AOPA Online: Will newest evidence finally find Amelia?

[Akoto]

Source: AOPA Online

Researchers who have made multiple trips to a remote Pacific island in search of the final landing spot of Amelia Earhart’s 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe may finally get some answers—in a university DNA laboratory.

Searchers from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) found a bone fragment—possibly from a human finger—on the remote atoll of Nikumaroro. The island in the western Pacific now belongs to the Republic of Kiribati. In Earhart’s day it was a British Crown colony and known as Gardner Island.

Making the find especially intriguing was its discovery near other artifacts dating to the period of Earhart’s flight and suggesting that castaways lived on the island during the 1930s. One of the objects reportedly found was a pocketknife consistent with one listed as aboard her aircraft.

In an interview with the newspaper The Telegraph, TIGHAR Executive Director Ric Gillespie said that the bone fragment was being tested for traces of human DNA at a molecular anthropology lab of the University of Oklahoma. Results would be forthcoming in a few weeks, but confirmation would be sought from another laboratory.

LINK: http://www.aopa.org/aircraft/articles/2010/101216new_evidence_in_Amelia_disappearance.html

[hlthe2b]

1. Intriguing... I've followed this story & read many books...

over the past several decades. It would be amazing if we get some answers. Gardner Island has been proposed by several researchers and seems among the more probable theories for where she ended up.

[Arrowhead2k1]

2. Whoa, so if thiswere true, than they survived and were living on that island for who knows how long?

If that was the case, you'd think they would have left a note or something somewhere.

[Myrina]

3. People didn't have sharpies and post it notes in the 30's ...

:shrug:

[Arrowhead2k1]

5. You don't need a pen and paper to write stuff if you're smart about it.

Use your imagination.

[former9thward]

6. They may have but there have been probably countless storms

etc. over the last 75 years or so that could have destroyed such evidence.

[Akoto]

4. This particular story may be incomplete ...

It's posted on a few different sites. On USA Today's, it notes that the artifacts found included a woman's compact, travel-sized bottles made in New Jersey, small fires with fish bones, and oyster shells upturned as if to collect water. That's aside from the pocket knife, which is supposedly of the same type as Earhart's.

Someone was there, and considering the long interest in this particular island, the potential connections to Earhart are striking.