The Odd Vanishing of Amelia Earhart

**"The Odd Vanishing of Amelia Earhart"** is a video made by Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej, uploaded onto YouTube on August 25, 2017. It was the fifth episode of the second season of *BuzzFeed Unsolved: True Crime*, and the thirty-fourth episode overall. You can find it here.

## Description

What truly happened to the famed aviator?

## Background

On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart, the first woman to cross the Atlantic, and one of the most famous women in the world disappeared along with her navigator, Fred Noonan, while attempting to circumnavigate the globe at the equator. Before we get into the incident, let's quickly provide some context into how accomplished Earhart truly was.

Amelia Earhart was born on July 24, 1897 in Atchison, Kansas. In 1928, Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic, albeit as a passenger in a plane with two other pilots. However, on May 20th to the 21st of 1932, Earhart would make the trip again, this time alone, flying from Newfoundland to Ireland for about 15 hours. She was the second person to ever complete this flight. During this trip, she demonstrated her resourcefulness in times of peril, as her plane suffered a leak in the fuel tank, ice on the wings, and a cracked manifold, which caused the engine to spew flames at one point. Yet, she still completed the flight. On August 24, 1932, Earhart flew from LA to Newark, setting a record at that time for longest distance flown without refueling. She also became the first female pilot to complete a nonstop transcontinental flight.

This takes us to 1937, when Earhart set her sights on circling the globe, zigzagging along the Equator requiring long hauls over water. If successful, she would have been the first female pilot to fly around the world. Her journey would have taken her about 29,000 miles over roughly 40 days, starting and ending in California, and would have included 20 stops, including San Juan, Calcutta, and Bangkok.

Earhart flew in a twin engine Lockheed 10-Electra, a 10-passenger high performance airliner, specifically outfitted with special tanks that allowed it to carry over 1,000 pounds of fuel, rather than the usual 200.

On May 21, Earhart and her navigator Noonan started their journey from Oakland, California. On the morning of July 2, 1937, 42 days into their journey, Earhart and Noonan prepared to leave Lae, New Guinea. Leaving Lae, the Electra was carrying the most fuel it had on this expedition, about 1,000 pounds worth. They were already roughly 22,000 miles into the trip and had about another 7,000 to go before returning to California. She planned to stop 256 miles away on Howland Island to refuel. It was about an 18-hour flight. Harry Balfour, the radio operator for Guinea Airways in Lae set up a schedule for he and Earhart to send transmissions to each other once every hour. Soon after Earhart's plane took off, Balfour noted that the headwinds were stronger than anybody had thought. He sent transmissions of this information to Earhart three times over the course of two hours. However, Earhart did not seem to get these transmissions. Headwind speed could affect plane speed, gas consumption, and length of flight. Around 2:18 p.m. Earhart's transmissions, which had been blocked earlier, were finally received by Balfour in Lae. She gave her speed, 140 knots, and altitude, 7,000 feet, and things seemed to be okay. A little over an hour later, her next transmissions stated that she had climbed to 10,000 feet. This may have been uneconomical in terms of fuel usage. It's unclear why Earhart made this climb. But author Elgen Long, a veteran pilot, guesses it may have been to avoid clouds or mountains.

This transmission also seemed to be delayed. Though, they were still on course, and it's believed that the experienced pilot Earhart would have realized the problem with the headwinds by this point. As they neared Howland Island, the plane was likely down to a last 97 gallons tank of fuel. The Coast Guard's Itasca, a 250-foot boat off the coast of Howland Island was to provide communications and weather for Earhart upon her arrival to the island. It is thought that Earhart's plane must have gotten fairly close to the island, because the Itasca did hear her transmissions, which grew stronger as sunrise came and went. In fact, they thought Earhart was close enough that the radio operator on board the Itasca went outside to look for her plane. In one of her last transmissions, Earhart told the Itasca, "we must be on you, but cannot see you." She radioed, "gas is running low." Earhart's last transmission at 8:43 a.m. was "we are on the line 157, 337. We will repeat message. We will repeated this on 6210 kilocycles, wait." While there are conflicting reports, the transmission may have also included, "we are running north and south," end quote. In her final transmissions, Earhart's voice was described as "frantic."

After that, Earhart was never officially heard from again. When Earhart's plane never arrived, the Itasca searched the waters northwest of Howland Island. On July 7, five days later, the US Battleship Colorado began to search the waters to the southeast. An aircraft carrier, the Lexington, arrived soon after from its base in San Diego, and stayed searching the region until July 18th. To this day, neither Earhart, Noonan, or their plane were ever found.

