History's Greatest Mysteries (2020) s06e07 Episode Script

1
Tonight, Amelia Earhart,
the world’s most
famous female pilot,
takes off on the final leg
of a record-breaking flight.
Earhart is attempting
to become the first woman
to fly around the world.
She’s flown 22,000 miles,
she only has 7,000 miles left.
But Earhart never
arrives at her next stop,
a tiny island in
the Pacific Ocean.
Earhart, her
navigator, and her plane
vanish without a trace.
The Navy conducts a massive
search by sea and air,
but nothing is found.
Now, we’ll explore
the top theories
regarding Amelia Earhart’s
doomed final flight.
There are many
conflicting stories,
and in the eyes
of some, secrecy.
We will never stop
looking for Amelia Earhart.
She was lost, of course,
but where did she go?
What really happened to
Amelia and her navigator?
June 1st, 1937,
5:57 AM,
Miami Municipal
Airport in Florida,
world-famous pilot
Amelia Earhart
sets off on her most
daring mission to date.
All eyes are on Amelia Earhart.
She embarks on her quest
to become the first woman to
fly around the world.
At this point,
Earhart is not only one
of the most well-known women
in America, she’s a celebrity.
Record firsts were no novelty
to aviatrix Amelia.
On May 20th, 1932,
she successfully
spanned the Atlantic
from Newfoundland
to Londonderry, Ireland,
the first woman to
make the flight solo.
Amelia Earhart at this time
is easily the most
photographed woman on earth.
She might be the most
famous woman on earth.
She is pursued everywhere,
the press is obsessed.
Her feats of flying, daring, do
are well known and
she is about to embark
on her most daring
feat of flying yet,
to circumnavigate the globe.
Which had been done
before with various vessels,
but never in an airplane
around the equator,
which is, of course, the
widest part of the globe.
She’s going to stay as close
to the equator as possible,
making this the longest
route that you could take.
She had already
accomplished a lot of firsts,
but this would have
established a new life
for air travel in general,
and the world is really excited.
Amelia Earhart and
her navigator, Fred Noonan,
take off in a
Lockheed E-10 Electra.
It will be legendary
if she manages to complete
this trip around the world.
Born in
Atchison, Kansas in 1897,
Amelia Earhart
is in her early 20s
when her interest in
flying is first sparked.
She takes her
first lesson in 1921
when she’s 24 years old.
She starts to fly and she
just falls in love with it.
The freedom, the
adventure, the challenge,
it becomes her passion.
Amelia Earhart demonstrates
a real knack for flying,
and it’s only six months later
that she is able to
purchase her own plane.
In October 1922, she reaches
an altitude of 14,000 feet.
So, within 18 months of
starting to take lessons,
she’s already broken
the world’s record
for altitude flying for a woman.
Amelia Earhart is
quickly coined Lady Lindy.
There are plenty
of newspaper articles
that put her portrait right
next to Charles Lindbergh.
In 1932,
Lady Lindy becomes
the first female pilot
to fly solo across
the Atlantic Ocean.
Earhart had done it again,
and frankly no one
was too surprised.
And in 1935, she
becomes the first person,
either male or female,
to fly from Honolulu
to California solo.
By this point, Earhart
has set seven records
for being a women pilot,
for speed and distance,
and she is known across the
nation, indeed across the world,
as the Queen of the Air.
America’s Miss Amelia Earhart,
world’s leading lady flyer.
Now, Earhart is planning
her most ambitious flight yet.
What sets this mission apart
is the route that she’s taking,
nearly 29,000 miles around
the equator of the Earth.
This has never been done
before by man or a woman.
It’s estimated to
take about a month,
and this is going to
be a true challenge
for the Queen of the Air.
It’s extremely dangerous.
They stop to refuel in South
America, India, East Asia,
and each time, it’s
a media sensation.
On June 29th,
she and Noonan land in
Lae, Papua New Guinea.
They take a few days there to
wait for favorable weather.
