RIC GILLESPIE REMEMBERS being asked over and over: When are you going after Amelia?
It was the late 1980s, just a few years after he had established the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). Gillespie was a former sales rep and investigator in the airplane insurance business. Whenever an airline was having problems—botched landings or outdated parts on aging planes, for instance—Gillespie was brought in to look into the situation and settle claims.
After years of investigating crashes and settling claims, he turned to aviation mysteries like the legendary L’Oiseau Blanc (White Bird), which his brother told him about in 1980. The Levasseur PL.8 biplane was piloted by two French aviators who had hoped to complete the first nonstop trip across the Atlantic Ocean, but it vanished somewhere over coastal North America in 1927. An old hermit, the legend goes, heard a plane sputtering overhead while paddling his canoe; a 12-day search turned up nothing. Gillespie, captivated by the tale, thought he could apply his experience to tracking down the lost plane, an endeavor that still continues.
Gillespie never intended, though, to search for one of the most famous pilots of all time. Like many people, he had believed that on a long flight around the world, Amelia Earhart and her copilot, Fred Noonan, crashed and died. “That was the intuitive answer,” he says. He’d heard of other theories floating around aviation circles and elsewhere. One book, which was later pulled from shelves, posited that Earhart survived and lived out the rest of her life under an assumed identity. Another popular explanation was that Earhart had been captured and killed by the Japanese.
Earhart’s plane, however, was never found. And as the years went on, Gillespie became more and more intrigued by what might have happened. The questions surrounding her disappearance gnawed at him.
Plane crashes were common in the early days of aviation as daring pilots pushed the limits of flight. And many, like that of the White Bird, didn’t have a clear cause. But how could Earhart vanish on a round-the-world trip with the expressed support of the U.S. military and millions paying close attention? Skilled and determined, Earhart broke multiple records in the 1930s for speed and distance, including being the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. That wasn’t enough: She wanted to be the first woman to fly around the world. “Here was shining adventure, beckoning with new experiences, added knowledge of flying, of peoples—of myself,” she wrote in a journal entry before embarking in May 1937, according to East to the Dawn, Susan Butler’s definitive biography.
Newspapers recounted each stop on her odyssey to readers across the globe. But on July 2, at the end of the most arduous leg of her worldwide journey, she failed to find Howland Island, her designated landing point. The Coast Guard and U.S. Navy spent 17 days looking for Earhart and her plane, but found no signs of her and gave up the search on July 19. The theory that emerged in the following weeks, one still endorsed by the U.S. government, is that Earhart exhausted her fuel supply and crashed into the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
As his efforts to locate the White Bird drew attention to his work, Gillespie and his nonprofit, TIGHAR, became a nexus for pilots, historians, and aviation enthusiasts. A charismatic fellow and gregarious self-promoter, Gillespie had gained a reputation as something of an Indiana Jones of lost aircraft. (He even says Raiders of the Lost Ark, in part, inspired his desire to search for lost planes.) In 1988, a couple of TIGHAR members approached Gillespie with a theory: Suppose that after failing to find Howland Island, Earhart followed a line of position, trying to find the next closest body of land. She flew north for a bit, found nothing, and backtracked, flying south until she eventually hit Gardner Island (now called Nikumaroro). There, at low tide, she landed her twin-engine plane on an outlying reef and later died as a castaway.
To Gillespie, the narrative was compelling. It soon absorbed him. Discovering her plane would be the pinnacle of his investigative work, and although he had no conclusive proof yet, he was gripped by the possibility. He decided to go looking for Amelia Earhart.
Gillespie’s belief that Earhart ended up a castaway has been bolstered by decades of rigorous research that has turned up clues and unearthed fragments of evidence. His theories have crystallized into something more rigid too—hardened by effort, discovery, and defeat, much of it in humid, briny Pacific air during the many costly expeditions that he has taken to Nikumaroro, searching for signs of the famous pilot.
