Just kidding about the “weekly” thing; this time the news seems more plausible than that “blurry photo” thing from last year.
An article in Forensic Anthropology analyzes the measurements of bones found on Nikumaroro Island in 1940. Among other things, the measurements were compared with an Earhart photo containing a scalable object and some of Earhart’s clothing. The author concludes that “Earhart is more similar to the Nikumaroro bones than 99% of individuals in a large reference sample.”
The article does mention that the bones were probably damaged due to “scavenging by crabs,” but does not address the theory that Earhart was eaten by scary giant crabs.
Earhart’s disappearance is one of those Great Mysteries that’s only technically a mystery: We never saw her augur in, but the only realistic possibility is that she crashed on her way to Howland Island and died along with Noonan.
The next rung down the mystery scale are things which are only mysterious by fiat: That is, they’re only mysteries because someone with a big enough platform says they’re mysteries, even though there’s a perfectly non-mysterious explanation staring us in the face. The Oak Island Money Pit is an example, given that it’s a natural sinkhole some people state is a treasure trove which we haven’t poured enough money into to find the treasure of yet. The crystal skulls are cut from the same cloth, given that we know they’re modern creations which some people state are ancient, and, therefore, mysterious, because they’d have to be ancient in order to be mysterious: We know modern man can carve crystal like that.
Below that you have rank conspiracy theories, where the reasonable explanation is violently rejected in favor of variably-insane babblings.
Oh, ye of somewhat overmuch faith in the rationality of humanity, I present to you the Japanese Capture Theory which is, in the Wikipedia article as in real life, just barely above the truly nutty ideas:
Yeah, they were lost and low on fuel… so they went 800 miles off course and managed to get captured by the Japanese. Women pilots, am I right, guys? Oh, wait, Noonan, her navigator, was a man. Probably refused to ask for directions, am I right, gals?
It gets nuttier:
Why would the Japanese shoot down an American plane years before Pearl Harbor? It’s… unclear, at best, unless you are of a mindset which considers it obvious. A racist mindset, most likely.
Wikipedia has this to say:
Nah, they wanted to play Rambo: First Blood Part II in reverse: Instead of holding prisoners years after the war, they’ll hold them years before, and instead of being Vietnamese, they’ll be Japanese.
" LOS ANGELES, Sept. 23. (AP) Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were “murdered by Dogmatic Science,” Tiffany Thayer charged in the first issue of the Fortean Society magazine today."
They found their current location inhospitable, moved on, and left a note. They weren’t suddenly killed off by a raid, they weren’t slowly killed off by a disease or famine, and they even had a destination in mind.
It seems plausible they intermarried with a local group:
And more recently:
Technically still only suggestive, but it would be a pretty damned big coincidence.
I agree Japanese involvement has no real evidence. A thread here not that long ago witnessed in real time a ‘new’ photo possibly actually showing Earhart in Japanese custody was shown to be from a Japanese travel book about the ‘South Seas’ from the 1920’s.
That said, another more modern form of irrationality IMO is a tendency to make ‘ism’ the center of everything.
‘Racism’ doesn’t explain a lot of things, or more importantly often isn’t the only reason even when it’s one of them. Racial attitudes currently viewed as bad were common among Americans toward East Asians in past decades but not against Japanese to the exclusion of Chinese. But there wasn’t a broad willingness to believe, especially after WWII, in Chinese govt attempts to harm the US or Americans before WWII. The better explanation for that differential is the fact that Japan ended up attacking the US in 1941, and also in fact did attack and sink the USN gunboat Panay in China later the same year Earhart disappeared*, while China was generally viewed as a victim of Japan ca. 1937, and was a US ally in 1941-45. Racism existed, as it still does to some degree. It’s just not that plausible an explanation why the US public had a so much lower opinion of one East Asian country vs. another especially after PH, and was more willing to believe in prior hidden acts of aggression by Japan against the US in addition to the known ones.
*post-WWII first hand accounts of Japanese Navy aircrew involved consistently insisted they did not know a USN vessel was present among the merchant ships (some of which were privately US-owned, one reason Panay was escorting them) they were sent to attack. The doubt lies in the information given by the Army, which sighted the vessels from shore, to the Navy about the targets. Local elements of the Japanese Army basically succeeded in starting the original takeover of Manchuria in 1931 with rogue actions. It’s possible they knew a USN vessel was present and deliberately failed to tell the Navy air units, though it’s never been proven. Anyway it was not a ‘racist’ fantasy that the attack occurred.
Well, if you ignore all the original story about the wooden beams every 10 feet, etc. I have no idea if they are true but you do have to throw them out completely. I’m not quite ready to do that.
Hey, if I had won the big lottery I would definitely build a 100 foot diameter caisson on Oak Island and excavate that entire site down to bedrock. I wouldn’t care about making a cent from it. I just want it ended one way of the other.
Actually, on the credibility scale, I would have ranked the blurry photo, crappy evidence that it was, somewhere above this bones thing.
He’s making conclusions on bones that have not been seen in almost 80 years, in contradiction to the doctor who examined them, to reach a conclusion that itself is highly implausible.
There’s just no way that Earhart and Noonan reached Nikumaroro. There is a small group of fanatics who stick with this fringe idea despite never having any evidence that passes the laugh test.
It’s going to take the actual discovery of the wreckage, somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific, for this all to go away, and maybe not even then. The plane was much smaller than a 777, though, and we know by now how hard those are to find.
I was familiar with the Saipan theory, since I used to be a huge fan of Unsolved Mysteries (original Robert Stack episodes only - the Law and Order guy never had the right schtick.) Even that, though, is basically a variant of the crash theory:
(bolding mine)
Unlikely due to its distance, eyewitness testimony of mysterious Saipanese woman and WWII dudes notwithstanding.
No, they are doing what everyone else has done for the past 170 years, boring holes. Nice large holes in some case, the largest is 60" diameter. Previously hand dug shafts were up to 12’ x 20’ across. Lots of smaller ones 6" in diameter to explore areas.
I want to excavate the entire diameter of the furthest possible extent of any original pit. I figure a 100’ diameter caisson would do it. Line the shaft with steel and take every freaking thing in the entire shaft out as you go, sift it and dig deeper.
