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00:00Tonight, Amelia Earhart, the world's most famous female pilot,
00:06takes off on the final leg of a record-breaking flight.
00:10Earhart is attempting to become the first woman to fly around the world.
00:14She's flown 22,000 miles. She only has 7,000 miles left.
00:19But Earhart never arrives at her next stop,
00:22a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean.
00:25Earhart, her navigator, and her plane vanish without a trace.
00:29The Navy conducts a massive search by sea and air,
00:32but nothing is found.
00:34Now, we'll explore the top theories
00:36regarding Amelia Earhart's doomed final flight.
00:39There are many conflicting stories and, in the eyes of some, secrecy.
00:44We will never stop looking for Amelia Earhart.
00:47She was lost, of course, but where did she go?
00:50What really happened to Amelia and her navigator?
00:59June 1st, 1937, 5.57 a.m., Miami Municipal Airport in Florida.
01:17World-famous pilot Amelia Earhart sets off on her most daring mission to date.
01:23All eyes are on Amelia Earhart.
01:26She embarks on her quest to become the first woman to fly around the world.
01:32At this point, Earhart is not only one of the most well-known women in America.
01:37She's a celebrity.
01:38Record first were no novelty to Aviatrix Amelia.
01:41On May 20, 1932, she successfully spanned the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Londonderry, Ireland,
01:47the first woman to make the flight solo.
01:50Amelia Earhart, at this time, is easily the most photographed woman on Earth.
01:56She might be the most famous woman on Earth.
01:58She is pursued everywhere.
02:00The press is obsessed.
02:01Her feats of flying daring do are well-known, and she is about to embark on her most daring feat of flying yet to circumnavigate the globe.
02:12Which had been done before with various vessels, but never in an airplane around the equator, which is, of course, the widest part of the globe.
02:21She's going to stay as close to the equator as possible, making this the longest route that you could take.
02:27She had already accomplished a lot of firsts, but this would have established a new life for air travel in general, and the world is really excited.
02:38Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, take off in a Lockheed A-10 Electra.
02:45It will be legendary if she manages to complete this trip around the world.
02:50Born in Atchison, Kansas in 1897, Amelia Earhart is in her early 20s when her interest in flying is first sparked.
03:00She takes her first lesson in 1921 when she's 24 years old.
03:05She starts to fly, and she just falls in love with it.
03:10The freedom, the adventure, the challenge, it becomes her passion.
03:15Amelia Earhart demonstrates a real knack for flying, and it's only six months later that she is able to purchase her own plane.
03:24In October 1922, she reaches an altitude of 14,000 feet.
03:30So within 18 months of starting to take lessons, she's already broken the world's record for altitude flying for a woman.
03:37Amelia Earhart is quickly coined Lady Lindy.
03:41There are plenty of newspaper articles that put her portrait right next to Charles Lindbergh.
03:46In 1932, Lady Lindy becomes the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
03:53Earhart had done it again, and frankly, no one was too surprised.
03:57And in 1935, she becomes the first person, either male or female, to fly from Honolulu to California solo.
04:06By this point, Earhart has set seven records for being a women pilot for speed and distance,
04:13and she is known across the nation, indeed across the world, as the queen of the air.
04:18America's Miss Amelia Earhart, world's leading lady flyer.
04:22Now, Earhart is planning her most ambitious flight yet.
04:27What sets this mission apart is the route that she's taking, nearly 29,000 miles around the equator of the Earth.
04:35This has never been done before by man or woman.
04:37It's estimated to take about a month, and this is going to be a true challenge for the queen of the air.
04:43It's extremely dangerous.
04:45They stop to refuel in South America, India, East Asia, and each time it's a media sensation.
04:52On June 29, she and Noonan land in Lai, Papua New Guinea.
04:59They take a few days there to wait for favorable weather.
05:02The next destination is Howland Island in the middle of the South Pacific.
05:07The plan is for them to land and refuel at Howland, after which they'll continue on to Honolulu, and then make the flight to Oakland.
05:14And that's a flight that Earhart has made before.
05:17On July 2, 1937, at around 10 a.m., Earhart and Noonan take off en route to Howland Island.
05:26The challenge is the stretch from Lai to Howland Island is the longest of the entire trip.
05:36Today, this trip would take a modern aircraft four or five hours.