“I’m absolutely certain,” he told me this spring, brimming with conviction, “we’ve solved the Earhart mystery.”
Were it only that simple. Gillespie has become a recognized expert on Earhart, regularly appearing on news broadcasts and in documentaries. His account of what happened in the weeks following July 2, 1937, has received international attention. Yet his steadfast adherence to his own narrative is contested by others who have also spent decades preoccupied with Earhart’s disappearance.
More than 30 years into his quest, Gillespie remains undeterred. He is certain he’s cracked the case. Now he has a seemingly harder task—convincing the world he is right.
BY 1937, EARHART was already a celebrity, an icon of the Golden Age of Aviation. The two decades following World War I were a time when ace flyboys demonstrated that a plane could be used for more than killing the enemy. Air racing and aerial exploration came into full effect as metal monoplanes replaced wooden biplanes. Earhart was piloting her own plane in races and on long flights. That, in part, was the foundation of her fame: She was the rare woman among the brave and daring pilots.
“Women must try to do things as men have tried,” she once wrote to her husband, the publishing scion George Putnam.
From an early age, Earhart preferred bloomers and blouses to dresses and spent summer days playing basketball and climbing trees. At age 7, she built a homemade roller coaster with a ramp. On her first ride, she flipped into the air, crashed with a thud, and cut her lip. “It’s just like flying!” she said to her sister.
During the First World War, she worked at an army field hospital and afterward enrolled in Columbia University with a vague ambition to go into medicine. That plan was derailed when her father took her to an air show in Long Beach, California, in 1920. Edwin Earhart paid $10 for a pilot, the aptly named Frank Hawks, to take his 23-year-old daughter on a 10-minute flight.
“By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground,” Earhart recalled in her journal, “I knew I had to fly.”
Flying lessons followed, and in 1923 she became the first woman pilot to be licensed by the National Aeronautic Association. Near the end of the Roaring Twenties, she moved to Boston and scraped together enough money to invest in nearby Dennison Airport, where she became an instructor and even piloted the first flight to take off from the airfield. That caught the attention of Hilton H. Railey, a pilot who helped orchestrate her trip as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean in 1928—as a passenger. (Another woman, Amy Guest, dropped out to appease her worried family, but she insisted that her replacement be female.) The event catapulted Earhart onto the national stage. She was honored with medal ceremonies in Chicago, New York City, Boston, and Washington, D.C. With the help of Putnam, who at the time was still only her agent, she garnered endorsement deals for the products she used on her transatlantic flight—watches, tomato juice, malted milk tablets—and gave lectures for $300 a pop (about $5,500 in today’s money).
In 1932, Earhart embarked on her grandest undertaking yet—a solo transatlantic flight. No one had attempted the crossing since Charles Lindbergh made his historic flight in 1927. Earhart wanted to be the first woman to do it. On May 20, she took off from Newfoundland and aimed her Lockheed Vega 5B toward Paris. A fuel leak over the Atlantic forced her to land in Londonderry in Northern Ireland instead, 15 hours after taking off. She was short of her goal, but she had successfully flown across the Atlantic, touching down on May 21, exactly five years to the day of Lindbergh’s flight.
“I chose to fly the Atlantic because I wanted to,” proclaimed Earhart in her memoir, The Fun of It, the final chapter of which she wrote just after her successful flight. “It was, in a measure, a self-justification—a proving to me … that a woman with adequate experience could do it.”
Since her Londonderry detour was unplanned, no photos of Earhart’s landing exist, but one can assume that she was in her classic flight gear: shirt tucked into trousers or breeches, maybe with a scarf around her neck, maybe with a tie, all hidden under a thick leather jacket with her tousled brown hair cut short above the neck.
With her latest triumph behind her, Earhart used her increasing fame to seek equality for women in aviation and was fundamental in creating the Ninety-Nines, originally an organization of female pilots that continues today as a nonprofit, providing scholarships and networking opportunities. She served as aviation editor of Cosmopolitan. In 1935 she joined Purdue University in Indiana as career counselor, helping to encourage prospective female pilots.