## Theories

* **The first theory is perhaps the most widely accepted theory, that Earhart's plane ran out of gas, and she and Noonan died** when they crashed into the ocean northwest of their destination.
	+ Although skeptics have pointed out that an Electra with that amount of fuel should have lasted 24 hours in flight, rather than 20, as Earhart's plane did. Analysis by the Jet Propulsion Center at Cal-Tech concluded that with the headwinds and the 10,000-foot climb Earhart was forced to take early in the flight, her plane would have been out of fuel when she disappeared.
	+ Near Howland Island, the ocean is about 18,000 feet deep. From 2002 until March 2017, a company called Nauticos teamed up with other groups to search a nearly 2,000-square nautical mile area of the Pacific Ocean floor, where Earhart's Electra may have sunk. They used sonar mapping to search the sea floor, but have not found evidence of the aircraft.
* **Earhart became a castaway on Gardner Island**, now called Nikumaroro, roughly 350 nautical miles south of Howland Island.
	+ Nikumaroro is along the 157, 337 line Earhart last reported flying along. As her plane lost fuel, it is thought she spotted the coral atoll of Nikumaroro, that at low tide could have worked as an emergency landing strip. Roughly two to three years later, in 1939 or 1940, a British Colonial Officer named Gerald Gallagher found the remains of a campsite on the island, along with a box for a sextant, a tool used to determine latitude and longitude via celestial bodies.
	+ However, the most provocative thing discovered on the island by Gallagher was a partial human skeleton, as well as 12 other bones. The bones were analyzed by a physician named D.W. Hoodless, who was working in a medical school in Fiji. But Hoodless determined that the bones belonged to a man who was short, stocky, and of European descent, and could not be Earhart or Noonan. Unfortunately, after this conclusion, Hoodless discarded the bones, thereby preventing anybody from DNA analyzing them in the future.
	+ However, the International Group for Historical Aircraft Recovery, a.k.a. TIGHAR, used Hoodless's original measurements of the bones and today's updated databases to determine the bones could have also belonged to a taller than average woman of European descent. And Earhart was said to be 5'7" or 5'8".
	+ According to TIGHAR director Ric Gillespie, the reason for there being only partial bones on the island was because of the coconut crabs that live there. He suggests that coconut crabs carried the bones off into burrows and that they may have eaten her. Coconut crabs grow up to three feet long, can break open coconuts with their pincers, and are the largest anthropods living on land.
	+ TIGHAR director Ric Gillespie has also said that a photo taken in 1937 by a British expedition to Nikumaroro shows what he believes to be landing gear from a plane sticking up out of the water. He also believes that Earhart would have used her plane's radio to signal for help for up to a week following the crash, but that if the radio had been in water, it would not work. Interestingly, according to Gillespie, several possible radio transmissions from Earhart were heard throughout the week after her disappearance, all of which coincided with the low tide on that island, a time when the plane radio was perhaps not underwater, and possibly functional. A teenager named Betty Klenck claims that via her shortwave radio, she heard a female voice saying, "This is Amelia Earhart, help me," and also heard the female voice arguing with a disoriented male's voice. She also claimed to hear, "Water's knee deep, let me out."
	+ Klenck listened to the voice coming in clips for three hours and recorded what she heard in a notebook. Klenck's father reported his daughter's findings to the Coast Guard, who did not seem to take the claim seriously, as there were reports of dozens of messages supposedly from Earhart heard in all parts of the world in the days after her disappearance. In 1991, Gillespie found a partial rubber shoe sole on the island, stamped with the words Cat's Paw Rubber Company, USA. The sole was from the same type of shoe Earhart is seen wearing in a photograph taken in Indonesia shortly before her disappearance. Though, the sole belongs to a size nine shoe, which would have been too big for Earhart.
	+ Gillespie also found a roughly 19-inch by 23-inch piece of riveted aircraft aluminum on Nikumaroro. TIGHAR believes it to be from Earhart's Electra, specifically from a shiny patch near the tail. Though Elgen Long, the first aviator to fly around the globe over both poles and an Earhart researcher/author says the piece in question is definitively not from Earhart's plane. Other experts, including a Lockheed employee who had worked on Earhart's plane concluded the same, according to Long. Further damning to the theory that Earhart was marooned on this island was the fact that Navy planes flew over the island Nikumaroro on July 9th, one week after Earhart's disappearance, and saw nothing.
* **The third theory, championed by Rollin C. Reineck, a retired US Air Force colonel is that Earhart was in cahoots with the US government and was indeed a spy.** Reineck posits that Earhart had a plan B, where if she couldn't find Howland Island, she was to ditch her plane near the Marshall Islands, which are only 800 miles away from Howland Island. That way, the US government would be able to perform reconnaissance in the Marshall Islands, which were, at the time, occupied by Japan, under the guise of searching for Earhart.
	+ Corroborating this notion are Marshallese locals who for decades have said they witnessed Earhart's plane crash on their island. However, the plan went awry when the Japanese intercepted Earhart and Noonan and captured them, releasing them years later after the war. Then Earhart and Noonan returned to live out their lives in the United States under assumed names. Some believe Amelia Earhart moved to New Jersey and changed her name to Irene Craigmile, though she married and became Irene Bolam. Though, this theory seems improbable, at least to the thought that Earhart is actually Irene Bolam since Bolam sued the publisher of a book that shared this speculation. Also, according to TIGHAR, the resemblance is not that strong. In comparing photos of Earhart to photos of Bolam taken four decades apart proved nothing. Regardless, Irene Bolam passed away in 1982.
	+ Another version of this theory is that after being captured in the Marshall Islands, Earhart and Noonan were eventually executed. An Army sergeant by the name of Thomas E. Devine claimed that in July 1944, he met a group of US Marines guarding a hangar containing Earhart's Electra, on the formerly Japanese-settled island of Saipan, which had recently been liberated. Devine also claims the soldiers destroyed the plane. Furthermore, a photo believed to show an obscured Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan on a dock in the Marshall Islands was found at the National Archives by retired government investigator named Les Kinney.
	+ The photo was analyzed by various experts, who were optimistic that it was indeed the missing aviators. Unfortunately, this photo was promptly and apparently debunked when two bloggers found the photo in a Japanese book published in 1935, which is two years before Earhart even disappeared.
	+ Photo aside, skeptics have pointed out that Earhart, given her fuel situation, would not have made it to the Marshall Islands, regardless. Among those skeptics are Elgen Long, a former pilot, and Fred Patterson, a pilot for World Airways and expert on Electras.
* **Earhart may have made contact with alien life forms**, either by accident or knowingly, and in collusion with the US government.
	+ Admittedly, this alien theory is a bit tinfoil hat. But an episode of Star Trek Voyager from 1995 capitalized on the idea.