05:40Amelia Earhart is planning on 18 hours for her to travel this 2,500 miles.
05:45This is a long flight with a very small target.
05:49The island is about 1 20th the size of Manhattan in the middle of the Pacific.
05:54So with few, if any, other landmarks to help guide the route, this is looking for a needle in a haystack.
06:01There's nothing at Howland Island.
06:04It's just an airstrip that was only very recently built.
06:07It's about two miles long and about a half a mile wide.
06:12And that Coast Guard cutter, the USS Itasca, is stationed in the vicinity to help guide her into the island.
06:20To find Howland Island, let alone land on it, is going to call on all of her piloting skills
06:28and all of Fred Noonan's navigational skills to make it a success.
06:33But Fred Noonan is up to the challenge.
06:36Noonan is a celebrated navigator.
06:39He had been in charge of mapping all of the Trans-Pacific routes for Pan American Airlines.
06:44There's no GPS then, so he's got to use technology that is comparatively primitive.
06:52He had been a sea captain, and he could use a sextant, which is a centuries-old form of navigation
06:58that doesn't require all of his modern technology to be working in order for them to be successful.
07:04Because he has a sextant, he can use Dead Reckoning, he can use the stars to navigate,
07:10even if all of this modern technology fails.
07:13Noonan's ability to navigate by the stars is a reason he and Earhart fly mostly by night.
07:20If they're going to make this trip, an 18-hour trip, obviously some of it is going to be at night.
07:27And they want to time it so their approach to Holland Island is during full daylight.
07:34One of the safety measures in place was a U.S. Coast Guard ship called the Itasca,
07:40and they had radio communication and also it was capable of shooting up a black plume of smoke
07:46that would show them the way.
07:49Four hours after takeoff, Leigh receives a message from Earhart.
07:54She says height 7,000 feet, speed 140 knots, everything's okay.
07:59Three hours later, total of seven hours into the flight, she reports position 4.33 south, 159.7 east,
08:10height 8,000 feet over cumulus clouds, wind 23 knots.
08:16When the tower gets that message, it's clear that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan are exactly where they're supposed to be.
08:24By 7.18pm, Earhart is out of range of the Leigh Airport and still too far from the USS Itasca at Howland Island.
08:34She isn't heard from again until over two hours later.
08:38They received that transmission on the USS Itasca, but everything still seems to be going according to plan.
08:44But there's starting to be concerns about the amount of fuel because the plane is running into major headwinds,
08:51and that also means a loss of fuel efficiency.
08:54Around 2.45pm, Itasca's radio operator receives a message from Earhart's weather report that it's cloudy and overcast.
09:02This is a great sign. This means that the Itasca can begin to broadcast its own radio signals to guide the plane to Howland Island.
09:10But for an unknown reason, it's clear that while Earhart can communicate with the Itasca, she isn't receiving any of their messages.
09:19So this continues for six hours with the same frustrating results.
09:25She is way behind schedule, and this is, of course, a huge factor when we are considering how much fuel she needs to land.
09:33The Itasca, as planned, sends up its heavy smoke signal, which should be visible within 40 miles in any direction.
09:4020 hours into the flight at 8.43am, the Itasca receives a message from Amelia saying,
09:48We are on the line, 157.337. We will repeat this message. We will repeat this on 62.10 kilocycles.
09:59Weight listening on 62.10 kilocycles. We are running on north-south.
10:05And the sound of her voice is starting to get thin, is starting to get a bit panicked.
10:11At that moment, because she says, I'm going to switch over to this different frequency, I'm switching over, she never does.
10:19We never hear her on 62.10, which suggests that her engine sputtered, went out, flamed out.
10:24And at that point, she's gliding the plane into the water.
10:27This is the last message that Earhart will ever send.
10:32By 9am, all the radio operator on the Itasca can hear is static.
10:39When Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan fail to arrive on Howland Island,
10:44there is just a really dismal realization that the worst may have happened.
10:55The flight's taking considerably longer than expected, at least two hours longer.
11:01By the time she sends her last message, it's likely that the Electra was running on fumes.
11:06It's also been suggested that the fuel tanks were not full.
11:12It was common practice for pilots to take off with less than a full tank,
11:17because weight mattered considerably, especially on long-instant flights.