GILLESPIE FINDS EARHART’S early life and the circumstances of her final flight spellbinding—he’s drawn to her accomplishments and the influence she had on society. At age 76, with a trim white mustache, he has his own tousled mop of hair, although its color is stark white. And while he’s never tried flying around the world, he was a pilot for years.
In high school he earned his student’s pilot license. For six months after graduating college in 1969, he copiloted an old DC-3, flying a semipro hockey team, the Rochester Americans, to their games. Then he went into the U.S. Army; he was commissioned in 1971 but never deployed to Vietnam. In 1973, he mustered out as a First Lieutenant in the Signal Corps, cast about for a few months, and then found his ideal gig: investigating flight accidents for an aviation insurance company. Instead of a company car, he got access to company airplanes, including a Cessna Skyhawk.
Evidently Gillespie was downright stubborn. He fought with management because he didn’t like that his clients’ insurance rates were going up. He was fired, then hired by a competitor, served as vice president of aviation doing similar work, and then resigned from that job for similar reasons, he says.
Not long after that, in 1985, Gillespie and his wife, Patricia Thrasher, established TIGHAR, which currently has about 600 members. The organization is run out of several rooms in an old farmhouse in southeastern Pennsylvania, where I traveled to meet Gillespie one afternoon in March. From the front porch you can see the barn and the couple’s two horses.
Those early years of TIGHAR were focused on searching for the White Bird. But in 1988, when two members—both retired military aerial navigators—suggested to Gillespie that Earhart died a castaway on Nikumaroro Island, the organization changed course. Finding Earhart became a central focus.
Gillespie was hooked. “It looked like a good hypothesis to test, that she might’ve gotten to this island,” he says. “We didn’t know if we’d be able to prove anything.”
ON FEBRUARY 11, 1937, Earhart, then 39 years old, announced her worldwide flight. She told the reporters that she was “tired of flying the Atlantic,” and had decided to become the first woman to fly around the world. She would skim the equator, traveling 27,000 miles in the process.
“I want to do it because I want to do it,” she told Putnam, whom she’d married in 1931.
Her famous plane was a Lockheed Model 10E Electra, modified for the long flight. Outfitted with two 600-horsepower engines, the plane also contained extra fuel tanks so it could carry 1,150 gallons and travel 4,000 miles.
Earhart would not be the only one in the plane. With her was Fred Noonan, joining the flight at her request. Noonan was an experienced navigator who had worked for Pan American Airways guiding planes across the Pacific via celestial navigation, or using the stars and sun to plot a course.
She had several communications tools at her disposal, too. One was a radiotelephone. Long before cables had been laid on the oceans’ floors, cross-continent communication relied on shortwave radio waves reflecting against the ionosphere—the atmospheric layer capable of bouncing those waves over great distances in order to transmit voice messages. The other was her direction finder. A transmitter mounted on her plane could zero in on radio frequencies in kilocycles (kilohertz, in modern parlance) sent by receivers on the ground, a sort of homing technology that could tell her if her plane was pointed in the right direction. Radar, GPS, autopilot—all the gizmos that make air travel a virtual certainty today either did not exist or weren’t in regular use.
In May, Earhart and Noonan departed. She planned to travel west, starting and ultimately ending in Oakland. The first flight to Honolulu, a trip of a little more than 2,400 miles, went fine. It would be another 1,900 miles from Honolulu to Howland Island. But during takeoff, Earhart ripped the right wheel and undercarriage from the Electra. The plane was shipped back to California and repaired, and on May 21, she took off again, this time flying east to Miami. Earhart kept both her new direction and date of departure a secret. “It seemed sensible,” she recorded in her journal, “to slip away as quietly as we could.” From there she traveled to 21 destinations, crossing over South America and Africa, through the Middle East, Asia, and Australia, before reaching New Guinea on June 29.
