Where's Amelia Earhart？ ｜ National Geographic

July 2nd, 1937, 7,000 miles of empty ocean stand between Amelia Earhart and her bold attempt to be the first to fly around the world, following the equator. She and her navigator Fred Noonan take off from Ley, New Guinea for Howland Island, a speck of sand in the middle of the Pacific. It was the last anyone would see of her. After a desperate search comes up empty, the U.S. Navy concludes Earhart ran out of gas and ditched into the open ocean near Howland Island. Her Lockheed Electra lies thousands of feet down on the ocean floor. Case closed. It is the logical conclusion, but there is no hard evidence to prove it. Not a trace of wreckage was found floating. There was no mayday call. There was no distress call. For 70 years, investigators have been trying to solve the Earhart enigma. Many are convinced the crash-and-sank theory is wrong. In the days after Earhart's disappearance, the speculation begins. Reports of SOS calls from her radio give the world hope that she is still alive. Day and night messages alternating between hope and disappointment crackle from the South Seas. The search swings around the area from which her last message was received. In a desperate effort to solve the mystery of Amelia Earhart's fate, we have found things on the island that we can't explain unless they came from Earhart's airplane. Some believe Earhart and Noonan landed 300 miles off target on a deserted atoll and died as castaways. Many are convinced by eyewitness accounts that they strayed into Japanese-occupied territory and were captured and held as spies. Others go even further, believing Earhart had an ulterior mission to gather intelligence on Japanese military expansion in the Pacific. Using forensic photographic analysis, they are out to prove Earhart returned to the United States under cover of a secret identity. All the competing theories are plausible, but which holds up under a critical eye? There is no evidence that she crashed at sea. It was just an aircraft accident. She returned as somebody else. Earhart survived. There's no question about it.