11:21The Electra can hold 1,150 gallons of fuel, but we have some evidence in the form of a letter from Earhart
11:28where she suggests that she might be able to make the flight on less,
11:31maybe 950 gallons of fuel, which would give her just a little over 20 hours of flying time.
11:37After flying 20 hours and 13 minutes, it would make sense that she would have run out of fuel shortly after
11:44and crashed into the ocean.
11:52If she ditches that plane in the vicinity of Howland Island, someone would have seen it.
11:57But the fact is, there was no report of the plane going down.
12:01There's no debris found on the water. There is no fuel that's bubbled up to the surface.
12:06She just seems to have disappeared.
12:11When Amelia Earhart doesn't arrive on Howland Island on July 2, 1937,
12:16the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard begin searching an area of the Pacific Ocean roughly the size of Texas.
12:23For the public, when they hear that Amelia Earhart has not arrived on Howland Island,
12:29it would be like if one of the biggest stars on the planet at this time suddenly disappeared.
12:36The story of a brave woman of the air enters a shroud of mystery.
12:39She had so many fans around the world who were paying attention to this flight.
12:44And when she doesn't turn up on July 2, people are following the newspapers,
12:49people are listening to the radio for any kind of update.
12:52Where is Amelia Earhart?
12:54The Itasca anchors off a tiny desert island.
12:58The Itasca begins their search for Amelia Earhart within an hour of losing contact with her.
13:04They had established communication with her and they had the best idea of where to start looking.
13:10The U.S. Navy deploys 62 planes from the aircraft carrier USS Lexington,
13:15which sails from Hawaii, 1,700 nautical miles from Howland Island.
13:20And that's just the beginning.
13:23You've got an aircraft carrier, several Coast Guard ships, the USS Colorado.
13:29Other vessels end up joining in the search, as many as 4,000 sailors engaged in this effort,
13:35at a cost of maybe $4 million, which would be equivalent to about $75 million today.
13:42On July 19th, after 17 days of searching an area that was 150,000 square miles, the search is called off.
13:55Given the resources devoted to the search, given that they are using every technology available,
14:00it may seem surprising that they were not able to locate any wreckage.
14:04Many people believe that even though it would be difficult and it may take a lot of time,
14:09we should have been able to find some trace of either her or her plane and none was ever found.
14:15Maybe there's a reason why there was no evidence on the surface of the ocean.
14:20Maybe Earhart and Noonan make it to land.
14:30Theorists point out that there's still no proof that she crashed into the Pacific Ocean.
14:35She is well-known, well-trained, highly acclaimed pilot with a very experienced navigator.
14:42Some theorists suggest that once they realized they couldn't find Howland Island,
14:48they had in fact changed their destination to a different island nearby.
14:53The closest island to Howland is Baker Island, just 40 miles away.
14:58Baker Island was looked at from the air, but no one saw anything as big as the Electra.
15:04It was just sand and trees.
15:06The next most logical island nearby, where she may have gone,
15:11is 400 miles away, and it's called Gardner Island.
15:16To call it an island is almost a stretch.
15:19It's tiny, it's four and a half miles, it's sandbars, it's palm trees, and totally uninhabited.
15:26Gardner is a sandbar, literally an oval-shaped sandbar with some water in between it,
15:32and there is no place to land.
15:34Amelia was a very experienced pilot, and she was very familiar with this particular aircraft,
15:39the Electra Tanny.
15:41Even out of fuel, she will be able to glide it and make a soft landing,
15:46either on the sandbar or land it on the water and then hop out with Mr. Noonan.
15:52Navy planes do search Gardner Island from the air.
15:56Now they report what they call signs of recent habitation, but no aircraft, no signs of life.
16:04The planes fly over the island in pairs, they don't see SOS written in the sand, no smoke,
16:09no fresh human activity that would suggest somebody was in distress.
16:13And so they conclude that this isn't a viable location for Earhart to have ended up.
16:19But three years later, in 1940, a new discovery suggests those planes may have overlooked something.
16:26British Colonial Officer Gerald Gallagher is leading an expedition on the island,
16:31scouting it for possible settlement, when he finds a terrifying thing.
16:36A human skull.
16:38Continued search of the island turns up other things.