New Guinea to Howland Island was the long leg over the Pacific Ocean. Waiting off Howland’s shore was the U.S. Coast Guard cutter USS Itasca, equipped with its own radio system and direction finder. The plan was for Noonan to use his celestial navigation tools to keep the Electra on course and close enough to the Itasca to pick up a radio signal. Then Earhart could home in on those signals with her direction finder, leading her and Noonan to Howland Island.
But the target itself was impossibly small—the size, approximately, of three golf courses. From the air it would’ve looked microscopic. The distance was immense, too: 2,556 miles. Earhart knew that the task ahead of her was difficult.
“This evening, I looked eastward over the Pacific,” Earhart journaled on July 1. “I shall be glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.”
WHEN EARHART AND Noonan take off July 2, the Electra contains roughly 24 hours of fuel for a trip estimated to take 19 hours.
At 6:46 a.m. Howland Island time, Earhart messages the Itasca at a frequency of 3105 kilocycles. She’s about 100 miles out, she says, and requests a bearing on her position. In other words, she wants the Itasca to use its direction finder to note her position at 3105 kilocycles.
But the Itasca can’t. Its direction finder can only pick up frequencies of 500 kilocycles—which the Electra can’t send. In California, while the Electra was being repaired after Earhart’s crash in Hawaii, Lockheed removed a trailing wire capable of radiating 500 kilocycles. The communication issues are one of the most puzzling elements of her final flight. The Itasca repeatedly tries to explain that it cannot take bearings on 3105 kilocycles, but Earhart is not receiving its messages. They never establish two-way communication, and Earhart and Noonan never find the island.
At 7:42 a.m., Earhart transmits over the radio: “KHAQQ [her plane’s call letters] calling Itasca we must be on you but cannot see you but gas is running low been unable to read you by radio we are flying at 1,000 feet.”
At 7:58 a.m., more than 19 hours into the flight, she receives the only radio message from the Itasca, and transmits, at 8:04 a.m.: “KHAQQ calling Itasca we received your signals but unable to get a minimum please take bearing on us and answer 3105 with voice.”
At 8:44 a.m., 20 hours and 14 minutes into the flight, Earhart radioes: “We are on the line 157-337.” Very shortly thereafter, she transmits again: “We are running on line north and south.”
She tells the Itasca that she’s flying a compass line, with 157 meaning southeast and 337 meaning northwest. And then the ship’s radio operators hear nothing more.
For 17 days, U.S. ships and planes scoured an area of the Pacific Ocean equivalent to the size of Texas. At $4 million ($87 million in 2024), it’s considered the most expensive search ever for a downed aircraft. The searchers had hoped to find any signs that might lead them to the Electra: an oil slick, a fuel tank, life vests.
When the search yielded no sign of Earhart near Howland Island, it expanded to nearby Gardner Island, about 400 miles southeast of Howland, where Gillespie believes Earhart and Noonan died as castaways. On July 7, the battleship USS Colorado—equipped with three catapult-launched float planes—reached the Phoenix Islands group, which includes Gardner.
“I’m sure there was no one there in 1937. We saw nothing to lead anyone to think the island was occupied,” Lieutenant John Lambrecht, who flew one of those planes over Gardner, said several decades later. “If we had seen anything on any of the islands that possibly was connected to Earhart, we would have recommended landing and making a ground search.”
On July 19, having found no traces of either Earhart or Noonan, the U.S. government suspended the search. Putnam stayed at it longer. With his own money, he put together and directed a charter fleet that swept several islands, including the Phoenix Islands. Finally, in October of that year, he abandoned his search, the words of Earhart possibly echoing in his mind. “When I go,” she had often said to him, “I’d like best to go in my plane. Quickly.”
