# Amelia Earhart's plane found on the sea floor? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 20, 2001, 8:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693 "2001-03-20T08:54:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Chas.E](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e99b99/32.png) [@Chas.E](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chas.E)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2001, 8:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/1 "2001-03-20T08:54:01Z")
My mom asked me to check into something she heard on TV, she said she caught the tail end of some cable “news” show that claimed that Amelia Earhart’s plane had been located on the sea floor with sonar. Supposedly this was the same group of people who located the Titanic. But then, my mom watches the crappiest shows… I promised her I’d look around the internet, but I can’t find a thing. She’s an Amelia fanatic (she used to run a restaurant called Amelia’s, she still has a 6 foot model of Amelia’s plane). It would make an old lady happy if someone could hunt down some leads, even if it’s a false lead. My mom takes much pleasure from hearing crackpot Amelia theories. ---
**Author:** ![Ice\_Wolf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/dfb087/32.png) [@Ice\_Wolf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ice_Wolf)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2001, 10:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/2 "2001-03-20T10:01:56Z")
Could try checking out [http://www.insightmag.com/archive/200002054.shtml](http://www.insightmag.com/archive/200002054.shtml) for some recent info. ---
**Author:** ![Chas.E](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e99b99/32.png) [@Chas.E](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chas.E)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2001, 10:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/3 "2001-03-20T10:14:09Z")
Thanks, that looks like the stuff I was looking for. Hard to tell though, she only heard the tail end of the story, and I only heard it secondhand from her. Maybe the story needs to be updated, my mom said they claimed to have located the wreck on the sea bottom. But if that was really true, this would be front page headlines, so maybe she misunderstood the story. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2001, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/4 "2001-03-20T13:03:52Z")
[The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery](http://www.tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/AEoverview.html) may be the group you’re thinking of. Previous expeditions to the island of Nikumaroro have provided some tantalizing but inconclusive evidence that Earhart and Noonan just might possibly have landed and died there. ---
**Author:** ![PastTense](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pasttense/32/14550_2.png) [@PastTense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PastTense)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/5 "2014-10-30T00:28:10Z")
Updating this zombie thread of only 13 years ago The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery has again announced important results: > [@](#): > > Now, a three-square-foot scrap of aluminum debris from Nikumaroro, an uninhabited atoll in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, may provide an important clue. > > The essence of the group’s report this week is that the piece of aluminum was a patch replacing a navigational window. News photos at the time show the shiny patch on the side of Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed Electra, which was installed during an eight-day stopover in Miami. > > “The Miami Patch was an expedient field repair," Ric Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR, told Discovery News. “Its complex fingerprint of dimensions, proportions, materials and rivet patterns was as unique to Earhart’s Electra as a fingerprint is to an individual.” > **[New clue to the mystery of Amelia Earhart?](https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2014/1029/New-clue-to-the-mystery-of-Amelia-Earhart)** > > For years, private researchers have looked for clues to the mystery of pioneer aviator Amelia Earhart's disappearance over the Pacific in 1937. Now, one piece of fuselage metal may confirm her last location. Aren’t Dopers excited about this news? Or does no one care about the fate of Amelia Earhart anymore? ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 12:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/6 "2014-10-30T00:33:10Z")
It might help if TIGHAR didn’t have one of the worst web sites I’ve seen in a long time - the kind you find now, abandoned for ten years, still looking like 2004 and with half the links broken. Almost free of useful content and that badly organized. No “news” or update section that I can find. Just Geocities-era clip art and template design. Bleah. ---
