Amelia Earhart Update!

Has Science Solved Her Disappearance?

Amelia Earhart’s story is a tale that has captivated the world for nearly a century. What was thought to be a straightforward tragedy of a plane and its two passengers lost at sea, may not be as simple as we thought.

Modern day science and technology may have finally unraveled the 87 year long unsolved mystery of what happened after that fateful and final radio message from Amelia on July 2nd, 1937. This week’s tilscience Substack is a two part series that explores the depths of the ocean—and the bounds of historical mystery through the lens of cutting edge technology and the latest scientific research to hopefully shed light on what happened to America’s favorite female aviator.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Richard (Ric) Gillespie, who is the Executive Director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR).

The following is an excerpt of the interview transcript. For paid tier members, please scroll to the bottom to view the full video interview!

Richard Gillespie: My name is Richard Gillespie. I use my nickname Ric. I am the executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery and we use an acronym for that, T -I -G -H -A -R, pronounced “Tiger”, just like the animal. We do historical investigations.

We're a nonprofit, 501C3, and we consider famous people who disappeared in airplanes to be our clients. We want to figure out what happened to them and of course, the most famous of those is Amelia Earhart.

We avoided the Amelia Earhart investigation for several years because we didn't think there was anything substantive that could be done. The intuitive explanation for her disappearance was that she crashed at sea. And we saw that there's way too much ocean out there and the airplane is so small and the expense so great in looking for such a small target and so much ocean.

The whole thing seemed totally impractical…until two of our members, and we're a membership organization, two of our members made us aware that what Earhart said in her final radio transmissions to the Coast Guard made perfect sense to a celestial aerial navigator. These guys (members) had been celestial aerial navigators during World War II using the same techniques that Earhart's navigator Fred Noonan used. And they said that if Earhart did what she said she was doing in her last radio transmission heard by the Coast Guard, which was running on a line, known as a line of position, then she should have come to another island. And nobody had ever looked for her there.

So I said, wait a minute. You're telling me nobody ever looked for Amelia Earhart in the most likely place? And they said, yes, that’s the way it looks to us.

So I thought, well I can't search an ocean, but I should be able to search an island. And we started to do some research and found that they were wrong about one thing.

This is not a new Amelia Earhart theory. This is the oldest Amelia Earhart theory. This is exactly what the Navy thought happened back in 1937. And they actually did search the island from the air and saw things that shouldn't have been there, although they didn't realize it at the time.

So we thought, well, maybe we ought to go have a look.

Well, going to have a look at a coral atoll known as Gardner Island then, but today is Nikamaororo, it's on the other side of the world and there's no good way to get there.

The best way is to fly to Fiji and then charter an ocean-going ship and sail for five days, thousand miles, and figure out some way to get ashore on the island because it's protected by a very dangerous fringing reef.

There's only one way to get ashore. It's through a channel that's blasted through the reef and then you've got this island that is about, well, if you took all the land and strung it out in a string, it'd be about 10 miles.

But it's a classic atoll, a ribbon of land surrounding a lagoon. But it's dense vegetation, some of it extremely thick, and a very difficult place to work. And of course, it's not unusual for it to be 100 to 120 degrees. Difficult place.

To make a very long story shorter, we ended up conducting 11 expeditions to that island and we found a great deal of evidence both on the island and through other research. And we ultimately proved what really did happen to Amelia Earhart.

Harini Bhat: I actually did not know about how they searched the island from the air. So what did they see or not see? And how did it end up being that they didn't pursue that further?

Richard Gillespie: Early in the US Navy's investigation, like within the first day or so, the Navy figured out that the line that Amelia Earhart said she was on was a line of position that passed through Howland Island, the island she was trying to get to, but also passed very close to Gardiner Island, now known as Nikamaroro.

Then, the same evening after she disappeared, the Coast Guard and the Navy and other radio operators around the Pacific were hearing radio distress calls that were on Earhart's frequency. Her voice was recognized. Sometimes her name was recognized. The call sign of her airplane was recognized (KHAQQ).

So, they said, well, she's apparently landed in the water and is floating around calling for help. And she's probably going to be on that line she said she was on. So we need to send a battleship down there to search along that line. The battleship will have three airplanes on it that they normally use just to spot for the guns on the ship.

So, the battleship left Pearl Harbor from Hawaii the next day, July 3rd, 1937, and started the 2000 mile trip down to Gardner Island. Meanwhile, people keep hearing these radio distress calls. And she was heard to say that she's part on land, part in the water, and so forth.

And this keeps going on, you know, night after night that people are hearing these signals. And Pan American Airways, who had been flying scheduled passenger service across the Pacific, northern Pacific for almost a year, had radio direction finding stations in Hawaii and on Midway Island and on Wake Island in the Pacific that they use to guide their clippers across.

They were hearing these signals too and they took radio bearings on them. And the bearings are crossing down there near Gardner Island.

Of course, this is making headlines all across the country and the Lockheed Aircraft Company, the manufacturers of Amelia’s airplane, heard that people were hearing all these radio signals.