A U.S. NAVY REPORT filed the day after the search for Earhart was halted offered an explanation for what happened. Captain J.S. Dowell, in a subsection titled “Assumptions,” wrote that Earhart’s plane “landed on water or an uncharted reef within 120 miles of the most probable landing point, 23 miles northwest of Howland Island.” In another subsection of the 10-page report, he added, “No sign nor any evidence of the Earhart plane was discovered.”
Over the years, this report formed the basis of the official narrative of what happened after Earhart and Noonan vanished: They crashed in the Pacific Ocean. Still, not a single particle of debris was spotted during the search. Without definitive evidence, people were free to fill in their own details to explain what happened. And many did.
“If it had been somebody else, people might not even be thinking of it anymore. But she was a woman of consequence,” says Dorothy Cochrane, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
In his 1966 book The Search for Amelia Earhart, San Francisco radio newscaster Fred Goerner, who died in 1994, laid out a case that Earhart had been captured by the Japanese. After failing to find Howland Island, he argued, Earhart and Noonan flew 760 miles in the other direction and crashed on Mili Atoll in the Marshall Islands; they were picked up by a Japanese warship and transported to Saipan, an island in the Northern Mariana Islands. Goerner traveled to Saipan several times, interviewing some 200 people in the process, and seemed satisfied with the idea. So do the Marshallese: In 1987, on the 50th anniversary of Earhart’s voyage, they issued stamps depicting her crash landing.
Thomas E. Devine, an Army sergeant stationed on Saipan after it was secured by the U.S. in 1944, came to a similar conclusion. He claims to have met Marines guarding an airfield hangar containing Earhart’s Electra and then to have witnessed the Electra in the air, its tail number NR16020 legible and unmistakable, before it was burned the same night by U.S. soldiers.
Years before Gillespie began searching for clues around Gardner Island, someone else had suspected the island as a possible landing sight. Fred Hooven, an engineer and a pioneering radio expert, had met Earhart and even created an advanced direction finder that was installed, and then removed, from the Electra a year before its last flight. Hooven found credible evidence that Earhart and Noonan might have landed on Gardner. In 1982, he presented a paper during a symposium on Earhart held by the National Air and Space Museum, writing that the “evidence strongly supports the hypothesis that … the flyers landed … probably on McKean or Gardner” and then “transmitted signals from there during the next three days.” (Hooven later dismissed that idea, convinced by his friend Goerner that it was implausible.)
To Gillespie, however, a Gardner Island landing felt entirely reasonable. There’s little northwest of Howland Island, just huge expanses of open water. But the Phoenix Islands sit to the southeast. An old Navy map used to direct the search in 1937, he says, showed the likelihood of the scenario. TIGHAR members had tracked down the map in archival files in California, and it shows how line 157-337 nearly intersects with Gardner, which is south of the equator.
“That’s why Noonan had her running up and down that line,” he says, “because he knew that line ran to a specific place.”
To truly test his theory, though, Gillespie needed physical evidence. In 1989, he took his first expedition to Nikumaroro, now one of the islands of the Republic of Kiribati. A thin deserted atoll in the South Pacific Ocean, Nikumaroro sits halfway between Australia and Hawaii. Barely five miles long, it’s composed of coral that surrounds an inner lagoon.
Temperatures on the sun-scorched island can reach 100 degrees. The light reflecting off the ocean can be blinding. Getting on shore requires navigating a skiff through a narrow channel, barely 32 feet wide, that cuts through a reef just beyond the beach on the island’s western coast. The water churns violently. “It’s like a washing machine in there,” he says. “Everything about the place is difficult.”
On that first trip, Gillespie and his team looked closely at that reef. Without a suitable landing strip, Gillespie’s theory would have crumbled. Walking the reef, he found it flat and smooth—so level that you could ride a bicycle on it, he says, which was enough for him to believe a landing was possible.