**Author:** ![engineer\_comp\_geek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/engineer_comp_geek/32/504_2.png) [@engineer\_comp\_geek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/engineer_comp_geek)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 1:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/7 "2014-10-30T01:04:17Z")
> [@PastTense](#): > > Aren’t Dopers excited about this news? Or does no one care about the fate of Amelia Earhart anymore? At this point I just kinda go “oh, they found her again, did they? Where was she this time?” and I move on to something more interesting. Give me something more definitive and I might get excited. ---
**Author:** ![doorhinge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a5b964/32.png) [@doorhinge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/doorhinge)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 1:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/8 "2014-10-30T01:07:52Z")
But where’s Waldo? ---
**Author:** ![Princhester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/9 "2014-10-30T01:08:16Z")
TIGHAR is trying to drum up funds for another expedition. To do that they need to convince backers they are on to something. If the photos in [this story](http://news.discovery.com/history/us-history/aluminum-fragment-appears-to-belong-to-earharts-plane-1410281.htm) are the best they can do to convince the world the patch is from Amelia’s plane, colour me unconvinced. ---
**Author:** ![jasg](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f0a364/32.png) [@jasg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jasg)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/10 "2014-10-30T02:23:19Z")
> [@Princhester](#): > > TIGHAR is trying to drum up funds for another expedition. To do that they need to convince backers they are on to something. If the photos in [this story](http://news.discovery.com/history/us-history/aluminum-fragment-appears-to-belong-to-earharts-plane-1410281.htm) are the best they can do to convince the world the patch is from Amelia’s plane, colour me unconvinced. They found the patch in 1991… ---
**Author:** ![levdrakon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/49beb7/32.png) [@levdrakon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/levdrakon)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/11 "2014-10-30T02:49:41Z")
This popped into the news today. I did a little reading around because it was interesting, but the founder of this TIGHAR group has been described as a great showman, but low on evidence. It’s tantalizing they found a woman’s compact among other things, but isn’t there still the problem that the Electra simply didn’t have enough fuel to make it as far as the island of Nikumaroro? They say there is evidence someone was eating birds and fish at the campsite in the southeast end of the island but crabs would have carried away any human remains. Well, why would there be any bird or fish remains then? It sure would be nice if someone found the human remains that were taken to Fiji and lost. ---
**Author:** ![handsomeharry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e9c0ed/32.png) [@handsomeharry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/handsomeharry)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 5:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/12 "2014-10-30T05:07:33Z")
> [@engineer\_comp\_geek](#): > > At this point I just kinda go “oh, they found her again, did they? Where was she this time?” and I move on to something more interesting. > > Give me something more definitive and I might get excited. Word. But, NEWSFLASH: A member of the Mafia just admitted to knowing where Jimmy Hoffa is buried…hold your breath for updates. ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 9:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/13 "2014-10-30T09:24:22Z")
So, why hasn’t this outfit found MH370 yet? ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 11:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/14 "2014-10-30T11:18:03Z")
[Per Skeptoid](http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4295), the group talking up this “discovery” doesn’t really seem that interested in any alternative explanations for their ‘findings’; > [@](#): > > Here’s the problem with TIGHAR’s findings. Even though they meticulously document and preserve every artifact, they exhaustively research each one to find matches with real objects from the 1930s, and they look exactly like what such an expedition should look like, their overall methodology is fundamentally, fatally unscientific. It’s unscientific in that it’s done completely backwards. TIGHAR begins with the assumption that Amelia Earhart crashed, camped out, and died on Nikumaroro. They take everything they find — every anomaly in a photograph or in a story, every piece of bone or manmade artifact found on the island — and try to match it to their assumption, rather than trying to objectively assess its origin. > > Nikumaroro, this tiny island where TIGHAR has recovered its artifacts, is in Kiribati, a nation of 100,000 people spread over millions of square kilometers of the South Pacific. People leaving artifacts come and go all the time. For example, pearl divers. Fleets of pearl boats have plied these waters since the 1800s. Every island and reef in the South Pacific has been visited countless times by pearl boats, who anchored, made camp on shore, and spent a few weeks free diving for oysters. Their exploits and histories have been published in dozens of books, such as Roy Miner’s 1941 volume Pearl Divers, and the many colorful tales in Frank Coffee’s 1920 book Forty Years on the Pacific. TIGHAR found evidence of campfires and fish bones on Nikumaroro and concluded “Amelia Earhart” who is not known to have visited the island; but I found no attempt made by them to exclude the pearl divers who are known to have camped there, and to have done so countless times over more than a century. TIGHAR appears to be dedicated to proving the least likely explanation for the artifacts. ---
