The Odd Vanishing of Amelia Earhart

This week on BuzzFeed Unsolved, we discuss the enduring mystery behind the disappearance of famed pilot Amelia Earhart. This one has been the topic of wide speculation for about 80 years now. There's a lot of interesting theories out there. I don't know any of them. This seems cut and dry, but you know. Oh no, there's more to it? There may be more than meets the eye here. Oh. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. All right, uh, shall we just get into it then? Yes. On July 2nd, 1937, Amelia Earhart, the first woman to cross the Atlantic and one of the most famous women in the world, disappeared along with her navigator friend Noonan while attempting to circumnavigate the globe at the equator. Before we get into the incident, let's quickly provide some context into how accomplished Earhart truly was. The babe of the sky. Is that what they called her? I've heard that, yeah. It was dope. It's pretty sick. Babe in the sky. Yeah, there goes Amelia Earhart, babe in the sky. Amelia Earhart was born on July 24th, 1897 in Atchison, Kansas. In 1928, Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic, albeit as a passenger in a plane with two other pilots. However, on May 20th to the 21st of 1932, Earhart would make the trip again, this time alone, flying from Newfoundland to Ireland for about 15 hours. She was the second person to ever complete this flight. During this trip, she demonstrated her resourcefulness in times of peril as her plane suffered a leak in the fuel tank, ice on the wings, and a cracked manifold, which caused the engine to spew flames at one point. Yet, she still completed the flight. On August 24th, 1932, Earhart flew from L.A. to Newark, setting a record at that time for longest distance flown without refueling. She also became the first female pilot to complete a nonstop transcontinental flight. She's got some salt in the game. She's the Michael Jordan of flying. Well, Michael Jordan never disappeared on a basketball court forever. Well, I mean, in terms of accomplishments, Michael Jordan never went up for a dunk and then just disappeared. I'm like, whoa, where'd he go? Where'd the air go? This takes us to 1937, when Earhart set her sights on circling the globe, zigzagging along the equator, requiring long hauls over water. If successful, she would have been the first female pilot to fly around the world. Her journey would have taken her about 29,000 miles over roughly 40 days, starting and ending in California, and would have included 20 stops, including San Juan, Calcutta, and Bangkok. Hope she's bringing some chewy bars. One time, I went on a flight to Asia, and I felt like I wanted to die. How long was it? It was, I don't know, like 19 hours. And this was 40 days? This was 40 days. Aye, aye, aye. That's a month. Yeah, that's more than a month. Could you imagine doing one thing for a month? Like eating popcorn, our favorite thing to do in the world. Imagine sitting in a chair and all you did was eat popcorn. Okay, that sounds pretty good. That's pretty good, actually. That's a bad example. Earhart flew in a twin-engine Lockheed 10 Electra, a 10-passenger high-performance airliner specifically outfitted with special tanks that allowed it to carry over 1,000 pounds of fuel rather than the usual 200. So when they built this one, they specifically said, let's make a plane that won't catch on fire. I mean, that's the goal with every plane, is it? Seems like they're not doing a great job at that. I'm just saying, do you imagine there's someone that's like, oh, it would be funny if this plane caught on fire halfway through. Could be. There's some sickos out there. If there's some misogynist pieces of ---- on there, you know, on that team, he's like, he's, you know, he's screwing the little bolts on and they're like, you know what they're gonna use this for? No. Well, that babe of the sky, she's gonna fly around the globe. Oh, is that so? Is that what she thinks she's gonna do? Oopsie. Oops. There goes a screw. Yeah. The sky belongs to men. Oh! On May 21st, Earhart and her navigator, Noonan, started their journey from Oakland, California. On the morning of July 2nd, 1937, 42 days into their journey, Earhart and Noonan prepared to leave Lae, New Guinea. Leaving Lae, the Electra was carrying the most fuel it had on this expedition, about 1,000 pounds worth. They were already roughly 22,000 miles into the trip and had about another 7,000 to go before returning to California. She planned to stop 2,556 miles away on Howland Island to refuel. It was about an 18-hour flight. Harry Balfour, the radio operator for Guinea Airways, in Lae set up a schedule for he and Earhart to send transmissions to each other once every hour. Soon after Earhart's plane took off, Balfour noted that the headwinds were stronger than anybody had thought. He sent transmissions of this information to Earhart three times over the course of two hours. However, Earhart did not seem to get these transmissions. Headwind speed could affect plane speed, gas consumption, and length of flight. Around 2.18 p.m., Earhart's transmissions, which had been blocked earlier, were finally received by Balfour in Lae. She gave her speed, 140 knots, and altitude, 7,000 feet, and things seemed to be okay. A little over an hour later, her next transmission