On TIGHAR’s second expedition, in 1991, Gillespie made what he considered a huge discovery. Trudging along a reef, poking around the flotsam left from a recent storm, team members spotted the faint shimmer of a bent aluminum sheet. Measuring 19 inches wide by 23 inches long and packed with 103 rivet holes, the unassuming piece of metal might as well have been their Holy Grail. The following year, Gillespie proudly displayed the aluminum shard at a news conference in Washington, D.C. “There’s only one possible conclusion,” wrote Gillespie in an article for Life magazine. “We found a piece of Amelia Earhart’s aircraft.”
The evidence was engrossing, if not entirely convincing. Over the years, Gillespie has returned to Nikumaroro an additional nine times, turning up even more bits: pieces of the heel and sole from a shoe, broken glass from a compact mirror, a rusted jackknife, an empty bottle of freckle cream. Each trip is expensive—between $50,000 and $500,000. One visit, in 2012, cost $2 million. Private donors cover most of the costs. (FedEx and Discovery Channel have contributed to past expeditions but have not directly funded them.) On several of these trips, Gillespie and the TIGHAR members who accompany him have flown first to Fiji before boarding a 120-foot vessel for the 1,000-mile passage to Nikumaroro.
Other evidence kept coming in that seemed to corroborate what Gillespie was finding on Nikumaroro. TIGHAR members who combed through U.S. Navy and Coast Guard reports, newspaper articles, and individual accounts found evidence of 135 messages that Earhart allegedly sent after landing. Of that number, Gillespie says that 57 of those, transmitted over a period of six days, could have been plausibly sent by the Electra.
“If even one of them is credible,” he tells me, “she didn’t crash at sea.”
The 3105-kilocycle frequency, thanks to ionospheric refraction, can broadcast on multiples, or harmonics, of that frequency. Harmonics, in turn, can skip for thousands of miles. One message believed to be sent from Earhart’s Electra was recorded by 16-year-old Dana Randolph in Wyoming. On the morning of July 4, he heard: “This is Amelia Earhart. Ship is on reef south of the equator. Station KH9QQ.” (Randolph, it seems, misspelled the call letters.)
Those transmissions would’ve been possible only if the propellers could spin to charge the radio batteries. That wouldn’t have worked at high tide, or if the Electra had sunk. Gillespie compared the time of each transmission to the island’s tides. Every message had been sent during low tide.
But why hadn’t the planes launched from the USS Colorado spotted the Electra, sitting there on the narrow, treeless reef? According to Gillespie, when Lieutenant Lambrecht reached the island on July 9, he saw signs of recent habitation, but no Electra. By that time the tides had washed the Electra off the reef and into the Pacific, out of sight. Gillespie points to the radio transmissions as evidence: The last recorded one was made on July 7.
In 2010, a forensic imaging specialist examined a wallet-size photograph taken in October 1937 during a British expedition to the island. Zooming in to a new high-resolution copy revealed what Gillespie believed to be part of the Electra’s landing gear. In a report published in a TIGHAR newsletter in 2013, Gillespie called the photograph the “best piece of quantifiable evidence suggesting that the Earhart/Noonan flight ended at Gardner Island.” He tempered that assessment at the end of that same bulletin: “Confirmation that the Earhart/Noonan flight ended on Nikumaroro must await the identification of a physical object that can be conclusively linked to the Electra or its crew.”
EACH NEW CLAIM brought attention to Gillespie’s theory and acclaim for TIGHAR. But skepticism arose, too. One of the most vocal critics is Mike Campbell, a pugnacious U.S. Navy veteran, who wrote a book on Earhart in 2012. “You have no idea how fed up I am after 36 years of listening to this crap,” he told me when I contacted him.
Like Devine and Goerner, he believes conclusively that Earhart and Noonan were captured by the Japanese. “Too much was involved around the Electra on Saipan for Devine to be mistaken,” he says. He calls the idea that Earhart landed where Gillespie says she did the “Nikumaroro virus.”