16:41Bone fragments, a portion of a woman's shoe, they find a bottle of herbal alcohol,
16:47and they find a box, empty, but made to contain a U.S. Navy sextant.
16:55We know that Noonan flies with a sextant.
16:58So this has Gallagher thinking that he stumbled upon Amelia Earhart's human remains.
17:06The bones that are discovered on Gardner Island are then sent to an expert on Fiji,
17:11Dr. D.W. Hoodless, who examines the skull, the tibula,
17:17and the other small bone fragments that were discovered.
17:20He determines that the bone fragments were from a male, short, maybe about 5'5",
17:25and quite stocky, middle-aged, 45 to 55.
17:29Earhart was in her late 30s, she was petite and slim,
17:33and Noonan was also a very slim man.
17:35So neither of them matched the profile of a short, stocky, middle-aged man.
17:42In any event, this is regarded as conclusive,
17:45that this could not have been the remains of either Noonan or Earhart.
17:50That opens up the question, where else could she be?
17:52Did she crash? Did she make an emergency landing?
17:55Where did she go?
17:57These questions remain unanswered for decades.
18:00Then, in 1960, a radio journalist forwards a shocking theory.
18:08For decades after Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan,
18:13vanish in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,
18:15speculation swirls that there's more to the story.
18:19How does a celebrated pilot just disappear?
18:22And there's no evidence of her plane?
18:25Did she just get swallowed up by the Pacific Ocean,
18:27or is there another explanation?
18:30As is often the case when a celebrity disappears without a trace,
18:36speculation abounds that maybe the official explanation is not a truthful one.
18:43This is certainly the case with Amelia Earhart.
18:46The question of where she has ended up
18:49fascinates a CBS radio newsman named Fred Goerner.
18:55He spends years investigating this.
18:57He looks through any document he could get his hands on.
19:00And in 1966, Goerner comes out with a book called
19:04The Search for Amelia Earhart,
19:06in which he advances a really interesting theory.
19:10According to Goerner, in 1937, Amelia Earhart had never truly intended
19:16to land on Howland Island,
19:18and that she was part of a secret government mission
19:22to actually spy on the Japanese in the lead-up to World War II.
19:32The Chinese forces tried desperately to stem the surging tide of the invasion.
19:36Japan had been at war with China since 1931 when they invaded Manchuria,
19:41and in 1937, they're poised to invade mainland China.
19:44Japan has colonies in the Marshall Islands and the Marianas Islands.
19:50There are reports that the Japanese are fortifying these islands
19:54with the expectation that they're going to face the U.S. Navy at some point.
19:59Of course, any kind of surveillance of Japanese military activity
20:02would be incredibly valuable to the U.S. government.
20:04And how better to acquire that surveillance material than from the air?
20:09But you can't just fly a plane into Japanese airspace
20:13and expect it not to get shot down.
20:15Garner claims to have interviewed dozens of World War II veterans
20:19as well as high-ranking officials in the U.S. military
20:23and people in the Pacific Islands.
20:25And he comes to the conclusion that Earhart's final flight
20:29was in fact covertly designed by the U.S. military, an elaborate ruse.
20:35So what was really surveillance activity was disguised
20:38as a celebrity record-breaking world-circling flight.
20:43The theory goes that Amelia Earhart was instructed to land her plane
20:48as far away from Howland Island as possible.
20:51This would then trigger the massive search that was conducted after she went missing.
20:57The idea being that the Navy isn't really searching the South Pacific for Amelia Earhart.
21:03What they're doing is trying to survey Japanese military activity.
21:08If that theory is true, it's brilliant.
21:11You could never get that close to Japanese territory in secret.
21:15But if you're searching for Amelia Earhart, you can basically spy out in the public.
21:20For those who believe that Amelia Earhart is actually a spy,
21:25it's the only way you could explain why Franklin Roosevelt was willing to commit
21:31such a massive amount of resources, both money and manpower,
21:34to finding a single aviator who was missing in the Pacific.
21:39Proponents of the spy theory also point to a number of strange details
21:44that suggest Earhart may have deliberately avoided detection.
21:49The Electra was equipped with the latest in radio technology.
21:53It had all of the most modern and up-to-date two-way communication devices.
21:59She was also scheduled to make a radio contact every hour.
22:04But in her 20-hour flight, she only does that seven times.