stated that she had climbed to 10,000 feet. This may have been uneconomical in terms of fuel usage. It's unclear why Earhart made this climb, but author Elgin Long, a veteran pilot, guesses it may have been to avoid clouds or mountains. You think she just went vert? Just like... I don't know. What do you think of this, Noonan? Maybe there was something she had to avoid that was coming at her. Okay, if this is a preview of what's to come... Maybe, you never know. This transmission also seemed to be delayed, though they were still on course, and it's believed that the experienced pilot Earhart would have realized the problem with the headwinds by this point. As they neared Howland Island, the plane was likely down to a last 97-gallon tank of fuel. The Coast Guard's Itasca, a 250-foot boat off the coast of Howland Island, was to provide communications and weather for Earhart upon her arrival to the island. It is thought that Earhart's plane must have gotten fairly close to the island because the Itasca did hear her transmissions, which grew stronger as sunrise came and went. In fact, they thought Earhart was close enough that the radio operator on board the Itasca went outside to look for her plane. In one of her last transmissions, Earhart told the Itasca, quote, we must be on you but cannot see you, end quote. She radioed, quote, gas is running low, end quote. Earhart's last transmission at 8.43 a.m. was, quote, we are on the line 157-337. We will repeat message. We will repeat this on 6,210 kilocycles. Wait, end quote. While there are conflicting reports, the transmission may have also included, quote, we are running north and south, end quote. In her final transmissions, Earhart's voice was described as, quote, frantic, end quote. Did Fred chime in during any of these? Not really, I think Fred was too busy white knuckling in on the passenger seat. It was a surprise, yeah, it was a surprise. My wife told me not to do this. Exactly. After that, Earhart was never officially heard from again. When Earhart's plane never arrived, the Itasca searched the waters northwest of Howlin Island. On July 7th, five days later, the U.S. battleship Colorado began to search the waters to the southeast. An aircraft carrier, the Lexington, arrived soon after from its base in San Diego and stayed searching the region until July 18th. To this day, neither Earhart, Noonan, or their plane were ever found, but that hasn't stopped the world from speculating about what happened. Let's go over the theories. The first theory is perhaps the most widely accepted theory that Earhart's plane ran out of gas and she and Noonan died when they crashed into the ocean northwest of their destination. All those skeptics have pointed out that an Electra with that amount of fuel should have lasted 24 hours in flight rather than 20, as Earhart's plane did. Analysis by the Jet Propulsion Center at Caltech concluded that with the headwinds and the 10,000-foot climb Earhart was forced to take early in the flight, her plane would have been out of fuel when she disappeared. Near Howlin Island, the ocean is about 18,000 feet deep. From 2002 until March 2017, a company called Nauticos teamed up with other groups to search a nearly 2,000-square-nautical-mile area of the Pacific Ocean floor, where Earhart's Electra may have sunk. They used sonar mapping to search the seafloor, but have not found evidence of the aircraft. Open and shut. I don't get this. It's all there. Is this gonna be your Occam's razor thing that you always cite? I think perhaps they slammed into the ocean and sank to the bottom of the sea. They're gonna comb that ocean, baby. And when they do. No one can comb the ocean. You can't drag the ocean. They're gonna comb the ---- out of it. No, the ocean, no. That ocean's gonna have nicely-groomed hair. The second theory is that Earhart became a castaway on Gardner Island, now called Nikumaroro, roughly 350 nautical miles south of Howlin Island. Nikumaroro is along the 157-337 line Earhart last reported flying along. As her plane lost fuel, it is thought she spotted the coral atoll of Nikumaroro that at low tide could have worked as an emergency landing strip. Roughly two to three years later, in 1939 or 1940, a British colonial officer named Gerald Gallagher found the remains of a campsite on the island, along with a box for a sextant, a tool used to determine latitude and longitude via celestial bodies. I think that's interesting. I do think it would be interesting if they did end up on an island. Yeah, if they were running out of gas, which still is in line with your, whatever you wanna call it, your calculations, they could have landed. Yeah, they could have. She was an expert aviator. She was, and she was good at problem solving under pressure. She flew a fireplane. However, the most provocative thing discovered on the island by Gallagher was a partial human skeleton, as well as 12 other bones. The bones were analyzed by a physician named D.W. Hoodless, who was working in a medical school in Fiji, but Hoodless determined that the bones belonged to a man who was short, stocky, and of European descent, and could not be Earhart or Noonan. Unfortunately, after this conclusion, Hoodless discarded the bones, thereby preventing anyone from DNA analyzing them in the future. I think that this guy