Goerner even claims that Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in World War II, once said to him, “Now that you’re going to Washington, Fred, I want to tell you Earhart and her navigator did go down in the Marshalls and were picked up by the Japanese.”
And don’t say “mystery” to Campbell unless you want a verbal shellacking. It’s no mystery that Earhart and Noonan crashed in the Marshall Islands. The only mystery is how she got that far west of Howland Island in the first place. “We don’t know how she arrived at Mili, or why,” he says.
Gillespie brushes this all off. When we met at his house, he brought up the Japanese-capture idea only to tell me “it’s been so thoroughly debunked that we don’t need to worry about it.”
But doubt persists. In all those trips to Nikumaroro, Gillespie has yet to discover evidence that definitively proves Earhart had ever been on the island. The shoes, mirror, and freckle cream that Gillespie found all could have belonged to someone else: While Nikumaroro was uninhabited at the time of Earhart’s disappearance, it was populated by dozens of people from 1939 to 1963. The aluminum sheet? For years, others surmised that it was stamped with letters indicating that it was from another aircraft. Earlier this year, Gillespie acknowledged that the metal panel belonged to a Douglas C-47 cargo plane.
Undeterred, Gillespie has pressed on. At times he has felt defeated: During TIGHAR’s second trip to the island in 1991, the group received permission to exhume a grave on the eastern edge of the island, only to find that it was the final resting place of an infant. Still, he is relentless in his search and determined in his belief, maybe even to the point of obstinacy. And although he’s not as combative as his detractors, he is no less certain: Earhart died on Nikumaroro.
More recently, Gillespie has turned his attention to a set of skeletal remains discovered by a British expedition on the island in 1940: a skull, a humerus and radius of an arm, a tibia, fibula, and two femur bones. The bones had been taken to Fiji shortly after they were found, where a British doctor named D.W. Hoodless concluded that they’d belonged to a short, stocky man, quickly ending most speculation that they were Earhart’s or her navigator’s.
Gillespie, however, has long suspected they belonged to Earhart. In 1998, TIGHAR ran Hoodless’s measurements through an anthropological database. The results were encouraging—the bones were more likely to have come from a woman similar in size to Earhart than from the short, stocky man Hoodless suggested.
Then, in 2018, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, named Richard Jantz learned about the bones from the late Karen Burns, a colleague who’d traveled twice with TIGHAR to Nikumaroro. Jantz is perhaps best known for codeveloping Fordisc, a computer program used by forensic anthropologists worldwide that estimates sex and ancestry from skeletal measurements. Intrigued by what Burns had told him, Jantz reviewed the notes made by Hoodless. He then extrapolated the lengths of Earhart’s humerus and radius from a well-known photograph of the pilot holding a can of fuel. He got the tibia length by measuring the inseam of a pair of her pants housed at Purdue University. He then compared the lengths of the bones found on Gardner to his own estimates, and cross-referenced that data against the bone lengths of 2,777 other individuals kept in a database at his university’s forensic anthropology center. Jantz says the bones found on the island “are more consistent with Amelia Earhart” than all the other bones in the database.
This was the piece of evidence Gillespie had been waiting for—a bull’s-eye that erased any remaining doubt in his mind; vindication, even, for years of trying to persuade his critics that Earhart and Noonan had perished on Gardner Island. “How big a stack of coincidences do you want?” he says. “This is where she died. That’s her story. Show me where I’m wrong.”
DNA evidence could prove Gillespie right, of course. But the bones were discarded decades ago, long before DNA profiling was established.
“The bones are interesting. I’ll give them that,” says Tom Crouch, curator emeritus of the National Air and Space Museum. Still, he finds the Gardner Island theory dubious at best. “But it seems to me that if they have proven anything in all those trips to that tiny little island, it’s that she’s not there. Because if she had been there, by golly, they would’ve found something.”