The next destination
is Howland Island
in the middle of
the South Pacific.
The plan is for them to
land and refuel at Howland,
after which they’ll
continue on to Honolulu,
and then make the
flight to Oakland.
And that’s a flight that
Earhart has made before.
On July 2nd,
1937, at around 10:00 AM,
Earhart and Noonan take off
on route to Howland Island.
The challenge is the stretch
from Lae to Howland Island
is the longest
of the entire trip.
Today, this trip would
take a modern aircraft
four or five hours.
Amelia Earhart is
planning on 18 hours
for her to travel
this 2,500 miles.
This is a long flight
with a very small target.
The island is about 1/20
the size of Manhattan
in the middle of the Pacific.
So with few, if any,
other landmarks to
help guide the route,
this is looking for a
needle in a haystack.
There’s nothing
at Howland Island.
It’s just an airstrip that
was only very recently built.
It’s about two miles long
and about a half a mile wide
and a Coast Guard Cutter.
The USS Itasca is
stationed in the vicinity
to help guide her
into the island.
To find Howland Island,
let alone land on it,
is going to call on all
of her piloting skills
and all of Fred Noonan’s
navigational skills
to make it a success.
But Fred Noonan
is up to the challenge.
Noonan is a
celebrated navigator.
He had been in charge
of mapping all of the
transpacific routes
for Pan-American Airlines.
There’s no GPS then,
so he’s gotta use technology
that is comparatively primitive.
He had been a sea captain
and he could use a sextant,
which is a centuries-old
form of navigation
that doesn’t require
all of his modern
technology to be working
in order for them
to be successful.
Because he has a sextant,
he can use dead reckoning,
he can use the
stars to navigate,
even if all of this
modern technology fails.
Noonan’s ability
to navigate by the stars
is a reason he and Earhart
fly mostly by night.
If they’re going to make
this trip, an 18-hour trip,
obviously some of it is
going to be at night.
And they want to time it
so their approach to Howland
Island is during full daylight.
One of the safety
measures in place
was a US Coast Guard
ship called the Itasca,
and they had radio
communication,
and also it was capable
of shooting up a
black plume of smoke
that would show them the way.
Four hours after takeoff,
Lae receives a
message from Earhart.
She says, "Height, 7,000 feet,
speed, 140 knots, and
everything’s okay."
Three hours later, total
of seven hours into the flight,
she reports position
4.33 south, 159.7 east,
height 8,000 feet
over cumulus clouds.
Wind, 23 knots.
When the tower
gets that message,
it’s clear that Amelia
Earhart and Fred Noonan
are exactly where
they’re supposed to be.
By 7:18 PM,
Earhart is out of range
of the Lae Airport
and still too far from the
USS Itasca at Howland Island.
She isn’t heard from again
until over two hours later.
They received that
transmission on the USS Itasca.
But everything still seems to
be going according to plan.
But there’s starting
to be concerns
about the amount of fuel
because the plane is running
into major headwinds,
and that also means a
loss of fuel efficiency.
Around 2:45,
Itasca’s radio operator
receives a message from Earhart.
It’s a weather report that
it’s cloudy and overcast.
This is a great sign.
This means that the Itasca
can begin to broadcast
its own radio signals
to guide the plane
to Howland Island.
But for an unknown reason,
it’s clear that while Earhart
can communicate with the Itasca,
she isn’t receiving
any of their messages.
So this continues for six hours
with the same
frustrating results.
She is way behind schedule,
and this is, of
course, a huge factor
when we are considering how
much fuel she needs to land.
The Itasca, as planned, sends
up its heavy smoke signal,
which should be visible within
40 miles, any direction.
20 hours into the
flight at 8:43 AM,
the Itasca receives a
message from Amelia saying,
"We are on the line, 157, 337."
We will repeat this message.
We will repeat this
on 6210 kilocycles.
Wait, listening on
6210 kilocycles.
"We are running on north-south."
