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Amelia Earhart Plane Fragment Identified?

news.discovery.com

by Thevet·11y ago·21 comments·view on hn ↗

21 comments

A lot of people are skeptical of TIGHAR's Nikumaroro hypothesis and of TIGHAR itself. I used to be in the skeptic camp myself, until one day I decided I might ought to do some investigation rather than just dismissing the idea out-of-hand. It turns out that TIGHAR has a lot of information on their website, including but not limited to artifacts they've recovered on expeditions to Nikumaroro.

It's the artifacts that get the most press, but in my layperson's opinion it's not the artifacts recovered that constitute the best evidence for the theory but rather archival evidence that's been discovered over the last 20 or so years.

Here are a couple of links that I personally found most compelling: http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/Bulleti.... I posted this link to both Hacker News and r/history a few months ago under the title "What happened to Amelia Earhart: The sextant box with two serial numbers".

The second link is: http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Bones_.... This page contains radio telegram transcripts from the British colonial authorities responsible for administering Nikumaroro in the early 1940s. The part about the sextant and two serial numbers is about half way down the first page.

So, I had a quick look at your links, and found nothing new there. The artifacts point to human presence (hardly a surprise), but there is little more than conjecture to link them to Earhart or Noonan. In fact, the telegraph writers clearly thought an Earhart link was unlikely.

The artifact is suggestive rather than conclusive. However, I'd argue that the "human presence" part actually was a surprise. If that really was a Brandis sextant box that had been surplused from the U.S. Navy, it indicates a human presence on the island during a relatively narrow time period, roughly 1919-1937. During that time period the only documented human presence on the island was the survivors of the wreck of the SS Norwich City and their rescuers in 1929, and accounts of that event indicate that they were never on the part of the island where the sextant box was found. The sextant box was also found near a number of large bones which were clearly identifiable as human. Where did that person come from? Were they shipwrecked on the island sometime between 1919 and 1937, but in a different event than the Norwich City wreck? What ship went missing in that area of the Pacific during that time period?

So anyway, this is just some circumstantial evidence. But it's not the only evidence that TIGHAR has. If you start combing through their website, you'll find they have a bunch of independent circumstantial evidence, none of which is conclusive by itself, but taken together starts to look suspicious.

With respect to your first link about the sextant box, I think the claim is pretty well countered here: http://www.ameliaearhartbook.com/new_page_14.htm

By TIGHAR's own admission from your link: "We’re trying but, so far, we’ve been unable to find documentation to prove that Brandis 3500 was assigned N.O. number 1542 or that it was owned by Fred Noonan."

The important part of the bones link was:

The medical examiner claims this is a male skeleton, not less than 45 years of age, probably stocky and a mixed European/pacific heritage.

I am highly skeptical of any analysis performed by TIGHAR. They are way too biased in their interpretation of their "finds." I would like to see a detailed report on how they determined that piece of metal is the one they say it is. If and only if that report draws reasonable conclusions, I would then be interested in what a third party analysis had to say about it. That is my minimum bar for even considering TIGHAR's claims.

For detailed skeptical analysis of TIGHAR's other Earhart claims, see:

http://skeptoid.com/blog/2012/03/20/more-amelia-earhart-nons...

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4295

Indeed, we seem to see announcements of TIGHAR "finds" about once a year, with each one being pretty vague and not leading specifically to the discovery of Earhart's actual aircraft.

If one were cynical, one could conclude that the annual "finds" are just exercises to keep TIGHAR's name in the news.

Actually to be cynical you would have to see them as funding teasers to elicit funding for yet another trip out to the atoll.

That said, if they dive down and find the plane they are going to be pretty pleased with themselves. As far as I can tell there aren't any facts that would rule out their theory that Earhart ended up here.

Here’s TIGHAR’s map of possible Earhart evidence on Nikumaroro: http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/MapsandPhotos/ma...

Note: their copyright disclaimer in the footer technically disallows linking to or visiting their site, so click at your own risk! ;)

It sounds fishy. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Islands_Settlement_Sche...

Earhart disappeared in 1937, since 1938 there were people on Nikumaroro and it seems they didn't report anything that would certainly be easily visible one year later on a 5 x 1.6 miles big island if Earhart and Noonan managed to land and live there.