may have jumped to conclusions a little bit, and maybe, just maybe, should have not thrown out the ******* bones. He threw out the bones? I just said that. He said, it ain't them. Trash them. That's him. Ah, these bones, these bones, no, these bones don't belong to anybody. Put them back in the ocean. Yeah, this guy wanted to go home early that day. Just throwing the bones out. What scientist does that? I feel like the majority of these true crime cases that you do are plagued with people who don't want to do their jobs. And they're not thorough. Yeah, half the reason half of these cases are unsolved is because people got evidence and were like, too much work, burn it. However, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, aka TIGAR, used Hoodless's original measurements of the bones and today's updated databases to determine the bones could have also belonged to a taller than average woman of European descent. And Earhart was said to be five foot seven or five foot eight. That's like a foot taller than you. I knew you were gonna say that. I'm 5'10", by the way, so. No, there's no quotes there. Well, when you wear your special shoes, yes, you're 5'10". Nope, nope, nope, that's from the doctor. Yes, your shoes are from the doctor. No, they're not. Yes, they are. I'm 5'10", damn it. According to TIGAR director Rick Gillespie, the reason for there being only partial bones on the island was because of the coconut crabs that lived there. He suggests the coconut crabs carried the bones off into burrows and that they may have eaten her. Coconut crabs grew up to three feet long, can break open coconuts with their pincers, and are the largest anthropods living on land. These are majestic. They're kind of horrifying looking. Anytime you think something's a majestic, just imagine if it was like 10 times bigger or if it was the last thing you saw before you died. Looking into those little beady eyes. TIGAR director Rick Gillespie has also said that a photo taken in 1937 by a British expedition to Nekumaroro shows what he believes to be landing gear from a plane sticking up out of the water. He also believes that Earhart would have used her plane's radio to signal for help for up to a week following the crash, but that if the radio had been in water, it would not work. Interestingly, according to Gillespie, several possible radio transmissions from Earhart were heard throughout the week after her disappearance, all of which coincided with the low tide on that island, a time when the plane radio was perhaps not underwater and possibly functional. A teenager named Betty Clank claims that via her shortwave radio, she heard a female voice saying, quote, this is Amelia Earhart, help me, end quote, and also heard the female voice arguing with a disoriented male's voice. She also claimed to hear, quote, water's knee deep, let me out, end quote. A little on the nose there. Yeah. I mean, I guess if your radio's malfunctioning, you wanna get straight to the point. You're not gonna say, the story is 1937, I landed on an island. Let me spin you a yarn that you shan't soon forget. I'm being eaten alive by crabs right now. Clank listened to the voice coming in clips for three hours and recorded what she heard in a notebook. Clank's father reported his daughter's findings to the Coast Guard, who did not seem to take the claim seriously, as there were reports of dozens of messages supposedly from Earhart heard in all parts of the world in the days after her disappearance. In 1991, Gillespie found a partial rubber shoe sole on the island, stamped with the words, Cat's Paw Rubber Company, USA. The sole was from the same type of shoe Earhart is seen wearing in a photograph taken in Indonesia shortly before her disappearance, though the sole belongs to a size nine shoe, which would have been too big for Earhart. What the ****, man? Come on. I just gotcha. It's stupid. For a second, I saw you perk up. Yeah. Gillespie also found a roughly 19 inch by 23 inch piece of riveted aircraft aluminum on Takuma Roro. Tygar believes it to be from Earhart's Electra, specifically from a shiny patch near the tail. Though, Elgin Long, the first aviator to fly around the globe over both poles and an Earhart researcher slash author, says the piece in question is definitively not from Earhart's plane. Other experts, including a Lockheed employee who had worked on Earhart's plane, concluded the same, according to Long. Further damning to the theory that Earhart was marooned on this island was the fact that Navy planes flew over the island Takuma Roro on July 9th, one week after Earhart's disappearance, and saw nothing. Personally, I love the island theory. I would love it to be true because I like the peril of it. I like the drama. I like her getting eaten by crabs. I love the thought of someone getting eaten by crabs. There it is. I like how you tried to sugarcoat it. And I went immediately to the core of what I knew you would find interesting about it. There's just something truly gross about it and horrifying. The third theory, championed by Roland C. Reynick, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, is that Earhart was in cahoots with the U.S. government and was indeed a spy. Reynick posits that Earhart had a plan B, where if she couldn't find Howland Island, she was to ditch her plane near