And the sound of her voice
is starting to get thin,
is starting to get
a bit panicked.
At that moment,
because she says,
"I’m gonna switch over to
this different frequency,
I’m switching over."
She never does, we
never hear her on 6210,
which suggests that
her engine sputtered,
went out, flamed out,
and at that point, she’s gliding
the plane into the water.
This is the last message
that Earhart will ever send.
By 9:00 AM,
all the radio operator on the
Itasca can hear is static.
When Amelia Earhart
and Fred Noonan
fail to arrive on
Howland Island,
there is just a really
dismal realization
that the worst
may have happened.
The flight’s taking
considerably longer
than expected,
at least two hours longer.
By the time she sends
her last message,
it’s likely that the Electra
was running on fumes.
It’s also been suggested that
the fuel tanks were not full.
It was common
practice for pilots
to take off with
less than a full tank
because weight
mattered considerably,
especially on
long distance flights.
The Electra can hold
1,150 gallons of fuel.
But we have some evidence
in the form of a
letter from Earhart,
where she suggests that
she might be able to
make the flight on less,
maybe 950 gallons of fuel,
which would give her
just a little over 20
hours of flying time.
After flying 20
hours and 13 minutes,
it would make sense that
she would’ve run
out of fuel shortly after
and crashed into the ocean.
If she ditches that plane
in the vicinity
of Howland Island,
someone would’ve seen it.
But the fact is there was no
report of the plane going down,
there’s no debris
found on the water,
there is no fuel that’s
bubbled up to the surface.
She just seems
to have disappeared.
When Amelia Earhart
doesn’t arrive on Howland Island
on July 2nd, 1937,
the US Navy and Coast Guard
begin searching an area
of the Pacific Ocean,
roughly the size of Texas.
For the public, when they hear
that Amelia Earhart has not
arrived on Howland Island,
it would be like if one
of the biggest stars
on the planet, at this
time, suddenly disappeared.
The story of a brave woman
of the air enters
a shroud of mystery.
She had so many
fans around the world
who were paying
attention to this flight,
and when she doesn’t
turn up on July 2nd,
people are following
the newspapers.
People are listening to the
radio for any kind of update.
Where is Amelia Earhart?
The Itasca anchors
off a tiny desert island.
The Itasca begins their
search for Amelia Earhart
within an hour of
losing contact with her.
They had established
communication with her
and they had the best idea
of where to start looking.
The US Navy deploys 62 planes
from the aircraft
carrier, USS Lexington,
which sails from Hawaii,
1,700 nautical miles
from Howland Island,
and that’s just the beginning.
You’ve got an aircraft
carrier, several Coast Guard
ships, the USS Colorado,
other vessels end up
joining the search,
as many as 4,000 sailors
engaged in this effort
at a cost of maybe $4 million,
which would be equivalent
to about $75 million today.
On July 19th, after 17
days of searching an area
that was 150,000 square miles,
the search is called off.
Given the resources
devoted to the search,
given that they’re using
every technology available,
it may seem surprising
that they were not able
to locate any wreckage.
Many people believe that even
though it would be difficult
and it may take a lot of
time, we should have been able
to find some trace of either her
or her plane, and
none was ever found.
Maybe there’s a reason
why there was no evidence
on the surface of the ocean.
Maybe Earhart and
Noonan make it to land.
Theorists point out that
there’s still no proof
that she crashed into
the Pacific Ocean.
She is well-known, well-trained,
highly-acclaimed pilot with
a very experienced navigator.
Some theorists suggest
that once they realized they
couldn’t find Howland Island,
they had, in fact, changed
their destination
to a different island nearby.
The closest island
to Howland is Baker
Island, just 40 miles away.
Baker Island was
looked at from the air,
but no one saw anything
as big as the Electra
to just sand and trees.
The next most
logical island nearby
where she may have
gone is 400 miles away
and it’s called Gardner Island.
To call it an island
is almost a stretch.
It’s tiny. You have
four and a half miles.