22:08Why would somebody who was supposed to check in every hour
22:13only check in after four hours and then another three hours?
22:17Maybe she was up to something else, goes the theory.
22:20Remember when Amelia Earhart was having that communication issue with Itasca
22:25where they could hear her, but she couldn't hear them?
22:29Was that a glitch or was she purposely being evasive?
22:34Five hours into her final flight,
22:37Earhart reports her position as 150.7 East and 7.3 South.
22:43Which doesn't make sense because that's only about 200 miles away
22:47and by this point she should be over 400 miles away.
22:52So for those inclined to believe this theory, this is a key piece of evidence.
22:56False location reports that make it harder for her to be tracked
23:00for some people could only mean one thing, spy mission.
23:04According to the theory, they lay low for a while and then once the search ends,
23:11they are quietly relocated and given new identities.
23:14Earhart and probably Noonan as well lived out the rest of their lives as somebody else.
23:20There are other theories that hold that yes, Earhart did survive past her purported death
23:27in July of 1937, but under very different circumstances.
23:32Circumstances that would prevent her from communicating at all with the outside world.
23:37In January of 1939, 18 months after Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific Ocean,
23:43she is officially declared dead, but still the search for answers goes on.
23:48By now most people believe the official story,
23:51that the aviator fell victim to navigational issues, crashed and sank.
23:56But there is yet another credible theory,
23:59that Amelia Earhart ended up a thousand miles from where she was supposed to land,
24:04only to end up a prisoner.
24:07While he's writing his book, Fred Gerner speaks with a Navy veteran
24:11who had been stationed on the Marshall Islands during World War II.
24:14The Navy veteran named John Mayhem claims that he had spoken to two Marshall Island natives
24:21who had been told by two U.S. military officials that they had seen Japanese soldiers transporting two captured U.S. aviators.
24:34One man, one woman.
24:36Warner also tells another story about another Marshall Island native
24:40who told two U.S. Navy officers that a Japanese friend had told him about a white lady pilot
24:47who had crashed near the Jaluit Atoll, was taken prisoner.
24:51He claims that a Japanese boat picked her up and took her away,
24:55maybe to Kwajalein, maybe to Saipan.
24:58Amelia Earhart is not only the most celebrated woman pilot,
25:08but she is one of very few female pilots.
25:12To see a white woman aviator in the Marshall Islands, completely unheard of.
25:18How else to account for this story?
25:20For a white woman to have been shot down or captured by the Japanese in the Marshall Islands in 1937
25:26requires a lot of people to be making stories up.
25:28So there is an element to the story that forces you to ask,
25:32was there in fact a woman flying in the Marshall Islands?
25:35And if there was, who was it?
25:38Even some U.S. government officials find the story convincing.
25:42Admiral Chester Nimitz, who was overall naval commander in the Pacific,
25:47is interviewed by Goerner in 1965.
25:51Goerner quotes Nimitz as saying,
25:53I want to tell you Earhart and her navigator did go down in the Marshalls
25:57and were picked up by the Japanese.
25:59For the Admiral of the Pacific Fleet to make a statement of that magnitude
26:04has suggested to some that the U.S. government knew or had information
26:09about Amelia's disappearance.
26:12And you wouldn't expect an admiral, particularly Admiral Nimitz,
26:15to make a statement like that unless he had some pretty good evidence.
26:18Some say that Amelia died of dysentery while she was in captivity.
26:24Some say that she was executed on the island of Sephan.
26:28Others say that Fred Noonan was also executed after Amelia Earhart died.
26:33But the fact is, we just don't know.
26:35Goerner also talks to a couple of U.S. Army veterans
26:39who had been stationed in the Marianas Islands.
26:42They said that they were shown items that belonged to Earhart
26:46and that they were shown where Earhart and Noonan were buried.
26:51And when Goerner goes to investigate this lead,
26:54he meets with some pretty significant resistance from the U.S. military.
26:59He makes four trips to Saipan to try to figure out what happened to Earhart
27:04and Noonan doesn't really find any conclusive evidence.
27:08Decades later, all of this is just hearsay.
27:11It's myth and legend.
27:13But in 2015, something like a piece of evidence maybe turns up.
27:19At Mili Atoll in the Marshalls,
27:22a native led investigators to a site where he claimed that Earhart went down.
