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New Evidence Indicates Amelia Earhart Survived For a Time on Pacific Atoll
In light of new evidence publicly released Friday showing artifacts believed to have been Amelia Earhart's, the U.S. Navy is prepping a mission to investigate the area where they were found. Next month marks the 75th anniversary of Earhart's disappearance, but the just-announced discovery of personal effects and the evidence of cooking represents the most concrete evidence yet that she did not simply crash into the ocean.
Good on her for surviving
The only thing new is the history that you don't know.
No offense, but who is she? Can't you add this information in the damn summary?
This group has been criticized for not looking into alternate explanations for their artifacts. While it is plausible that these artifacts come from Amelia Earhart's trip, it is also plausible they could come from many other sources.
who cares?
TIP always bring a Wilson volleyball when flying a private plane over the Pacific.
I'd totally understand this story making top headlines on ILoveAmeliaEarhart.com, but why Slashdot?
-- obligatory (but true) caveat: my comments my own, and don't reflect my employer or colleagues' positions.
Gee skipper, do you ever think well get off this island?
It sounds like they were surviving fairly well which would indicate they weren't so injured that they couldn't keep themselves going on the island. And, if they were fishing (and not relying on birds/eggs) they could probably survive indefinitely. So, what did them in?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Why on earth would the US Navy spend taxpayer dollars for this expedition? Unless they have too much money and don't know what to do with it all - which is quite plausible considering the proportion of budget allocated to the military. Meh!
-- obligatory (but true) caveat: my comments my own, and don't reflect my employer or colleagues' positions.
These TIGHAR folks have been pushing this pet theory of theirs for quite a while.
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4295
http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com/search.pl?query=Amelia+Earhart
Have gnu, will travel.
It makes my chuckle that there is a "RECOMMENDED: Are you scientifically literate? Take the quiz" link imbedded into the article, as this 'evidence' from TIGHAR is exactly the opposite of good science. They have been pushing this nonsense for a while. They've decided she was on this island and continue to look only for confirming information to support their hypothesis, rather than attempting to falsify it. They could start by admitting that there have been a lot of people who traveled to and briefly lived on that island throughout the years, particularly many, many pearl divers, and that finding various pieces of junk on the island is completely and entirely consistent with this, and not even slightly compelling evidence that Earhart left this junk.
I hope she happened to have a copy of the book Robinson Crusoe on hand to take her mind off of her predicament.
Crash land into the ocean and die relatively instantly.... or land on a chunk of useless rock, last for a few days eating fish or crabs, then dying a slow horrible death from dehydration and exposure.
Kiribati is the small nation that includes Gardner Island. A US Navy expedition into the area would pump money into the local economy. This sort of expedition is often encouraged by local governments. The military is a diplomatic tool as much as it is anything else. Considering the shifting politics of the region keeping a good relationship with a small but well placed country could bring significant benefits in time of crisis. For historical reference Tarawa, of the Battle of Tarawa, is the capital of Kiribati.
Kiribati is the small nation that includes Gardner Island. A US Navy expedition into the area would pump money into the local economy. This sort of expedition is often encouraged by local governments. The military is a diplomatic tool as much as it is anything else. Considering the shifting politics of the region keeping a good relationship with a small but well placed country could bring significant benefits in time of crisis. For historical reference Tarawa, of the Battle of Tarawa, is the capital of Kiribati.
sorry for the double post, but this time I am logged in.
The "new" evidence seems to consist of modern modelling of seventy-five year old radio logs and photo-analysis of a seventy-something-year-old photograph. It is hard to believe that she would not have attempted to make some sort of mark on the island. Why wasn't she wearing a spark-plug necklace?
Their they're doing there hair.
So the Voyager episode "The 37s" didn't/won't really happen?
Now I'm disillusioned.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I know a retired cop who fished one too many bodies out of the water. He refuses to eat crab.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
A famous aviator, that everyone in the US knows of (if only for the fact that she disappeared). The phrase "needs no introduction" comes to mind. Explaining who she is would have been like starting an article with "Abraham Lincoln, the president of the United States during the Civil War". If you don't recognize the name, then you're either a small child or from some other country. If it's the latter, you should accept that American websites will sometimes refer to American celebrities, and in such situations Wikipedia is your friend.