It’s sandbars, it’s palm
trees, and totally uninhabited.
Gardner is a sandbar,
literally an oval-shaped sandbar
with some water in between it,
and there is no place to land.
Amelia was a very
experienced pilot
and she was very familiar
with this particular
aircraft, the Electra 10-E.
Even out of fuel, she
will be able to glide it
and make a soft landing
either on the sandbar
or land it on the water, and
then hop out with Mr. Noonan.
Navy planes do search
Gardner Island from the air.
Now, they report what they call
signs of recent habitation,
but no aircraft,
no signs of life.
The planes fly over
the island in pairs.
They don’t see SOS
written in the sand.
No smoke, no fresh
human activity
that would suggest
somebody was in distress.
And so, they conclude that
this isn’t a viable location
for Earhart to have ended up.
But three years later in 1940,
a new discovery
suggests those planes
may have overlooked something.
British Colonial
Officer Gerald Gallagher
is leading an expedition
on the island, scouting it
for possible settlement, when
he finds a terrifying thing,
a human skull.
Continued search of the
island turns up other things,
bone fragments, a portion
of a woman’s shoe.
They find a bottle
of herbal alcohol.
And they find a box, empty,
but made to contain
a US Navy sextant.
We know that Noonan
flies with a sextant.
So, this has Gallagher thinking
that he stumbled upon Amelia
Earhart’s human remains.
The bones that are
discovered on Gardner Island
are then sent to
an expert on Fiji,
Dr. DW Hoodless,
who examines the
skull, the tibula,
and the other small bone
fragments that were discovered.
He determines that
the bone fragments
were from a male,
short, maybe about 5’5",
and quite stocky,
middle aged, 45 to 55.
Earhart was in her late 30s.
She was petite and slim,
and Noonan was also
a very slim man.
So, neither of them
matched the profile
of a short, stocky,
middle-aged man.
In any event, this is
regarded as conclusive
that this could not
have been the remains
of either Noonan or Earhart.
That opens up the question,
where else could she be?
Did she crash? Did she
make an emergency landing?
Where did she go?
These questions remain
unanswered for decades.
Then, in 1960,
a radio journalist
forwards a shocking theory.
For decades after Amelia Earhart
and her navigator, Fred Noonan,
vanish in the middle
of the Pacific Ocean,
speculation swirls that
there’s more to the story.
How does a celebrated
pilot just disappear?
And there’s no
evidence of her plane.
Did she just get swallowed
up by the Pacific Ocean
or is there another explanation?
As is often the
case when a celebrity
disappears without a trace,
speculation abounds that maybe
the official explanation
is not a truthful one.
This is certainly the
case with Amelia Earhart.
The question of
where she has ended up
fascinates a CBS radio
newsman named Fred Goerner.
He spends years
investigating this.
He looks through any document
he could get his hands on.
And in 1966, Goerner comes out
with a book called "The
Search for Amelia Earhart,"
in which he advances a
really interesting theory.
According to Goerner, in 1937,
Amelia Earhart had
never truly intended
to land on Howland Island,
and that she was part of
a secret government mission
to actually spy on the Japanese
in the lead up to World War II.
The Chinese
forces tried desperately
to stem the surging
tide of the invasion.
Japan had been at war with China
since 1931 when they
invaded Manchuria.
And in ’37, they’re poised
to invade mainland China.
Japan has colonies
in the Marshall Islands
and the Marianas Islands.
There are reports
that the Japanese are
fortifying these islands
with the expectation
that they’re going to face
the US Navy at some point.
Of course, any
kind of surveillance
of Japanese military activity
would be incredibly valuable
to the US government,
and how better to acquire
that surveillance material
than from the air?
But you can’t just fly a
plane into Japanese airspace
and expect it not
to get shot down.
Goerner claims to
have interviewed dozens
of World War II veterans,
as well as high
ranking officials
in the US military, and
people in the Pacific Islands.
