What Really Happened to Amelia Earhart？

Hey Thoughty2 here. The fear of flying is one of the most common phobias in the world. As many as 40% of people may suffer from a mild form of flight-related anxiety, or aerophobia as it's imaginatively called, whilst up to 5% of the population have been cursed with a crippling fear of flying that, in many cases, prevents them from ever travelling by air. But as far as phobias go, it isn't the most rational. As you're probably well aware, air travel is one of the safest ways to get around, far safer than almost all other forms of transport that most of us take on a daily or weekly basis without ever thinking about it. In the year after the September 11th attacks in New York, many Americans understandably avoided flying for quite a while, instead choosing to travel by car where possible. But ironically enough, one study calculated that over 1,500 Americans died in traffic accidents as a result. That's more than the number of people who died in commercial plane crashes in the whole of 2002 worldwide. And here's the thing, we see aerophobia as a largely irrational fear because flying is so safe, but that hasn't always been the case. And in the very early days of aviation, getting into the cockpit of an aeroplane really did mean taking your life into your own hands. Several of the most famous aviation pioneers in history lost their lives inside their beloved planes. Otto Lilienfeld died after breaking his neck in a glider crash, and John Alcock lost his life in a flying accident fewer than six months after becoming the first person to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic. But of all the pilots to have met their end indulging in their greatest passion, one name stands out above all others. Amelia Earhart. And the reason for that is simple. To this day, more than 80 years after she was last seen alive, nobody knows exactly what happened to her. It's no exaggeration to say that her disappearance in the summer of 1937 remains one of the biggest mysteries in modern human history. Before seemingly vanishing off the face of the planet, Amelia Earhart was a bona fide international celebrity. She set dozens of aviation records, perhaps the most famous of which was becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. But she was famous for more than just her flying credentials. Amelia Earhart represented a new kind of woman. She was a trouser-wearing, adventure-seeking badass who showed the people of a very different era to our own that, contrary to popular belief, there was an overlap in the Has Boobs, Goes on Adventures, Then diagram. So Amelia Earhart was a pioneer in more ways than one. But it's safe to say her transformation from popular aviatrix into a legend of almost mythical proportions is at least partly down to the great and enduring mystery that surrounds her disappearance. In the July of 1937, Earhart was nearing the end of her most ambitious project yet, an attempt to circumnavigate the globe in her trusty Lockheed Electra. Alongside her navigator, Fred Noonan, Earhart had already been on the road, or should that be in the air, for some 40 days and the pair had clocked up well over 20,000 miles in the process. All that stood between them and another remarkable record were two more refuelling stops, well that and about 6,500 miles of ocean. Now, seeing as you're watching this video, I'm going to take the liberty of assuming that you, like me, are a citizen of planet Earth, which means you'll be all too familiar with arguably our home's most striking interior design feature, the Pacific Ocean. This frankly ridiculous body of water covers more than 30% of our planet's surface, that's more than all of the land on Earth combined. At its widest point, you could fit five moons side by side across it, five bloody moons. There are parts of the Pacific Ocean so remote that if you were mad enough to ever go there, there's a good chance that astronauts on the International Space Station would be your nearest human companions, seriously. I tell you all partly because I literally can't help myself when it comes to useless facts and partly to give you a sense of the absurd challenge facing Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan as they took off from Papua New Guinea on the 2nd of July, 1937, and charted a course smack into the middle of the biggest nothing our planet has to offer. Their destination was Howland Island, a tiny spit of land just a mile and a half long and a good two and a half thousand miles away. There they would stop and refuel before flying on to Hawaii and finally California for their homecoming and eternal glory. Now, it's important to remember that this was a time before GPS existed, in fact it was a time before almost any of the handy things you might find on a modern aircraft had been invented, outside of wings and an engine. Which meant the only way Earhart and Noonan could find Howland Island, the proverbial needle in a haystack if ever there was one, was to rely on Noonan's knowledge of celestial navigation. Luckily, waiting for the Electra just off Howland Island was the Itasca, a US Coast Guard vessel equipped with radio gear, capable of guiding the Electra towards the island once it got close enough, using a technique called radio direction finding. Unfortunately, thanks to a combination of misunderstandings and good old fashioned crappy planning, the gear on board the Electra wasn't compatible with that on the Itasca, meaning a two-way connection couldn't be established and radio direction finding was impossible. Or, to put it another way, the Electra was flying blind. That's something Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan slowly began to realise about 20 hours into their flight, when they were singularly unable to contact the Itasca, their lifeline. They knew Howland Island must be close, Noonan was an expert navigator after all, but actually finding the damn thing, particularly with heavy cloud cover, was next to impossible. And all the while, the Electra's fuel gauge slowly ticked down towards zero. And that's pretty much where Amelia Earhart, Fred Noonan and their Lockheed Electra soared out of the history books and straight into legend. The question that's fascinated generation after generation ever since is simple. What happened next? From what I've told you so far, the disappearance of Amelia Earhart probably sounds like an open and shut case. The Electra ran out of fuel in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, somewhere in the vicinity of Howland Island, and both the aeroplane and its inhabitants disappeared beneath the waves. But it turns out things aren't quite so straightforward. After all, the Electra was equipped for extremely long-range flight. It was basically an airborne petrol station, with every spare inch packed with reserve fuel. And you have to wonder, as Earhart and Noonan watched that fuel slowly being depleted, if they would have eventually reached a decision point. Continue searching for Howland Island in the knowledge that failing to find it meant certain death, or try their luck somewhere else. In the days after contact was lost with the Electra, radio stations all over the Pacific, as well as amateur radio enthusiasts, reported picking up distress signals from the plane, something that could only have been