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Amelia Earhart Mystery Solved?
Un1v4c writes: "According to this article on MSN... "A Delaware-based archaeological group is sufficiently intrigued to send a diving team to an atoll 2,000 miles southwest of Hawaii to get an up-close look at whatever produced the rust-colored spots on the space photographs taken by Space Imaging of Thornton. "Nothing out there occurs naturally that's rust colored," said Rick Gallespie of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. He believes the rusty object just beyond the reef that surrounds the uninhabited atoll could be an engine and the landing gear of Earhart's Lockheed 10-E Special Electra."" See also this article on space.com and the picture in question. Apparently Earhart never had a piece of outhouse wash up on shore to help her escape.
located in the Pacific ocean 457.6 square miles east of Hawaii
They also found a pink spot 37 volts south of Alaska.
:)
hawk, wondering where he'll sleep (oh, wait--his wife won't use a computer, so she'll never see this
These guys aren't basing this off of two pixels on a photo shot from space -- they've got pretty good reasons to believe that this is where she ended up. They've really done a bit of research on this; it looks as if they've been working at this since the early sixties, and they've been sending expeditions to the island since the early ninties.
See also some of their research. bulletins. Sure, they might be wrong, but based the last of the transmissions heard from her plane and such, this is a *very* likely place for her to have ended up.
It's also the place where Robert Louis Stevenson breathed his last (and he's buried there; I've seen a photo of him when he lived on the island, and he was one sickly puppy dog).
The history lesson was thrown in for free.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
How about the Next Generation episode (The Royale?) where Picard hinted that Fermat's Last Theorem had remained unsolved up to that time?
I think they just mean naturally in that local area. I've seen miles of rust colored soil in Texas and Asia, but since it's an atoll, any sand would be white, since it's dead coral.
These guys are hard-core Earhart mystery fanatics.
This is just the latest of nearly annual claims.
Its not like- "Oh I see a rust spot on a random
sat photo- must be Emila". They looked hard for
the slightest possibility in a well-researched area.
Hope better luck this round.
Today, BSNBC news reports that National Ocean Images Inc. has taken photographs of a mysterious black spot located in the Pacific ocean 457.6 square miles east of Hawaii. According to scientists (OK, one obsessed guy from Kansas), the spot is actually where Atlantis was swallowed by the sea some three thousand years ago. Or maybe the Titanic, or possibly the missing Mars Lander... Nonetheless, The US government and scientists from We Got a Grant and Have Nothing to Do National Laboratory will send a diving team to the spot this fall in hopes of determining what mysterious and historical artifact is not lying at the site.
</SARCASM>
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
- This is essentially treasure hunting, the success rate of these things is extremly low.
- The success rate of this group is low, they've already sent out five expeditions with theories of success, to return with nothing.
- The evidence in this case is light. Wonder why you don't see the spots on the picture? They are a pixel or two large. Not to mention, almost the same color as the ocean. See for yourself here, they claim the "anamoly" is the sunken plane.
I suspect this is a case of, we paid the money for this, now lets see if we can find something. If you look hard enough, you can see almost anything anywhere (heck, I finally saw 3D holograms in noise :). That all said, it's exciting to see folks chasing this stuff down, and the adventure getting there is almost as good as actually finding anything.
I wish them luck, but hope no one is holding their breath on this one.
Did a little digging on Google and found this link:
http://www.earhart.org/
Interesting reading, as it claims a big coverup and the direct involvement of James Forrestal, then Secretary of the Navy.
Since it's on the internet, it *must* be true...
;-)
MMDC Mobile Media
-- My Weblog.
Not to mention that it could be a boat wreck or the engine from an abandoned fishing boat.
One of the main pieces of supporting evidence that she was there is from the discovery of the heel of a woman's shoe. Dig around on the web and see if you an find a picture of her in anything but man-style shoes and boots. Even as a child, she wore pants, rather than dresses, which was quite unusual for the time.
MMDC Mobile Media
-- My Weblog.
Well, at the time, Earhart's trip was hugely publicized as a good-will mission of peace around the world -
What if the government was forced to admit that a national heroine was, in fact, a spy? It would have been a real black eye for America.
Tensions between the US and Japan were mounting and Japan felt that they were divinely empowered to win any war they entered. This was around the time that Japan was devestating Manchuria and Nanking - their Navy was very strong and Saipan and the Northern Marianas islands were a key position for them, as well as a threatening one to America. (It's funny, none of my American friends knew that Saipan is a US posession now.)
I live a few blocks from the Japanese War Museum and Shrine - (Yasukuni Jinja. I'll be up there tonight, in fact, for a summer festival.)
There's always elderly Japanese soldiers up there, often looking at items from some island where they were stationed. I wonder if any of them were Saipan at the time and would be able to offer any information, but it would be just too insensitive for a foreigner to ask about such a thing. Plus, if they were sworn to secrecy then, I am sure they would still respect that.