And he comes to the conclusion
that Earhart’s final
flight was, in fact,
covertly designed by the US
military, an elaborate ruse.
So, what was really surveillance
activity was disguised
as a celebrity record-breaking,
world-circling flight.
The theory goes
that Amelia Earhart
was instructed to land her plane
as far away from Howland
Island as possible.
This would then trigger
the massive search
that was conducted
after she went missing.
The idea being that the navy
isn’t really searching the South
Pacific for Amelia Earhart.
What they’re doing is trying
to survey Japanese
military activity.
If that theory is
true, it’s brilliant.
You could never get that close
to Japanese territory in secret,
but if you’re searching
for Amelia Earhart,
you can basically spy
out in the public.
For those who believed
that Amelia Earhart
is actually a spy,
it’s the only way you could
explain why Franklin Roosevelt
was willing to commit such a
massive amount of resources,
both money and manpower,
to finding a single aviator
who was missing in the Pacific.
Proponents of the spy theory
also point to a number
of strange details
that suggest Earhart
may have deliberately
avoided detection.
The Electra was equipped
with the latest
in radio technology.
It had all of the most modern
and up-to-date, two-way
communication devices.
She was also scheduled to make
a radio contact every hour.
But in her 20-hour flight, she
only does that seven times.
Why would somebody
who was supposed to
check in every hour
only check in after four hours,
and then another three hours?
Maybe she was up to something
else, goes the theory.
Remember when Amelia Earhart
was having that communication
issue with Itasca
where they could hear her
but she couldn’t hear them?
Was that a glitch or was
she purposely being evasive?
Five hours
into her final flight,
Earhart reports her position
as 150.7 east and 7.3 south.
Which doesn’t make sense
because that’s only
about 200 miles from Lae,
and by this point, she should
be over 400 miles away.
So, for those inclined
to believe this theory,
this is a key piece of evidence.
False location reports
that make it harder
for her to be tracked,
for some people could only
mean one thing, spy mission.
According to the theory,
they lay low for a while,
and then once the search ends,
they are quietly relocated
and given new identities.
Earhart and probably
Noonan as well
lived out the rest of their
lives as somebody else.
There are other theories
that hold that, yes,
Earhart did survive
past her purported
death in July of 1937,
but under very
different circumstances,
circumstances that
would prevent her
from communicating at all
with the outside world.
In January of 1939, 18
months after Amelia Earhart
vanished over the Pacific Ocean,
she is officially declared dead,
but still the search
for answers goes on.
By now, most people
believe the official story,
that the aviator fell victim
to navigational issues,
crashed, and sank.
But there is yet
another credible theory
that Amelia Earhart
ended up a thousand miles
from where she was
supposed to land,
only to end up a prisoner.
While he’s writing his book,
Fred Goerner speaks
with a navy veteran
who had been stationed on
the Marshall Islands
during World War II.
The navy veteran
named John Mahan
claims that he had spoken to
two Marshall Island natives
who had been told by two
US military officials
that they had seen
Japanese soldiers
transporting 2 captured
US aviators,
one man, one woman.
Goerner also tells another story
about another
Marshall Island native
who told two US Navy officers
that a Japanese friend had told
him about a white lady pilot
who had crashed near the Jaluit
Atoll, was taken prisoner.
He claims that a Japanese boat
picked her up and took her away,
maybe to Kwajalein,
maybe to Saipan.
Amelia Earhart is not only
the most-celebrated woman pilot,
but she is one of very
few female pilots.
To see a white woman aviator
in the Marshall Islands,
completely unheard of.
How else to account
for this story?
For a white woman
to have been shot down
or captured by the Japanese
in the Marshall Islands, 1937,
requires lot of people
to be making stories up.
So, there is an element to the
story that forces you to ask,
was there in fact a woman
flying in the Marshall Islands?
And if there was, who was it?
Even some
US government officials
find the story convincing.
Admiral Chester Nimitz,
who was overall naval
commander in the Pacific,
is interviewed
by Goerner in 1965.