Her survival does not surprise me atoll. ;-b
Nevertheless, the idea that her name is known to all except children and foreigners is absurd. I don't think knowing who she was is a scholastic requirement, I can't remember when and where I heard of her, (I'm neither a child nor a foreigner...) but I have. However, I feel it IS possible for an adult, well-educated, informed American never to have heard of Amelia Earhart. It's just unlikely. Now, an adult American never having heard of George Washington, or Christopher Columbus, for example...
Let me ask you this... what was the name of the Sailing Master on Columbus' ship, during his first voyage to what they ended up calling "the New World"? What about his Chief Carpenter? George Washington's dentist? These were important men, each of whom had a hand in shaping American history. But you've never heard of them, despite their importance. Who taught Marie Curie basic chemistry? Who taught Albert Einstein math? You've probably never heard of them either. Who taught Charles Lindbergh to fly a plane? Just because someone was important doesn't mean you or anyone else would necessarily have ever heard of him. Conversely there are a lot of very famous people who just don't matter, and never did. For example...
More Americans probably know who Kim Kardashian is, (or however the fuck you spell it, I can't be bothered to look something so inconsequential up...) even though I think she could live to be a hundred and never achieve anything as significant or important as Amelia Earhart.
Actually, if that whole family got on a plane and tried to fly around the world and got lost for 70+ years, I'd be fine with it. I know I got off on a tangent, but this whole article is a tangent.
Really, WTF does Amelia Earhart either being found or not, have to do with anything on /.? You might as well also mention Richard Dawson died (he did).
A broken bottle that might have held the freckle cream that she would have used if she had known about it? Well, that's enough for me! Mystery solved!
With the exception of places like Snowtown of course.
The crash island is just a few hundred miles next to the target island. A proper investigation would try to visit the uninhabited islands within some range of the plane's fly path. 70 years later the US Navy is reinvestigating, maybe they feel they neglected something..
Amelia Earhart was actually abducted, taken to the delta quadrant, and kept in suspended animation for some 430 years before being revived by the crew of the USS Voyager. HTH.HAND.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Here they go covering the truth again!
Earhart was taken to the Delta Quadrant by an alien species named the Briori. She will be reawakened from hibernation when discovered by Captain Janeway in the 24th century.
The island is not that small, it has trees, shade, coconuts, lots of crabs, and a lagoon full of fish. It's probably a bit short of fresh water, but between coconuts, rain, and a simple solar still using a tarp, she should have been able to get by. And someone else seems to have been able to survive there by themselves for a few years.
One of the stories on this new evidence stated that a pilot saw Gardner Island and stated that he'd not seen anyone but saw signs of habitation. For some reason nobody looked into it further. And another thing that's interesting is someone found a human skull and a few navigational instruments on the island and again it was not considered to be of interest or associated with the Earhart story.
To bad LRH wasn't still around or else he could have made a Goddess out of her.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I watched a documentary with all of this supposedly new information a while back. Interviews with a woman who as a girl wrote down messages from her and everything.
But ya, it's new somehow.
Obligatory xkcd
Edgar Cayce was asked to locate her and her navigator. Available at http://www.edgarcayce.org/are/blog.aspx?id=6479&blogid=445 ; it will be never known if Edgar Cayce accurately tuned into her correctly, but given his track record, he would be quite close.
aliens that kept her alive
"If it's the latter, you should accept that American websites will sometimes refer to American celebrities, and in such situations Wikipedia is your friend."
This is arrogance at best. The readership from slashdot has long swelled to be a sizeable international reader, if not a majority of reader. It is not about linking every goddamn noun to a dictionary, it is about linking *personal name* to a wiki to make it easier for your international readership. The fact that it is not done *combined* with telling other to just google it, seems quite indicative of the arrogance some feels entitled here.
No. I did not expect this atoll.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Years ago on a tour of the National Air and Space Museum, our (female) guide gave us the straight dope on Amelia Earhart. She was at best a mediocre pilot who was pressed into performing stunts like crossing the Atlantic by her publicity-mad husband.
If, of all words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are, "It might have been,"
More sad are these we daily see:
"It is, but hadn’t ought to be."
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Those are good questions, antdude. I would like to learn more about the cartographic practices that resulted in the map they carried.
