Indonesian Digital News Archive

A team of researchers are en route to a chain of remote islands in the South Pacific with the hopes of solving one of the great mysteries of the 20th century. Armed with new data, the team hopes to find the remains of Amelia Earhart, the famous aviator who went missing in 1937 while attempting to fly around the world.

The disappearance of Amelia Earhart is one of the most enduring mysteries of the 20th Century. The pioneering aviator went missing somewhere over the Pacific back in 1937 as she attempted to fly around the world, and there have been a host of search parties ever since. Now a new team says that they have found clues to her whereabouts and they believe that they have discovered her final resting place at last.

According to this story from Discovery.com, researchers now believe that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan crash landed on Nikumaroro Island, an uninhabited atoll that is part of the tiny nation of Kiribati in the South Pacific. They believe that not only did they survive, but that they attempted to use the plane's radio to signal for help on numerous occasions. Some of those SOS attempts were recorded and the researchers studied them, concluding that 57 of the 120 transmissions that were examined have some credibility as belong to Earhart.

The research team behind the study says that they believe that Earhart and Noonan were able to continue broadcasting signals until the plane was eventually pulled out to sea by high tides a few days after the crash. They have reviewed tidal data for July 2nd through the 9th of 1937 as well, and that data holds well to their theory. The thought is that the two survived the crash and lived on the island as long as they could before eventually dying there.

If the radio signal evidence wasn't enough, explorers have also found another clue on Nikumaroro. While searching for evidence of Earhart's eventual resting place, they found five fragments of a glass jar. When that jar was reassembled it was discovered to be Dr.‭ ‬C.‭ ‬H Berry's Freckle Ointment, which was on the market at the time of Earhart's flight. It was also known that she not only had freckles but didn't like them, and used cosmetics to cover them up or in an attempt to remove them altogether. Some of the researchers believe that this jar belonged to the aviator.

Next July the team intends to mount an expedition to the island to search once more for the aircraft. Of course, this will be just the latest attempt to find her and while efforts in the past have provided intriguing clues, the mystery of what happened to Earhart has yet to be solved. It should be very interesting to see what it is they discover.