Amelia Earhart Mystery: Plane Fragment Found From 1937 Disappearance?

Virginia D'Cruz Sunday, November 02, 2014

Amelia Earhart (right) and her navigator Fred Noonan are captured on film before launching their ill-fated mission to circumnavigate the world aboard a Lockheed aircraft on July 2, 1937 | Photo: Creative Commons/[Flickr Tekniska museet]

Amelia Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937 while trying to circumnavigate the world aboard a Lockheed Model 10 Electra with twin engines.

Since that time, her plane and body have never been recovered.

That could change as Ric Gillespie has managed to match a piece of wreckage to Earhart's plane.

Gillespie is an executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). The group claims to have found a piece of aluminum measuring 19 x 23 inches washed up on Nikumaroro Island sometime in 1991. Since getting the find, TIGHAR had been trying to match the piece to the Electra used by Earhart but had not been successful.

Recently, however, the piece was matched to the aluminum sheeting used to cover a window on Earhart's plane. It also matched the rivet holes on a window of an Electra that was being rebuilt in Newton, Kansas. Gillespie says the match was "like a fingerprint."

'It is the first time an artifact found on Nikumaroro has been shown to have a direct link to Amelia Earhart," Gilespie says.

Nikumaroro is a small uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is about 2,000 miles away from Hawaii. Soon after Earhart's disappearance, the Navy conducted a flyover of the island and noticed signs of inhabitation. However, they found nobody around when they reached Nikumaroro Island and searched it.

This leads to speculation that Earhart and Fred Noonan, who was her navigator, had crashed or landed near the island and lived on it as castaways until their death. When British settlers arrived on the island, they found the bones of a tall woman and a short man along with a sextant and one part of a shoe belonging to a woman. These remains were transported to Fiji but were lost soon after the Pacific war against Japan started.

Sonar images of the reef near Nikumaroro have shown an object matching the dimension of the Electra lying under 650 feet of water. The Huffington Post notes that Gillespie plans to explore this next year.