AP News, August 2nd, 2007
A group seeking clues to the fate of famed aviator Amelia Earhart is ending its latest search of a remote South Pacific island with some new evidence but without a conclusive "smoking gun," its leader said Thursday.
Scant as they might seem, the 100 or so artifacts collected over the past 16 days at Nikumaroro island offer some possible links to Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, said executive director Ric Gillespie. The aviators vanished over the Pacific during a round-the-world flight attempt in July 1937.
The official ruling was that the pair crashed at sea, but Gillespie's group, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, believes they may have crash-landed on the atoll, known then as Gardner Island, and lived for months as castaways before perishing.
Earlier searches turned up records of human remains found in 1940 by a British overseer and deduced by modern computer analysis to have belonged to a Caucasian woman of Earhart's height and build.
Finding more bones was a primary objective of the current search, but none was discovered by the 15-member team.
The latest items found include metal bearing sleeves, possibly from an aircraft, part of a small mirror and a U.S.-made zipper tab that could have come from Earhart's flight pants, which had zippers on the side, Gillespie said.
"As always we are disappointed that no smoking gun emerged, but we're encouraged that evidence continues to support the hypothesis that this is where it happened," Gillespie said Friday by satellite phone from the expedition's motorsailer Nai'a, anchored off the island.
Gillespie also said that after 18 years, this could be the last land expedition to the uninhabited atoll near the equator, some 1,800 miles southwest of Hawaii. The passage of time and severe storms may have washed away any other evidence, he said.
He said this would not preclude an undersea search for Earhart's silver twin-engine Lockheed Electra, which experts say may have been carried by tides off the flat reef where it would have landed. But the cost of exploring 5,000 or more feet down would be the guiding factor, he said.
The search was funded by $330,000 in private contributions to the nonprofit organization.
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On the Net:
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery: http://www.tighar.org
