Howdy folks and greetings from the Great Plains of North Texas!
We're in a short series about the mystery of the disappearance of Emelia Earhart(and her navigator) while attempting to fly around the world in 1937.
Recap
In yesterday's post we discussed how a 15 year old girl in Florida heard much of Emelia's distress call on her dad's radio even though none of the military or government radios picked it up.
The girl wrote down everything she heard and I posted copies of the transmissions.
Today's story
Robert Ballard, the man who found the Titanic, was sponsored by National Geographic to go look for Emelia's plane last summer on Nikumaroro Island. Maybe some of you heard about it, I didn't.
I thought he was planning the search but no, he already conducted it. Obviously they didn't make any big headlines.
Here's Nikumaroro Island. It's 4 miles long and a half mile wide:
His crew worked around the clock and spent 2 weeks there. They used all the high tech equipment they had including 2 unmanned vehicles, an unmanned boat that scans and maps out the topography, plus the main ship, The Nautilus, which circled the island with sonar and other equipment.
This is the control room on the Nautilus:
Since Emelia's plane was a fragile one made out of aluminum, they figure it would all be disintegrated by the salt water and washed away by the currents except for the 2 engines.
They searched every square foot around the island out to 4 miles and didn't find anything.
This is Robert Ballard with one of his unmanned search vehicles:
Even though they conducted a thorough search he doesn't consider the expedition to be done. He reminded his crew that it took 4 expeditions to find the Titanic.
There was also a land part
While Robert was doing his thing around the island, a land crew was searching the island itself. This was headed by National Geographic Society archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert.
Although they didn't find anything on Nikumaroro, he spent time on a nearby island called Tarawa at their museum.
Remember the bones found on Nikumaroro in 1940 believed to be those of Emelia but they disappeared during WWII?
Well, that museum has a set of bones but they don't know where they came from and Fredrik thinks they are the missing bones from 1940!
This could be the final proof
They're in Florida now, being analyzed by a Forensic Anthropologist. The testing takes several months but the latest word was that the expert conducting them said..
“all lines of evidence point to the 1940 bones being in this museum” source. In other words, she thinks it's Emelia's bones. We should know shortly and Robert Ballard says he's on his way back there if the results prove it's Emelia's.
Here's Emelia and Fred Noonan going over their route:
Did you know she was married?
I didn't even realize it and had never heard that. But yes, she was married to her publisher, George Putnam.
In one of her distress calls she used the name Emelia Putnam, which was interesting because she insisted on being called Earhart.
Here she is with George, they got hitched in 1931:
She was such an independent woman working to improve women's rights and standing in society that she didn't want to get married. It took George a long time to convince her... he proposed 6 times before she said yes! lol.
They didn't have any kids. I think she was so driven that she didn't want to take time out to raise children.
This is one of my favorite photos of her because it doesn't look staged, it's just her out in the wind by her plane and someone snapped her photo:
She was a hero and an inspiration to millions of young girls and women across the globe and her legacy lives on by the life she lived.
"Women, like men, should try to do the impossible. And when they fail, their failure should be a challenge to others." -Emelia Earhart
source
Thanks for reading folks, I'll let you know how the DNA results turn out. God bless you all!
-jonboy
Texas