Amelia Earhart's disappearance

Amelia Earhart, a pioneer of aviation, disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 while trying to fly around the world.The trailblazing aviator’s disappearance remains a source of fascination—and controversy.

Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off from Lae, New Guinea, on July 2, 1937, on the last leg of their historic attempt to circumnavigate the world . Their next destination was Howland Island in the central Pacific Ocean, some 2,500 miles away. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter, the Itasca, waited there to guide the world-famous aviator in for a landing on the tiny, uninhabited coral atoll..But Earhart never arrived on Howland Island.In her twin-engine Lockheed Electra plane, Earhart and Noonan battled overcast skies, faulty radio transmissions, and a rapidly diminishing fuel supply,she and Noonan lost contact with the Itasca somewhere over the Pacific .. Despite a search-and-rescue mission of unprecedented scale, including ships and planes from the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard scouring some 250,000 square miles of ocean, they were never found.In its official report at the time, the Navy concluded that Earhart and Noonan had run out of fuel, crashed into the Pacific and drowned. Despite this, debates rage over what actually happened on July 2, 1937 and afterward. A court order declared Earhart legally dead in January 1939, 18 months after she disappeared. In search of evidence that would reveal Earhart's fate, millions of dollars have been spent searching for alternate theories.

At 8:43 am local time on the morning of her disappearance, Earhart reported flying "on the line 157 337...running north and south," a directional coordinate describing a course through Howland Island.In 1989, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) lead by Richard Gillespie, first visited Nikumaroro - a small and remote Pacific atoll belonging to the Republic of Kiribati. TIGHAR and its director, Richard Gillespie, believe that when Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were unable to locate Howland Island, they headed south on the 157/337 line for 350 nautical miles and made an emergency landing on Nikumaroro (then called Gardner Island) According to this theory, they lived for a period of time as castaways on the tiny, uninhabited island, and eventually died there.

On July 9, 1937, U.S. Navy planes flew over Gardner Island and saw no sign of Earhart, Noonan, or the plane, but they did notice signs of human habitation, though no one had lived on the atoll since 1892.

In 1940, British officials located a partial human skeleton from a remote part of Nikumaroro. A physician examined the bones and believed they were from a male. After that, the remains disappeared; however, in 1998, TIGHAR made an analysis of their measurements and thought that the bones most likely belonged to a female of European origin, who was approximately Earhart's height (5-foot-7 to 5-foot-8). Then in 2018, anthropologists from the University of Tennessee completed a forensic examination of the bone measurements with help from TIGHAR and discovered that “the bones have more similarity to Earhart than 99 percent of individuals in a large reference sample.”During their expeditions to Nikumaroro since 1989, TIGHAR has discovered metal artifacts (possibly airplane parts) and a broken jar of freckle cream, but no conclusive evidence that Earhart's plane landed there.

The crash-and-sink theory is the most widely backed concept of what became of Amelia Earhart's final flight, despite prolonged debate among historians and researchers for more than 80 years. In an effort to get to the bottom of the mystery, deep-sea exploration companyNauticos has used sonar to explore a two thousand square nautical mile area close to Howland Island where her last radio message was sent from in the course of three excursions since 2002, yet no signs of the Electra's wreckage were found. Until there is some kind of definite proof, it appears as though this mysterious incident will remain unsolved.