Goerner quotes Nimitz as saying,
"I want to tell you,
Earhart and her navigator
did go down in the Marshalls
and were picked up
by the Japanese."
For the admiral
of the Pacific fleet
to make a statement
of that magnitude
has suggested to some that
the US government knew
or had information about
Amelia’s disappearance.
And you wouldn’t
expect an admiral,
particularly Admiral Nimitz,
to make a statement like that,
unless he had some
pretty good evidence.
Some say that Amelia
died of dysentery while
she was in captivity.
Some say that she was executed
on the island of Saipan.
Others say that Fred Noonan
was also executed after
Amelia Earhart died.
But the fact is we
just don’t know.
Goerner also talks to a
couple of US army veterans
who had been stationed
in the Marianas Islands.
They said that
they were shown items
that belonged to Earhart,
and that they were shown
where Earhart and
Noonan were buried.
And when Goerner goes
to investigate this lead,
he meets with some pretty
significant resistance
from the US military.
He makes four trips to
Saipan to try to figure out
what happened to
Earhart and Noonan,
doesn’t really find any
conclusive evidence.
Decades later, all of
this is just hearsay.
It’s myth and legend.
But in 2015,
something like a piece of
evidence maybe turns up.
At Mili Atoll in the Marshalls,
a native led investigators
to a site where he claimed
that Earhart went down.
A reef where he
claims the plane crashed
and was then salvaged and
drug across the beach,
and then carried
away by the Japanese.
So, there is no evidence,
but the investigators
decide to search anyway
and they discover a
small piece of metal.
A rectangular piece
of aluminum was found
that may have been a
part from the plane.
It’s painted red
and it’s known
that at least part
of the Electra was painted red.
And under that red paint,
a yellow chromium primer,
which was known to be used
in the 1930s and 1940s,
and it looks as though
it’s the cover plate
for an auxiliary power unit
that would’ve been found
on a Lockheed Electra
made during this time.
In addition to that, there
was a round piece of aluminum
that they conclude
is a dust cover
for landing gear for
a Lockheed Electra.
It is certainly a
fascinating discovery,
but there is just no way to know
if what they found
is an actual piece
to this Amelia Earhart puzzle
or if it is just an
unrelated artifact.
Rather than
speculate on new leads,
some investigators take a
deeper dive into old theories.
Experts start to go back
and reevaluate and redetermine
if maybe some of our old
leads were, in fact, correct.
Amelia
Earhart’s final radio message
to the USS Itasca is one
of the biggest clues in
her unsolved disappearance.
But what if that wasn’t
actually her last transmission?
Soon after Earhart’s
disappearance,
well before she’s
pronounced dead,
ham radio operators in the
United States began reporting
to have received transmissions
from Amelia Earhart.
Many of these are
dismissed as cruel hoaxes,
but there are some which
deserve additional scrutiny,
because of the
details transcribed
by the radio operators.
After Earhart’s disappearance
about 5,000 miles from
Howland Island, a young,
a 16-year-old civilian,
ham radio operator,
named Dana Randolph
reports hearing the voice of a
woman at about the same time
that Amelia Earhart
would’ve been in distress.
Randolph lives
in Rock Springs, Wyoming
and is listening on a
commercial radio set
with shortwave bands
connected to a special
antenna he’s just installed.
At about eight
o’clock in the morning,
he hears a female voice saying,
"This is Amelia Earhart.
Ship on a reef
south of the equator.
Station KH9QQ."
And then, according
to the report,
the signal just dies away.
Dana and his father
share this information
with a local government
radio operator.
Now, this operator tells them
that given the
frequency involved,
it is possible for them
to have heard a transmission
from halfway around the world.
So, this government
radio operator
takes down the information
and forwards it
to Washington, DC,
but what happens
to that information
after that is unknown.
There’s another message
that reaches a 15-year-old girl
in St. Petersburg, Florida.