the Marshall Islands, which are only 800 miles away from Howland Island. That way, the U.S. government would be able to perform reconnaissance in the Marshall Islands, which were at the time occupied by Japan under the guise of searching for Earhart. Corroborating this notion are Marshallese locals, who for decades have said they witnessed Earhart's plane crash on their island. However, the plan went awry when the Japanese intercepted Earhart and Noonan and captured them, releasing them years later after the war. Then, Earhart and Noonan returned to live out their lives in the United States under assumed names. Some believe Amelia Earhart moved to New Jersey and changed her name to Irene Craigmill, though she married and became Irene Bolum. Though, this theory seems improbable, at least to the thought that Earhart is actually Irene Bolum since Bolum sued the publisher of a book that shared this speculation. Also, according to Tygar, the resemblance is not that strong and comparing photos of Earhart to photos of Bolum taken four decades apart proved nothing. Regardless, Irene Bolum passed away in 1982. This is dumb. It's pretty dumb. Can you imagine if someone just accused you of being Amelia Earhart? You're her, I know you are. I'm gonna tell the world. I do love the idea that the government tells her land in this area so we can do the little reconnaissance. Another version of this theory is that after being captured in the Marshall Islands, Earhart and Noonan were eventually executed. An army sergeant by the name of Thomas E. Devine claimed that in July 1944, he met a group of US Marines guarding a hangar containing Earhart's Electra on the formerly Japanese-settled island of Saipan, which had recently been liberated. Devine also claims the soldiers destroyed the plane. Furthermore, a photo believed to show an obscured Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan on a dock in the Marshall Islands was found in the National Archives by a retired government investigator named Les Kinney. It sounds like he's very accomplished and distinguished and probably knows what he's talking about. That photo looks like ----. So I don't care what he thinks of it. He might as well be looking at like a Rorschach blot being like, that's your mother. I don't care what he thinks. The expert is only as good as the material he has in front of him. The photo was analyzed by various experts who were optimistic that it was indeed the missing aviators. Unfortunately, this photo was promptly and apparently debunked when two bloggers found the photo in a Japanese book published in 1935, which is two years before Earhart even disappeared. So this photo might as well have been taken in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It's like, hey, here's a lady who looks like Amelia Earhart in Idaho in 1946. Photo aside, skeptics have pointed out that Earhart, given her fuel situation, would not have made it to the Marshall Islands regardless. Among those skeptics are Elgin Long, a former pilot, and Fred Patterson, a pilot for World Airways and expert on electrodes. So you're wasting my time. You're wasting everybody's time right now. Okay, all I'm saying is it's not impossible that they overshot the island, went down, and then wherever they landed, even if it wasn't on the Marshall Islands, they got picked up by some freight boat or they floated close enough that they got picked up by a freight boat. That does not seem crazy to me. Sounds like a fairy tale to me. Okay, well, I'm just saying that I like this theory quite a bit. All right, I'm glad you like it. Which brings us to our fourth and final theory that Earhart may have made contact with alien life forms, either by accident or knowingly and in collusion with the US government. I don't even wanna talk about it. Why? Because it's stupid. Is it completely impossible that it happened? No, because I actually do, you know, look, aliens are a lot more probable than ghosts. Admittedly, this alien theory is a bit tinfoil hat, but an episode of Star Trek Voyager from 1995 capitalized on the idea, so that's kinda cool. Okay. I just love that every time I ask you, can you definitively say no? What's the answer? Can you definitively say? No, what do you say? Answer the question. Definitively? Definitively, can you say that aliens did not have a part in the abduction of Amelia Earhart? No, I can't. There you go. In the end, many believe that Earhart simply crashed and died on impact, but still, there's no way of telling if any of these alternate theories may have transpired. Until a plane or body is discovered, the case of Amelia Earhart will likely remain unsolved. You know what? I may be with you here. I think crabs one, aliens two, crash three. I bet the crabs built a little restaurant on the island called Joe's Amelia Shack. They ate for weeks, probably. Do you think they ate her with butter as well? Oh, yeah. Mm, that's delicious. And one of them was like, oh, a little too human-y for me. I don't really like when it tastes too human-y. I like it meatier. And they were like, shut up, Fred. She's a bit too bold. I'm sorry you have no culture. Was that morbid? Mm-hmm. You know all of this is morbid, right? I'm sure human with butter would taste pretty good. Where are you going? I don't know. To sleep? Okay. Well, it was aliens.