What we call the Earhart-in-the-Marianas Hypothesis is reflected in eight interrelated stories, though not all proponents of the hypothesis subscribe to all eight in all respects, and some more or less contradict others.
We examine these stories only to the extent they bear on Earhart’s/Noonan’s presence in the Marianas
Nor have we considered those notions that do not feature incarceration at all – for example the Nikumaroro Hypothesis or the hypothesis that Earhart and Noonan splashed down in the Pacific and sank.ġ A few stories have Earhart at least surviving the war and returning to the U.S. We have not considered those that put them in New Guinea or New Britain, or with those that have them being taken straight to Japan. We have not dealt with stories about their capture and death in the Marshall Islands or Chuuk except where these stories involve their transport to Saipan. We have limited our consideration to those stories that have Earhart and Noonan spending some time on Saipan and/or Tinian as captives of the Japanese. In preparing this paper we have reviewed all the books we could find positing that Earhart and Noonan were in the Marianas, together with a number of media accounts, letters, emails and manuscripts filed with TIGHAR these sources are discussed below. We can only assure readers that we have tried very hard to prepare this paper with open minds, and we ask that it be read in the same spirit. This fact will probably cause some proponents of Earhart-in-the-Marianas to reject the analysis reported here out of hand we can do nothing about this. We think that the historical, archaeological, and other data we have collected strongly suggests that the Nikumaroro Hypothesis is correct.
Amelia earhart found full#
In the interest of full disclosure, we acknowledge that we are active participants in the work of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which for the last 24 years has been collecting and analyzing evidence related to what we call the Nikumaroro Hypothesis – that Earhart and Noonan landed and died on Nikumaroro in the Phoenix Group, Kiribati. 1 In this paper we attempt a systematic description, analysis and critique of the eight stories that in various configurations constitute the “Earhart-in-the-Marianas” hypothesis.įigure 1: Main Locations Referred To (Source: Google Earth) Earhart said they were flying “on line north and south.” After their loss a vigorous search failed to find them, and in the decades since a number of hypotheses have been advanced for what happened to them.Īmong the best known hypotheses is a set of overlapping propositions that they were captured somewhere in the Micronesian islands then under Japanese administration, and incarcerated on Saipan (or in one account Tinian) where in most accounts they died or were executed and were then buried.
Earhart’s last generally accepted radio message, received at Howland by the US Coast Guard cutter Itasca waiting offshore, indicated that she believed she was somewhere along a line bearing 157° – 337°, generally referred to as a “line of position” (LOP), running through the island’s charted location. One of the abiding historical mysteries of the twentieth century in the Pacific is that of “what happened to Amelia Earhart.” Earhart, a pioneer in American aviation, and her equally pioneering navigator Fred Noonan, disappeared on July 2 nd 1937 en route from Lae, New Guinea to Howland Island in their two-engine aluminum Lockheed Electra 10E, during an attempt to circle the globe at the equator.
This paper was originally published in the World War II section of the Marianas History Conference 2012 website.
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