This girl’s name
is Betty Klenck.
Her and her dad are
interested in radio.
Her father has just
installed a new antenna,
which enables her to get
signals from farther away.
She’s listening soon
after the disappearance
and scanning through shortwave
and she gets a message saying,
"This is Amelia Earhart."
Betty hears the
message shortly after news
of Amelia Earhart’s
disappearance is made public.
She knows Earhart’s
voice from newsreels
and is certain she is listening
to the famous aviator as
her plane fills with water.
For the next couple of hours,
Betty listens to what
she describes as a male
and a female voice that are
growing increasingly distressed,
continually giving
their distress calls
and their location information,
and that both of their voices
sound strained and frightened.
Betty starts writing
down the messages
and getting as many of
the numbers as she can.
What Betty describes
is a bad situation that
is quickly getting worse.
Purportedly, this is
Noonan and Earhart
talking back and
forth in the plane
as it begins to fill with water
and they try to plot how
it is they’re going to,
not only get out of the
wreckage, but then survive.
Their father comes home and
he hears the final messages.
He is convinced
that this is real,
and so they report
to the Coast Guard.
The Coast Guard
though assures them
that the navy is in the
area, the search is underway.
There’s nothing to worry about.
How might we explain the fact
that two separate radio
operators, amateurs, were able
to receive transmissions
purportedly from Amelia Earhart?
You could say that Betty
and Dana heard about Amelia
Earhart’s disappearance
and decided to jump
on the bandwagon
for their 15 minutes of fame.
But Betty and Dana did
not know each other
and they live thousands
of miles apart.
In 2011, Earhart researchers
compare when the
radio transmissions
were received by both Betty
Klenck and Dana Randolph.
They began to detect
what they say is a pattern
that these transmissions
were happening
at certain times of the day,
at low tide on Gardner Island.
Low tide would only happen
at night or early morning,
and that just happens
to be when these
purported transmissions
from Earhart were received
back in the States.
In order to use the radio,
the plane’s engine
needs to be on.
But in order for the
plane’s engine to be on,
it could not be even
partially submerged in water.
If the Lockheed was stuck
on a sandbar or an atoll,
only when the water had receded
would they have been able
to start up the engine,
thus allowing them to
transmit that message.
So, that means
that they could only turn
the plane on at low tide.
Many researchers believe Earhart
was navigating toward Gardner
Island when she vanished.
Earhart’s
final documented message
by the radio is,
"KHAQQ to Itasca.
We are on the line, 157, 337."
So, this is a
navigational indicator
that the plane is flying on a
northwest to southeast route.
And it cuts right
through Howland Island.
But if they can’t
find Howland Island,
are they northwest of it
or they’re southeast of it?
Northwest, there’s
nothing but open ocean,
but southeast,
Baker and Gardner Islands
are not too far away.
If she ended up on Baker Island,
search crews would’ve
found her pretty easily,
because it’s so close.
So, that leaves us once again
looking at Gardner Island.
Three months after
Earhart’s disappearance,
a British official who
scoped out Gardner Island
to see its suitability for
a colony, finds evidence
that somebody had been
camping there overnight.
Did it ever cross his mind
that it may have been
Earhart and Noonan?
Maybe not, because that
report simply got shelved.
In 2018, the issue of the bones
found on Gardner Island
comes back up again.
Now, the bones themselves
are long gone at this point,
but an anthropologist at
the University of Tennessee
uses software entering
all the measurements
and information that had been
taken down years earlier,
and finds that the original
investigator was wrong,
that this well could have
been a human female skeleton
and that it is more
like Amelia Earhart
than 99% of bones
could have been.
Unfortunately, the bones were
discarded as medical waste,
so we’ll never know, ’cause
those bones were thrown away.
Without those original
bones to analyze,
it’s just too inconclusive.
However, new evidence
has developed
that leads us in a completely
different direction.
It has been more than 80 years
since Amelia
Earhart disappeared,
and the search for her lost
plane is heating up once more,
thanks to a private expedition.
