

Amelia Earhart Plane Fragment Identified? - Thevet
http://news.discovery.com/history/us-history/aluminum-fragment-appears-to-belong-to-earharts-plane-141028.htm

======
curtis
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...](http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/Bulletins/52_NumbersGame/52_NumbersGame.html).
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_...](http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Bones_Chronology.html).
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.

~~~
goodcanadian
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.

~~~
curtis
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.

------
goodcanadian
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.

~~~
smacktoward
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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
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.

------
evincarofautumn
Here’s TIGHAR’s map of possible Earhart evidence on Nikumaroro:
[http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/MapsandPhotos/ma...](http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/MapsandPhotos/maps/Nikumap.html)

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

------
acqq
It sounds fishy. See:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Islands_Settlement_Sche...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Islands_Settlement_Scheme)

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.

See also:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIGHAR](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIGHAR)

~~~
curtis
> 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.

So here's the thing -- they did find evidence and they did report it. See my
other comment (the one starting with "A lot of people are skeptical of
TIGHAR's Nikumaroro hypothesis...")

~~~
acqq
No, I'm not interested in TIGHAR's "evidence" that they discovered 20 years
after people for 20 years attempted to live there. Of course there will be
some traces of that people. I'm interested why anybody who was on the island
one year (1938) after supposed landing/crash (1937) haven't reported anything.
The island is so small (see Wikipedia) that everything would be discovered in
just a single day.

------
lambdasquirrel
It's kind of funny, looking back at that age, how unreliable machinery was,
how famous aviators disappeared all the time. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who
wrote _Terre des Hommes_ and _The Little Prince_ , was another who went away.

~~~
codezero
If we can lose an entire 777 today, losing a small aircraft seems really
reasonable back then, I don't think things were inherently more unreliable
back then. They had some pretty advanced technology at their disposal as well,
they used radio signals to determine their headings, probably the biggest
disadvantage they had was poor weather predictions and limited search/rescue
capabilities.

~~~
mturmon
"If we can lose an entire 777 today..."

This starts to look more and more embarrassing in retrospect.

~~~
scott_karana
Not really. Sonar scans on vast, deep seabeds are hard. Also consider how far
a crashed plane can drift on descent, how thoroughly it could be disintegrated
with sea impact, quickly it can be covered up by sand, et cetera... :)

~~~
mturmon
I'm not talking about after it has reached the sea bed.

I'm aware of some of the issues regarding continuous RF transmission of basic
telemetry while inflight. The bandwidth for all relevant flight info is higher
than you'd think, and the receivers over open ocean are sparse. Et cetera.

But still: in hindsight, relative to the high standards we expect from flight
systems, the inability to localize a 777 is looking more and more, for lack of
a nicer term: stupid.

I'm reminded of the crash of an early Mars lander (Mars Polar Lander, 1999),
which didn't have telemetry during EDL, so the cause of the crash could not be
fully determined. They pretty much determined after that, that every Mars
landing would have telemetry, so we'd at least know what went wrong.

