Does anyone know what happened to amelia earhart

Reineck, a retired U. Air Force colonel who lives in Kailua, Hawaii, claimed in According to Reineck, the scheme would have allowed the U. Earhart radioed that she was headed north, the message was intercepted, and the Japanese took her hostage, he claims. Our uncles and aunts, our parents, and our grandparents know she landed here. The documentary argues that the Japanese navy thought that Earhart and Noonan were U.

For him, the answer to the mystery rests under 17, feet of ocean. But until Earhart's wreckage is hauled from the Pacific, the mystery surrounding her disappearance will continue to invite speculation of every stripe.

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When the planes flew over Nikumaroro, the pilots saw no sign of Earhart or of recent habitation. The Navy wrote the signals off as bogus. Three years later, a British coconut harvesting expedition to the island found a partial skeleton of what appeared to be a castaway. Giant coconut crabs, apparently, had dismembered and carried off many of the bones, but the crew collected those that remained.

In the spring of , the bones arrived in Fiji, where a local doctor examined them and concluded they came from a short, stocky man. The bones and objects subsequently disappeared, and only a few dozen members of the British colonial administration ever heard about the findings. Few people believed the whispered, lingering rumours about the mysterious skeleton until, in , the original paperwork turned up.

Both concluded that he had been mistaken in his interpretation. The bones actually belonged to a woman, most likely of northern European descent, who stood around five feet and seven inches tall. Encouraged, the TIGHAR team subsequently carried out three archaeological surveys on the island, uncovering artifacts that speak of an American woman from the s, including a broken compact, personal care products and anti-freckle cream Earhart reportedly considered her freckles unattractive.

A bone fragment that came from a human fingertip raised hope, but geneticists at the University of Oklahoma were unable to recover enough mitochondrial DNA to test it against samples provided by the Earhart family.

Evidence pointed towards Earhart possibly landing in the coral reef surrounding Nikumaroro. It would have been low tide when she landed, meaning her plane could have stayed upright long enough for her to send out distress signals.

Eventually, TIGHAR members hypothesise, the tide washed it down the steep reef shelf, engulfing it in several hundred feet of ocean. Last summer, TIGHAR returned to the island for the tenth time and deployed a Bluefin autonomous underwater vehicle AUV to collect sonar imagery of the vertical face of the reef for the first time.

When word that the Earhart plane was lost reached the U. But even before the message reached Washington, Secretary of the Navy Swanson had ordered the Navy to start hunting. The battleship Colorado hove to off the Phoenix Islands, catapulted three planes from its deck. The flyers skimmed over Gardner and McKean Islands and Carondelet Reef, saw nothing but ruined guano works and the wreck of a tramp freighter.

Thousands of startled seabirds fluttered up, menacing the propellers and forcing the flyers to climb. Some days equatorial squalls and vanishing visibility crippled the hunt, but on others the weather was perfect, visibility unlimited.

The Itasca , which inaugurated the search last fortnight, continued its futile patrol until fuel ran short. The minesweeper Swan put ashore a searching party at Canton Island, where last month a party of scientists viewed the solar eclipse… Meanwhile the aircraft carrier Lexington , with 62 planes aboard instead of 72 as first announced and an escort of four destroyers, sped out of San Diego at forced draft, stopped in Hawaii to refuel, arrived in the search area early this week.

Rear Admiral Orin G. Murfin, coordinator of the search, planned to abandon it. Meanwhile the chance of finding the flyers alive, according to the consensus of searchers, was already down to one in a million.

But while the formal search-and-rescue mission may have ended, the citizen search was just beginning. In the s, one theory that became popular was put forth by journalist who believed that the Japanese captured Earhart and Noonan and took them to Saipan.

In , TIME reported that the FBI confirmed that a clue to her last landing site could be an aluminum map case that was recovered by aircraft archaeologists on Nikumaroro, an atoll miles southeast of Howland Island. Just last year, a 12th expedition focused on Nikumaroro kicked off, backed in part by National Geographic; a forensic anthropologist believes bones found there could belong to Earhart.

But other experts on Earhart, including Butler, believe that if she ended up there, plane parts would have been discovered by the three planes that flew over Nikumaroro and nearby islands five days after Earhart went down.

And recently, a photograph found in the National Archives was the subject of a History Channel documentary that put forward the theory that it showed Earhart and Noonan on Jaluit Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

While billionaire philanthropist Ted Waitt co-producer of the biopic Amelia financed a a robotic search of the ocean floor west of Howland Island, the ocean floor on the east side of the island has yet to be explored. Write to Olivia B.

Waxman at olivia. By Olivia B. Get our History Newsletter. Put today's news in context and see highlights from the archives.