So they said, at that time, wait a minute, if you're hearing radio signals from this airplane, it's not in the water. It'll float just fine, but the radios will be underwater. They won't work. That airplane is on land.

Not only that, but it's been going on night after night and she needs to recharge the batteries that her radio depends upon.

So the only way for her to do that is with the generator that's on the right hand engine. So she's got to be able to run the engine in order to charge the battery. That means the airplane's on its wheels because you can't run the engine if the propeller hits the water.

So you're looking at a landing. She has landed somewhere. And the Navy looked at this and said, well, OK, well if she's on land then the bearings are crossing at the only land that is down there - Gardner Island, that must be where she is.

So when the ship got there, it took them a week to get there, by which time these radio distress calls had stopped. But they launched their three airplanes and they flew over Gardner Island on July 9th. They didn't see an airplane, but they did see what they described as clear signs of recent habitation.

Now, exactly what they saw, they didn't say. The best we've been able to find out was that they saw what they described as markers of some kind, but they considered there'd be signs of recent habitation. But they were under the impression that all these islands had native work parties harvesting coconuts. So they thought nothing of that.

They didn't see an airplane and so they left.

What they didn't realize is that there were no work parties on Gardner Island. There had been nobody there since 1892. There should have been no sign of recent habitation. They didn't know that. In their minds, they had searched the island. There's no airplane here. So they left.

Now, Amelia had landed on the reef that surrounds the island, which is flat and dry, smooth, like a runway, and it dries at low tide. So, when Earhart arrived over the island on July 2nd, the tide was out and the reef was dry, and she was able to make a landing.

She was parked down that reef out near where the waves break, sending those radio calls. But the tide came in, and you know, tide goes in, tide goes out, and it gets higher and higher.

Eventually the airplane was washed into the ocean. When the Navy showed up a week later, the tide was in, it was high tide. So the reef didn't look like a runway. It was just surf and the airplane, what was left of it, was hidden under the surf.

So the Navy pilots didn't even see something that looked like a place she could have landed and the airplane was hidden anyway. So they kind of blew it and they left her to die on that island.

Harini Bhat: Oh my goodness. Just the timing of it all. And the timing of everything has been really key. At least from what I can tell from reading the investigation from TIGHAR, because at least when I did the video, I think the reason why it did so well was because people had no idea about these post-loss distress calls. Because the way that history has portrayed it, is that day, July 2nd or July 3rd, she had one last radio call and after that there was nothing.

I don't think people in modern day realize that she was still radioing in and local people from across the country were getting her messages and writing in - writing to the president, to her husband saying, ‘Hey, I heard her name. I heard her call signal. She's out there.’

And you all (TIGHAR) decided to pursue that and then you noticed that something was odd about the timing, which prompted you to investigate further, which is how you guys ended up going to Gardner Island, correct?

Richard Gillespie: Right, yeah. What we refer to as the post loss radio signals are an extremely important body of evidence. But we wanted to confirm that they were real, that that was real evidence. So we did a lot of research and we found every instance of somebody reporting, hearing a radio signal that might be from Earhart.

And we analyzed each of those very scientifically with software developed by the US government to assess the probability that such a call could be heard by the people that claim to hear them. And what we found is that for 57 of 135 alleged distress calls, there is no other explanation for them. They had to be coming from her location to be heard the way that they were heard. That took us a long time to confirm all that.

Another thing we did to confirm the validity of those signals was investigating the airplane.

OK, so the airplane can only transmit if she's able to run the engine to recharge the battery. But the same battery that powers the battery is also the battery you use to start the engine. So if you're going to do this, you better start the engine first and then send your signals. Because if you run the battery down sending signals, you can't get the engine started or recharged again.

So, we asked ourselves, if we track these 57 credible signals and determine what the conditions on the reef were like at the time they were sent, let's see if the tide was low enough for the engine to be run at the time those signals were heard.

Doing that meant surveying the reef and hindcasting the tides.

Surveying the reef was not fun, but we got it done in 2007 and then we were able to match it against the hindcast of tides. And it's unbelievable. It's fantastic. Night after night, the credible signals only occur when the water level is low enough to run that engine and the propeller to clear.

As soon as the water level gets high enough to threaten the prop, the signal stops. And when the tide goes back out, they start up again. And this is night after night after night. But then the tide is getting higher and higher until at one point the tide is high enough so that it will actually reach not only the prop, but the transmitter that's in the cabin. And once that happened, game over.

And sure enough once that happens, there are no more signals. So it all tracks.

Now, the post-loss signals and the radio bearings taken by Pan-American, that's one body of evidence, but there's more.

We found a photograph taken in 1937, three months after she disappeared, by a British expedition that visited the island, not searching for Earhart, but they were there to evaluate the island for future colonization. And they took a bunch of pictures. They didn't realize it, but one of their pictures shows something sticking up out of the water on the reef in the area where we thought she probably landed…

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