NOT EVERYONE FINDS Gillespie’s take as ironclad as he does. Questions remain. The enduring uncertainty of Amelia Earhart might be likened to a mathematical equation with a missing variable—an unknown that allows an infinite number of answers, each of them potentially right, and each, perhaps, impossible to prove.
What hasn’t been found—the one object that would silence all questions about the fates of Earhart and Noonan, the crucial missing variable—is the plane.
“What we don’t have is what everyone wants: a Lockheed Electra sitting on the bottom of the ocean that can be recovered and put in the Smithsonian,” Gillespie says.
A new cohort of explorers is turning to advanced underwater sonar imaging technology in hopes of a breakthrough. One of the first to pioneer the tech was marine explorer Bob Ballard, who discovered the RMS Titanic on the ocean floor in 1985. Like Gillespie, he initially resisted searching for the Electra, but eventually went looking. In 2019 he organized an expedition to search the coast around Nikumaroro. He had been drawn there by TIGHAR’s research and was optimistic. For two weeks, his team used sonar and remote-operated vehicles to scan the depths around the island. But Ballard came up empty-handed. Apparently, he has plans to look off the coast of Howland Island next. In a PBS interview that aired last year, he said, “Stay tuned.” When asked if he’ll be able to find the Electra, he said, “Absolutely.”
Gillespie doubts Ballard will find anything. The Electra, as he has said for years, succumbed to rising tides and surf and was washed into the ocean off Nikumaroro’s coast, too deep for anyone to find.
Meanwhile, in August 2023, an expedition led by pilot and U.S. Air Force veteran Tony Romeo traveled by ship to an area of the Pacific Ocean about 2,000 miles southwest of Hawaii, where he and several colleagues had determined the Electra might be found. His company, Deep Sea Vision, had purchased a powerful underwater drone from a Norwegian defense contractor for $9 million. Romeo used another $2 million of his own money earned from a career in real estate to fund the trip.
During his own investigation, Romeo became familiar with TIGHAR’s work and says its website is an exceptional source of information on Earhart. “TIGHAR has done excellent research,” Romeo says. “I’ll give it to them.”
Ultimately, however, he chose to search near Howland Island, not Nikumaroro. It took more than three months, at $15,000 a day, but his six-person team eventually uncovered a sonar picture from 16,500 feet below that seemed to depict a fuselage, with two wings up front and two tail fins. Headlines in January trumpeted the find. “An Astonishing Ocean Discovery May Have Just Ended the 86-Year Search for Amelia Earhart,” wrote this magazine. “3 Miles Down, a Potential Clue to Earhart’s Fate” reported the New York Times.
“It’s, I think, the first real evidence of a man-made object near Howland Island,” Romeo told me. He says Deep Sea Vision made the footage public because his team thinks they have a pretty good idea of what they’re looking at.
“I’d like to see more engines in the sonar image,” he added. “But I think it’s promising. I’m open to the possibility that it’s not, or it’s a rock formation, or that it’s another plane. But it’s got the same characteristics of the tail that she had on her plane.”
Gillespie, as intransigent as ever, was ready to protest what he believes to be so clearly a false alarm. Four days after the New York Times published its article, Gillespie was on Fox News laying out his suspicions. The wings in the image? Swept back, and the Electra’s, he pointed out, are straight.
“A couple million dollars buys an awful lot of confirmation bias,” Gillespie told the anchor.
No matter what Gillespie uncovers, analyzes, or explains, he still finds himself defending his theory, searching for evidence, and attempting to get the world to buy in. Those who agree with him have all the information they need. Those who disagree will continue to challenge him until irrefutable proof is produced. In September, he’ll publish One More Good Flight, a book that will sew all the threads of his Earhart story together. Will it become the definitive text? Or will it be yet another tome in the vast catalog of Earhart discourse?
“All we can do is put the truth out there and hope that people who have credibility review my book and say, ‘He’s got a point here,’” Gillespie says.
There’s no more convincing he can do. He’s moving on to other things. After all, the White Bird is still out there.
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