possible had it gone down on land. For these and other reasons, plenty of people have theorised that the Electra did not ditch into the ocean near Howland Island, and instead landed safely somewhere else. But that being the case, why were Earhart and Noonan never found? Literally hundreds of theories have come and gone over the years, but three have proven the most popular. The first is that, deciding Howland Island was a bust, the Electra struck out north-west, eventually crash-landing on the Japanese-occupied Marshall Islands, where Earhart and Noonan were promptly taken prisoner and executed. Admittedly, exactly what motive the Japanese had for wanting a world-famous aviator and her navigator dead is a little shaky, to say the least, as is the idea some have put forward that Earhart was spying on the Japanese for the American government. Having said that, several Marshall Islanders reported having seen a plane crash in the area at the time, and some claimed to have seen Earhart being held in a prison camp. Others even came forward to say they'd witnessed her execution. The Japanese capture theory gained some serious momentum in 2017, when the History Channel uncovered a photo taken in Jaluit Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands, that appeared to show Earhart, Noonan, and possibly even the Electra in the background, being towed by a Japanese ship. Now, it should be pointed out that the fact they appear to be chilling on a dock here does seem to somewhat undermine their status as soon-to-be-executed prisoners of the Japanese, but it turns out there was actually a slightly bigger problem with this image. It was taken in 1935, around two years before the pair actually went missing. Yeah. Aside from the fact no hard evidence has ever been uncovered that conclusively links the Electra or her crew to this particular theory, there's also around a thousand miles of open ocean between Howland Island and the Marshall Islands, so all things considered we can probably discount this one. The Electra would have had to have flown for almost ten hours to reach the Marshall Islands from her last known position, which doesn't seem credible considering we know they were low on fuel in the vicinity of Howland Island. The second theory is that the Electra instead flew south to Gardner Island, which today is called Nikumaroro and is in the Republic of Kiribati. According to this theory, the Electra landed safely, though Fred Noonan was badly injured. Earhart, and possibly Noonan too, then survived on the island for an unknown period of time as castaways, before succumbing to either the elements, the lack of fresh water, the limited food supply, or, if you prefer your theories with a side of disturbing fries, the local population of giant coconut crabs. There are a few intriguing tidbits pointing the search in this direction, not least of which is that the last known directional coordinates sent by the Electra would have taken the aircraft right by Gardner Island, and many of the radio signals picked up by enthusiasts in the days after the craft went missing were triangulated to almost exactly that spot. The idea the Electra made it to Gardner Island was considered plausible at the time of the disappearance, so much so that US Navy planes flew over it a week later to search for Earhart and Noonan. The recce didn't turn up any crashed aeroplanes, but the pilots did note signs of recent habitation on the island, which is extremely interesting since Gardner Island had been uninhabited for several decades at the time. Unfortunately, the reconnaissance team weren't aware of that crucial detail at the time and having not spotted the Electra, the search continued elsewhere. A few years later, the bones of an apparent castaway were found on the island by a bunch of British colonists who apparently hadn't got the memo that colonising wasn't really the done thing anymore. Considering the location, the human remains were immediately connected with Amelia Earhart, but scientific examination at the time concluded they were most likely the bones of a man. Assuming the remains were no longer of interest, they were packed into a box and forgotten about. Which is really rather annoying, because some scientists today believe they could well have been Amelia's and that, with modern techniques, they could have proven her fate once and for all, though admittedly that claim is still highly controversial and hotly debated by many. There certainly seems to be enough evidence to keep the Gardner Island theory alive, but again here we hit a bit of a snag. You see, over the years a dozen expeditions have combed the island and the waters around it, looking for evidence that the Electra came down here, and whilst a few interesting artefacts have been recovered, for example an aluminium panel similar to those found on the Electra, and the heel of a woman's shoe that resembles those Amelia used to wear, none of these pieces of evidence constitutes proof. Not only that, but despite extensive searches for the Electra itself, including one led by Robert Ballard, the man who found the wreck of the Titanic, no trace of it has ever been found. The truth is, for now, neither the Japanese capture hypothesis nor the Gardner Island theory is entirely compelling, and that's probably why the simplest theory of them all remains the most likely, the crash and sink hypothesis. Unable to find Howland Island for the reasons we've already covered, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan crashed into the Pacific Ocean, and the Electra quickly sank beneath the waves, never to be seen again. Whether the crew survived the crash is unknown, but adrift in the endless expanse of the ocean, it's safe to say their status on landing is pretty much irrelevant. Of course, there's currently no conclusive evidence to support this theory either, but since it doesn't require any leaps of imagination or suspensions of logic, it probably remains the safest bet. Sure, it doesn't explain all those radio signals supposedly picked up from the Electra in the days after she went missing, but it's difficult to know for sure what people were really tuning into. There were hundreds of stations around the Pacific trying to get hold of the Electra at the time, and it's possible that all the confusion led to false reports the aeroplane was broadcasting a distress signal. It's tantalising to think that Amelia Earhart's plane must be out there somewhere, more than 80 years after it met its end. That right now, fish are chasing each other through its silent cockpit as it lies in wait on the ocean floor. If the Electra is down there in the waters around Howland Island, it's probably only a matter of time before we find it. There are still lots of places we haven't looked. Did I mention the Pacific is big? And there are plenty of people who remain desperate to find one of America's great lost heroes. Who knows, perhaps one day soon, the Electra's final resting place will be disturbed as a shaft of light from a remote-operated vehicle cuts through the darkness. But for now, the vanishing of Amelia Earhart remains one of the greatest mysteries in recent history. Thanks for watching. Check out my new podcast, Random Interesting Facts, available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Link in the description below. Thanks.