Maybe in a few years, as they die off, a diary or some photographs will surface and the mystery will be solved.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
MMDC Mobile Media
-- My Weblog.
I visited Saipan a year ago and there's a lot of local legend about Amelia Earhart. From what people have peiced together, AE's plane supposedly was shot down over/near Saipan by the Japanese forces on the island. Saipan natives recalled the Japanese's surprise that it was a woman aviator and especially that her navigator, a man, took orders from her. They were apparently imprisoned as spies, which they would have been, if they were in that area.
One old chamorro woman recalled seeing a tall white woman with an injured arm ocassionally walking under guard of Japanese navy men.
Later, American soldiers told of destroying a Lockheed plane that was in a Japanese hangar, after the fall of Saipan.
If you go there, you can see the foundations of the prison where she was supposedly kept, as well as some really cool caves and bunkers hidden all over the island. Saipan is also one of the places where the Japanese soldiers were hiding and didn't know that the war was over - The last of them came down from the hills in 1953 or so.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
MMDC Mobile Media
-- My Weblog.
from the how-I-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-like-coconut s dept.
Apparently Earhart never had a piece of outhouse wash up on shore to help her escape.
Ooh, jaded allusions to two seperate movies in this post. I'm impressed - Michael, keep up your good work.
Cheers,
levine
A ghost of aviation
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea
Like me
She had a dream to fly
--joni mitchell, amelia, from hejira
Many conspiracy theorists say that Amelia Earhart was shot down and/or captured by the Japanese because she would have seen their military activity in the pacific.
Maybe they sunk it there.
Researchers have actually been looking at this atoll for quite some time as a possible crash site for her. A couple of unidentified skeletons were found on the atoll as were various pieces of her actual wreckage. So they know she wrecked somewhere within the area (a very large area because of currents, but at least it was narrowed down). They don't know if the skeletons are her and/or her partner, but they might be and the wreckage is, iirc, definitely hers. These also aren't just random sat photos, they actually commissioned these photos to be taken of this specific spot.
IANAL, but I play one on
"Elvis needs boats!"
- Mojo Nixon, "Elvis is Everywhere".
This invalidates yet another Voyager plot . . .
I'm pretty sure this wouldn't be the Titanic though, since it'd have to have suddenly risen from the spot on at the bottom of the Atlantic where we've known it is for years (it was crossing from the UK to the Eastern Seaboard of the US remember) and flown across North America without anyone noticing.
The post kinda reminds me of a story a software engineering lecturer once told me - he was working on an imaging system for a brain-scanner, and decided to test it on himself. When he got out of the scanner the doctors were all looking very serious and showed him a scan with a black blob in the center of his brain. After reeling from the shock he decided to go back and look at his code; it turned out that in a moment of distraction he'd started counting array elements from 1 instead of 0 - after fixing it his scan was blob-free. Anyway, this could be what your dark spot in the Pacific is.
PS - yes, I do know you were joking
b) Anecdotal historical evidence from natives continually points out to a plane like hers crashing near the island that was visible in a lagoon for awhile, and around the time of her disappearance.
c) The recovery in a previous expedition of artifacts such as a shoe and labels from food cans produced around the time of her disappearance.
d) A British research ship which a few years later took the bones of a "European woman" from the island, and the logbook and anecdotal evidence of such.
e) In terms of Navigation, and her position near her disappearance, Nikamuoro is a lot more probably than Saipan.
This group would not be raising $400k just for naught - they are trying to be thorough and rational... Perhaps this sometimes is clouded by the evangelical zeal they have by which they want to find the wrecked plane... Because at the very least it would finish off the ridiculous stories that transform her into some martyr. Let's not forget that Earhart was a devoted pacifist who worked as a nurse while in her teens on WWI soldiers returned home, and she was doubly progressive in teaching and looking after non white children at around the same time. TIGHAR may not find anything, but at least their search respects Earhart as opposed to using her for silly theories about how she was a spy for the US government. Let's not forget that it became inscribed in stone that her navigator Noonan was a tempestuous alcoholic due to one volume of biography that never attributed the knowledge of such - and subsequent research in later years was never able to find the man as incomptent at his job.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
Check out this analysis from TIGHAR. The second page has a magnification of the photo where they think the plane is.
That said, it'd be nice if Amelia Earhart was finally laid to rest, even if not literally. She was a pioneer whose dedication and skill probably inspired many young women to the realization that there was more to life than being June Cleaver.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Nonsense, it was meerly missrouted to San Marino and is scheduled to be returned to her. . .
Next Tuesday.