**Author:** ![Rain\_Soaked](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e19adc/32.png) [@Rain\_Soaked](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rain_Soaked)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/15 "2014-10-30T15:43:11Z")
> [@Senegoid](#): > > So, why hasn’t this outfit found MH370 yet? Give them another 77 years… ---
**Author:** ![HipGnosis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/76d3ee/32.png) [@HipGnosis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HipGnosis)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/16 "2014-10-30T15:43:54Z")
> [@PastTense](#): > > Aren’t Dopers excited about this news? Or does no one care about the fate of Amelia Earhart anymore? I care. My aunt (wife of my Moms brother) is Amelia’s niece. Her maiden name is Earhart and the resemblance is irrefutable. But, like others, I’m desensitized to such faux news. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/17 "2014-10-30T15:47:24Z")
My reaction is the same it always is: These guys are still at it? Gillespie believes what he wants to believe, no doubts or conflicting facts or alternative hypotheses permitted. His desired conclusion depends on pretending the island was never even visited by humans other than Earhart and Noonan until his group arrived. ---
**Author:** ![Motorgirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e36b37/32.png) [@Motorgirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Motorgirl)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/18 "2014-10-30T16:40:45Z")
> [@levdrakon](#): > > They say there is evidence someone was eating birds and fish at the campsite in the southeast end of the island but crabs would have carried away any human remains. OMG how big are the crabs on that island??! ---
**Author:** ![araminty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b5e925/32.png) [@araminty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/araminty)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/19 "2014-10-30T16:58:52Z")
> [@Motorgirl](#): > > OMG how big are the crabs on that island??! [Pretty big](http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/92/16/ed/9216edd640fd17f15edfa541ab5e0971.jpg). (Physicist for scale.) I’d like a pet coconut crab! ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693/20 "2014-10-30T17:02:21Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > [Per Skeptoid](http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4295), the group talking up this “discovery” doesn’t really seem that interested in any alternative explanations for their ‘findings’; First, let me say that I would like Earhart’s airplane to be found. Second, I’m glad someone is out there looking for it. Third, I am not taking a stand on whether the ‘new’ evidence is conclusive. Per Skeptoid is basically saying, ‘Since TIGHAR doesn’t consider alternative theories regarding campsites, and did not “exclude the pearl divers who are known to have camped there”, they have not considered alternatives for this “patch” that they’ve found.’ Maybe TIGHAR did, and maybe they didn’t. A quick look at google images shows that most Electras had more than one window on each side. Images of Earhart’s plane in Miami do show a ‘patch’ where one window should be. TIGHAR says, ‘Its complex fingerprint of dimensions, proportions, materials and rivet patterns was as unique to Earhart’s Electra as a fingerprint is to an individual.’ If the patch is to blank out a window, and if most other Electras had a window in that position, the patch’s dimensions and proportions would not be ‘unique’ – at least, IMO, not unique enough to be identified from an old photograph. The materials would not have been unique either. It’s an aluminum alloy. Rivets would probably have used existing holes, so I doubt they would be sufficiently different between planes with the same alteration. The artifact does seem to be from an Electra, if TIGHAR’s research is correct. We know that Earhart and Noonan were flying in that part of the world. It’s plausible that the artifact is from their aircraft. But how many Electras had that modification? Lockheed built 149 of them, plus a couple of variants. Between Australia and New Zealand, there were eight airlines flying them – and Nikumaroro Island is nicely between Australia and Hawaii. Of Electras known to have been flying in the area in 1937, how many of them crashed; and how many simply vanished? Did any have the ‘patch’ that was discovered? If so, could the artifact have been taken to Nikumaroro Island or thereabouts by pearl divers or fishermen? As Per Skeptoid says, TIGHAR can be sloppy, failing to exclude alternatives. But right now I don’t think the ‘patch’ can be excluded. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/amelia-earharts-plane-found-on-the-sea-floor/58693.md?page=2)