What do you think about this?
On July 2, 1937, the most famous woman in the world flew into a clear blue sky and was never seen again. Amelia Earhart, with her navigator Fred Noonan, was near the end of a twenty five thousand mile flight around the globe. All that remained was to find Howland Island, a flat speck of land in the vast Pacific barely two miles long, and refuel.
She never reached it. A Coast Guard ship waiting offshore picked up her voice on the radio, growing more anxious as the hours passed. We must be on you, she said, but cannot see you, and our fuel is running low. Then the transmissions stopped, and the largest sea and air search in American history up to that point found nothing at all.
For almost ninety years people have refused to let the ocean keep her. The Navy concluded she ran out of fuel and went down at sea. But others believe she turned for a tiny uninhabited atoll called Nikumaroro, landed on its reef, and survived for a time as a castaway. Search teams have returned again and again, recovering a woman’s shoe heel, a piece of aircraft aluminum, fragments that tantalize but never quite close the case.
Is it possible that the answer to one of the last century’s greatest mysteries is sitting on a reef in the middle of the Pacific, waiting for the right tide?
Lost at sea, stranded on an island, or something else entirely? What do you think happened to Amelia Earhart?