KFG
Yes, but it would be unbelieveably difficult. Ground telescopes that use so called aperture synthesis can achieve resolutions which approximate the resolution you would expect if you had one huge telescope the size of the separation distance or "baseline" of the two smaller separated telescopes(the basic idea of astronomical interferometery), but there is a (BIG)catch. In order to 'get fringes' or achieve interferometry, you must combine the light from the array of telescopes with the same high tolerances that you would need to use with one giant telescope the size of the baseline. That means the mirrors and beam splitters/combiners of the entire system must be held to within 1/10th of a fraction of the wavelength of light that you are observing with. If you assume yellow light with a wavelength of 5X10^-7 meters you would have to know the positions of the optics in the system to within 50 Nanometers or billionths of a meter. This is possible on earth and is even being done on large scales such as at Keck and the ESO's VLT. If you can figure out a way for two telescopes orbiting the earth 200Km up(and varying in altitude by METERS everyday because of drag with the upper atmosphere) to know their position with respecto to eachother to within a tiny fraction of the diameter of a hair, let me know; the King of Sweden wants to see you. (BTW this trick is not so hard at centemeter wavelenghts; the baseline of this system stretches from Hawaii to New Hampshire and the resolution in this VLBA image is nearly 1000 times higher than the hubble space telescope can achieve.)
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
The resolving power of an optical instrument is defined by it's ability to separate the images of two adjacent objects. Something called the diffraction limit, inherent to all optical devices prevents infinite resolution from being achieved simply by increasing magnification. The minimum angular separation of two objects that can be resolved by a round aperture is given by the eqation: X=1.22*L/D, where D is the diameter of the aperture L is distance from telescope. Realistically, you can assume an absolute maximum of 3 meters for a primary optic(bigger than hubble), about a 160km orbit and 500nm visible light wavelength measurement. Or X=1.22*5X10^-6*1.6X10^5/3=0.33 meters or 33 centimeters or about a foot. remember that this is not even taking into account atmospheric effects (think looking at a penny on the bottom of a pool) and it does not mean you can see your face because it's about this size, it means your face will show up as a dot.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Anybody else find it extremely amazing that an object's color, under the ocean, can be identified by a satelite? Anybody want to try proving that they *can't* see my face from space?
Don't forget your sunglasses.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
As long as they use some sort of TCP based protocol to guarantee that the payload is received...
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Bullshit. You've been reading too much Berlitz methinks. If you want to know what really goes on in the Bermuda triangle, check out James Randis book "Flim Flam!". An old one, but it covers the claims made a bout the triangle in great detail.
What it boils down to, is that the area has no more ship/plane wrecks or disappearences than any other place along the american coast. The myth about the triangle came to be mostly because of horribly bad journalism, and total lack of research.
^]:wq!^M
Great post. But here's a question: Couldn't a spy satellite be designed to use interferometry to create a large virtual mirror with a greater resolving power than a single physical mirror? I believe this technique is used in ground-based telescopes to great effect. While I'd imagine the engineering issues of getting such a thing up on a satellite would be quite daunting, isn't it possible to do this in principle?
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Gee boss, I'm out of vacation time but I just found this picture of something rust colored that's not too far from Hawaii. How bout you pay for me to go and erm... investigate it.
I still think those posters are some sort of sick joke - "If you look just right, you can see... wink, wink".
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
...is why, if they supposedly soft-landed (the article states this guy's idea that they managed a soft landing and then the tide swept the ship out), then why did they die?
They vanished in '37. Brits discovered bones and no live humans in '40. Is the island nothing but rock and sand, with no food? But the space.com article babbles on about GPS helping so they won't have to hack through teeming jungles with machetes, apparently. Was there no food to be found in all that jungle?
Either they were mortally injured in the crash, or injured such that they could not gather food, or they died by some other accident ("I ated the purple berries!"), or the island had no food on it, or (as is more likely) they died because there was no fresh water (but how could there be jungle without some fresh water?), or it's a sunken Zero from WW2, or (as is most likely), some nut is reading a bit too much into two off-color pixels in a satellite image.
You pays your money and you takes your choice.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
There's 12318241398 Gazillion (very wild guess) unclassified species, a majority of which sit in the ocean, and they can honestly say that there's nothing that produces a rust color naturally???
A sunken ship, a old WWII plane wreck or some shipper lost a cargo container overboard in a bad storm. I wonder who is paying for this weird obesssion of Ameila Earhart?
--
Will the last company to abandon Linux please turn off the lights??!
These people are determined that her plane is there and they will "see" her plane in every picture of the island that's released. I'm convinced that her plane could be raised from the bottom of the ocean, her skeletal remains still in the pilot's seat, and these kooks would swear it was an imposter and that the real wreckage is somewhere around the island.
In related news, Amelia Earhart's luggage remains missing.
/.
Finally, the Rock has come back to
Mentioned in the article, "Bones were found on the island by a British group in 1940. Also found was a campfire, a box designed to hold a sextant and the heel of a woman's shoe." It's not like they found a rust spot in the Pacific and decided it was Earhart. It sounds like they were looking for confirmation this was the island. (Why, I can't say)
"End self-quotes in Sigs!"