I wonder what Earhart and Noonan knew or presumed about the chart's accuracy with respect to islands when they were leaving New Guinea?
I wonder what they made of what happened when they were talking about it afterwards on Gardner island?
We'll know more if they find the aeroplane. They are going to have a good look soon.
As someone not from the US and not from Russia (from Greece if you are wondering), I should give some insight of what "the world" knows about that stuff - as a bonus my language does not use the latin or cyrillic scripts, so I can make some less biased searches. /.ers candidates for knowing Chuck Yeager - I did, but very few of my friends would know him. Now, Amelia Earhart has certainly been publicized more (at least outside the US) so she has made it in more general/history books, so it lowers the bar of knowing who she is - you just need to have read some books, so most of my friends know her. Heck, even reading books is not required - my nieces know her from her "Night at the Museum" appearance...
So, to answer the GP post, no, Chuck Yeager is certainly not known to non-US people, unless they are interested in the history of flight or spaceflight. I guess this makes most
Going on to the parent post, Chkalov is about the equivalent status of Chuck Yeager, but this time in Russia. Given the fact that Hollywood has exposed us to so much US culture and yet most people would have not heard of Chuck Yeager (no, The Right Stuff is sadly not well known in most of Europe), it is easy to explain why a handful of people would have heard of Chkalov. On the other hand, Yuri Gagarin is known by virtually every Greek (while you could find a few who would not know of Neil Armstrong or at least the fact that he was not a Jazz musician). But the Cosmonaut thing puts the bar too high I guess, he is not a single pilot. So there is at least one Russian pilot who is also not very well known, but more known than Chkalov (to Greeks at least): Alexey Meresyev. And rightfully so - the guy faught the Luftwaffe, got shot down, dragged himself to friendly territory losing his two legs in the process, then trained non-stop for many months with his prosthetic legs and flew again shooting down even more Germans! I don't think a pilot can top that.
Anyway, to sum up, Amelia Earhart should probably be known to every geek around the world. Real geeks would also know more important but less advertised aviators, but if you haven't heard of her it is simply your fault and not a matter of culture.
And here is the interesting piece, trying the names in the Greek script on google:
Yuri Gagarin: 70200
Neil Armstrong: 30500
Amelia Earhart: 17800
Chuck Yeager: 909
Alexey Meresyev: 6
Valery Chkalov: 1
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
TFA mentioned evidence of a fire ring, which they conjectured might have been to discourage the hordes of hungry hungry crabs swarming the survivors at night.
Maybe they lived to regret having survived the landing.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
... and Enumclaw
I lived in the Marshall Islands for over 7 years and nearly every year a team of explorers and researchers would arrive claiming to know exactly where she landed.
The teams, shrouded in secrecy, would hire locals to take them to some of our outer islands. Without exception they would all return with nothing but more secretive claims of where they were sure she crashed for their next trip.
This exercise happened throughout Micronesia (Kosrae, Phonepei, Chuuk/Truk, etc), the Gilberts(Kiribati), and many other island chains. In spite of the enormous size of the area she may have crashed in, most locals on these tiny atolls can guide to you just about every wreck, munitions depot, bomb crater, and sunken Taiwanese purseiner.
On a dive trip to the island of Jaulit our group was told by our guide that a local on the other side of the island knew of a Japanese flying boat sunk in 100 feet of water somewhere in the lagoon. We drove over to the other side of the island picked up an old Marshallese man who guided us to the middle of the lagoon. He lined us up with some coconut tree across the lagoon from us and said "right here". We sort of shook our heads and said ok, dropped into the water and 100 feet down a fully loaded WWII Japanese flying boat came into view.
The point of this story is that if Amelia crashed anywhere but the open ocean, island locals would know and this mystery would have been solved decades ago.
She crashed in the middle of the ocean and died. Sorry.
I don't think that fire ring was purely self-defense. I suspect the survivor party brought their doom onto themselves by poaching some of the younger, smaller, tastier coconut crabs. After that, the crab community at large was forced to take forceful action to defend themselves.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
... in her stasis pod all the way until she was revived by the Enterprise :-)
Cracked.com was really on to something recently. http://www.cracked.com/article_18718_6-famous-unsolved-mysteries-that-have-totally-been-solved.html