns out to match the patch, some will probably challenge the analysis and say we manipulated the imagery " but the essence of scientific investigation is that results must be replicable. Any qualified photogrammetrist should be able to examine the film and reach the same conclusion."
Work to have the film scanned at high resolution and rendered into digitised frames is expected to take place later this month. Gillespie warned that analysis could take weeks or months, with an expert attempting to match the distinctive pattern of parallel lines of rivet holes on the artefact with the image. As a one-off alteration to an already rare aircraft, there should be little dispute over its provenance.
Earhart's disappearance has fascinated the world for decades. Photo: AP
"If the artefact is the patch, the Electra was there " full stop," Gillespie said. "We have other artefacts found on the island that appear to be, but cannot be proven to be, from the Earhart aircraft. Aluminium survives well on land. In water, not so much."
TIGHAR's already persuasive body of evidence " painstakingly gathered and catalogued before being scientifically scrutinised " includes the remnants of a castaway's camp site, shards of Plexiglas that match the curvature of the Electra's window, a scent bottle, a zip made in Pennsylvania in the mid-1930s, parts of a pocket knife of the same brand that was listed in an inventory of the aircraft, and the heel of a woman's shoe.
The organisation has also recorded stories handed down from later settlers on the island who recalled parts of an aircraft turning up over the years, radio signals reported long after the aircraft would have run out of fuel and the documented discovery in 1940 of human remains by a British colonial officer " who suggested at the time that it might be Earhart.
That suggestion was later dismissed by a surgeon in Fiji who examined the partial remains, although a forensic re-examination last year of the data that was collected on the bones " which were apparently lost when the second world war reached the Pacific " strongly indicates they were of a Caucasian female of the same height and build as Earhart.
Gillespie is not counting his chickens yet, but believes that if the panel can be reconciled with the one in the footage, then it will be the final nail in the coffin of alternative theories as to Earhart's fate (see below).
And it will open up a new course of action.
"If the panel turns out to be what we hope it is, it could inspire the funding needed to look underwater for more of the plane," he said. "It would be great to find and even recover more of the plane, but that would be gilding the lily. The point is to answer the question of what really happened to Amelia Earhart. The panel could answer that question in a way that everyone can accept."
There are plenty of theories surrounding the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, including her being a spy " or returning to the US under an assumed name. Photo: Reuters
RIVAL THEORIES
Ever since Earhart's aircraft disappeared on that fateful day in July 1937, theories have abounded as to where she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, ended up.
Crashed and sank: The original " and arguably the most obvious " explanation for the aviators' disappearance was that the Lockheed Electra simply ran out of fuel as Earhart was trying to locate Howland Island and that she was forced to ditch at sea. Elgen Long studied the Earhart mystery for 35 years and published Amelia Earhart: The mystery solved in 1999, declaring that her aircraft sank close to her intended destination, a conclusion shared by a number of other writers and aviation historians. Two searches of more than 3,000 square kilometres close to Howland Island by the undersea research company Nauticos have been unsuccessful.
Captured by the Japanese: In 1966, CBS correspondent Fred Goerner published a book claiming Earhart and Noonan were captured and executed on either the island of Saipan or in the Marshall Islands, both of which were Japanese territories at the time, because Japan was ramping up its military capabilities in the region ahead of the outbreak of war. Other historians have reached similar conclusions and there are numerous reports throughout the Pacific of people who claim they had seen the aircraft, Earhart and Noonan, their execution or their graves. None have been confirmed.
New Britain: In 1990, a former soldier in the Australian Army who fought in New Britain, Papua New Guinea, reported finding a wrecked civilian aircraft during a 1945 patrol in the jungle about 60km southwest of the town of Rabaul and jotted down serial numbers from the twin-engined aeroplane. Researchers claim those serial numbers match the airframe and engine model number of Earhart's Electra. A number of expeditions to the area have failed to rediscover the aircraft.
Espionage: The 1943 propaganda film Flight for Freedom is ostensibly fiction, but flies extremely close to Earhart's exploits. The movie tells the tale of a female pilot on a spying mission in the Pacific, which helped to reinforce the suggestion Earhart had been working for the government of then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt. By 1949, US Army Intelligence had announced that the rumour was groundless.
Tokyo Rose: Another rumour has it that Earhart was captured and forced to make propaganda broadcasts under the name of "Tokyo Rose", a name given to female radio broadcasters of English-language Japanese propaganda.
New Jersey: Joe Klass, in his 1970 book Amelia Earhart Lives, claims Earhart survived the round-the-world flight, changed her name to Irene Bolam to escape the public attention and moved to New Jersey. The real Bolam sued the author and the publisher, demanding US$1.5 million in damages and was successful in having the book withdrawn from sale.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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