Tony Romeo is the founder
and CEO of Deep Sea Visions,
an underwater
exploration company
that’s based in
the United States.
In the fall of 2023,
using his own new
state-of-the-art technology,
he begins to scour the seafloor
in the vicinity of where Earhart
is purported to have gone down.
We said to ourselves,
"It’s been 86 years
since Amelia’s disappeared."
We have a really good
trail of evidence
as to where she went down.
The technology is available
today to do a deep water search.
"Why not take a shot at this?"
We mobilized out of Port
Moresby, Papua New Guinea,
not too far from where
she took off from.
We intended to cover
about 5,000 square miles.
We did that in about
100 days of searching.
And we scanned an area
around Howland Island,
about the size of Connecticut.
Tony Romeo conducts
this search of the area
using an autonomous vehicle
that travels 18,000
feet below the surface,
about 160 feet from
the ocean floor,
taking sonar images as it goes.
Shoots out these
powerful pulses of sound,
and it goes back and forth
looking off to the
side about a mile.
So you’ve got about a mile
swath as it does each turn.
And it looks at the reflection
when it comes back
to the sonar system,
and it paints an image
of what it’s looking at.
When Romeo and his team
head home in December 2023,
they review the
sonar data received
by their underwater drone
and find a startling image.
They find something at
a depth of 16,000 feet,
about 100 miles off the
coast of Howland Island,
an image that looks a whole lot
like a small
twin-engined aircraft.
And it was just incredible.
And I remember sitting down
and thinking, "This is it.
This is the first time
her plane’s been seen
in 80 some years."
The measurements of
the Lockheed Electra,
that’s not secret information.
He compares what this image
is to the size of that plane
and the vertical stabilizers
that he sees on it.
And they’re pretty much a match.
Could this be some
other twin-engine plane?
Well, there are no reports
of a crash of a
plane of that design
anywhere close to there.
For that reason, he
becomes convinced
that it’s actually the plane.
But Romeo and his team
aren’t celebrating just yet.
There were some stuff that
we were skeptical about.
It is blurrier
than we would like.
It was taken at quite some
distance from the sonar.
So the resolution isn’t as
good as what we would’ve hoped,
but we suspect very
strongly it’s a plane.
The other really
strong possibility
is that it’s just
a natural formation
that’s a cruel trick of nature
that looks just like a plane.
10 months
later, in October 2024,
Romeo and his crew
return to the site
and send their
submersible down again.
And this time, the pictures
they take are much clearer.
Hopes that Amelia
Earhart’s long lost plane
had been found were
dashed this week.
Researchers scanning the
Pacific Ocean for the wreckage
thought they had
found it last year,
but upon further inspection,
it’s just a natural rock
formation shaped like a plane.
It was obviously
a real disappointment,
no question about that.
We really thought we had
a very promising target,
but we didn’t go with the
champagne bottle open.
Despite the
disappointing setback,
the researchers
vowed to search on.
The group says they’ve covered
nearly 7,700 square miles so far
in their efforts to find
the ill-fated plane.
It’s a really
small target, right?
And it’s a really big ocean.
But with the ability of
deep sea sonar systems
to scan the seafloor,
it’s just a matter of time till
all the major mysteries
of the ocean are solved,
including finding
Amelia’s plane.
Why are we so interested
in what happened to a woman
who disappeared 80 years ago?
Well, she was a superstar.
She was somebody who
was known by everyone,
and there were a lot of
people cheering for her
to finish this round
the world voyage.
To suddenly find such a
huge source of inspiration
to have vanished,
the question of
what happened to her
will be a question
that we will never,
ever be satisfied not knowing
Romeo plans to
return to the site
sometime in the near future.
Until then,
the fate of history’s
most famous female pilot
will remain the
unfinished final chapter
of her legendary career.
I’m Laurence Fishburne,
thank you for watching
History’s Greatest Mysteries.