27:28A reef where he claims the plane crashed
27:32and was then salvaged and drug across the beach
27:36and then carried away by the Japanese.
27:38So there is no evidence.
27:40But the investigators decide to search anyway
27:43and they discover a small piece of metal.
27:46A rectangular piece of aluminum was found
27:50that may have been apart from the plane.
27:54It's painted red and it's known that at least part of the Electra was painted red.
28:00And under that red paint, a yellow chromium primer,
28:04which was known to be used in the 1930s and 1940s.
28:09And it looks as though it's the cover plate for an auxiliary power unit
28:15that would have been found on a Lockheed Electra made during this time.
28:19In addition to that, there was a round piece of aluminum
28:23that they conclude is a dust cover for landing gear for a Lockheed Electra.
28:29It is certainly a fascinating discovery,
28:32but there is just no way to know if what they found is an actual piece
28:37to this Amelia Earhart puzzle or if it is just an unrelated artifact.
28:43Rather than speculate on new leads,
28:45some investigators take a deeper dive into old theories.
28:50Experts start to go back and reevaluate and redetermine
28:54if maybe some of our old leads were in fact correct.
28:58Amelia Earhart's final radio message to the USS Itasca
29:04is one of the biggest clues in her unsolved disappearance.
29:07But what if that wasn't actually her last transmission?
29:11Soon after Earhart's disappearance, well before she's pronounced dead,
29:17ham radio operators in the United States begin reporting to have received
29:23transmissions from Amelia Earhart.
29:28Many of these are dismissed as cruel hoaxes,
29:32but there are some which deserve additional scrutiny
29:35because of the details transcribed by the radio operators.
29:40After Earhart's disappearance about 5,000 miles from Howland Island,
29:45a young 16-year-old civilian ham radio operator named Dana Randolph
29:51reports hearing the voice of a woman at about the same time
29:55that Amelia Earhart would have been in distress.
29:58Randolph lives in Rock Springs, Wyoming,
30:01and is listening on a commercial radio set with shortwave bands
30:04connected to a special antenna he's just installed.
30:08At about 8 o'clock in the morning, he hears a female voice saying,
30:13this is Amelia Earhart.
30:15Ship on a reef south of the equator, station KH9QQ.
30:21And then, according to the report, the signal just dies away.
30:25Dana and his father share this information with a local government radio operator.
30:30Now this operator tells them that given the frequency involved,
30:34it is possible for them to have heard a transmission
30:37from halfway around the world.
30:39So this government radio operator takes down the information
30:42and forwards it to Washington, D.C.
30:44But what happens to that information after that is unknown.
30:48There's another message that reaches a 15-year-old girl
30:52in St. Petersburg, Florida.
30:55This girl's name is Betty Clank.
30:57Her and her dad are interested in radio.
30:59Her father has just installed a new antenna,
31:01which enables her to get signals from farther away.
31:04She's listening soon after the disappearance
31:07and scanning through shortwave,
31:09and she gets a message saying, this is Amelia Earhart.
31:12Betty hears the message shortly after news
31:15of Amelia Earhart's disappearance is made public.
31:18She knows Earhart's voice from newsreels
31:21and is certain she is listening to the famous aviator
31:24as her plane fills with water.
31:26For the next couple of hours, Betty listens
31:30to what she describes as a male and a female voice
31:34that are growing increasingly distressed,
31:37continually giving their distress calls
31:40and their location information,
31:41and that both of their voices sound strained and frightened.
31:45Betty starts writing down the messages
31:48and getting as many of the numbers as she can.
31:51What Betty describes is a bad situation
31:56that is quickly getting worse.
31:59Purportedly, this is Noonan and Earhart
32:01talking back and forth in the plane
32:04as it begins to fill with water,
32:05and they try to plot how it is they're going to
32:07not only get out of the wreckage but then survive.
32:10Their father comes home, and he hears the final messages.
32:14He's convinced that this is real,
32:16and so they report to the Coast Guard.
32:18The Coast Guard, though, assures them that the Navy is in the area,
32:22the search is underway. There's nothing to worry about.
32:25How might we explain the fact
32:27that two separate radio operators, amateurs,
32:30were able to receive transmissions purportedly
32:32from Amelia Earhart?
32:33You could say that Betty and Dana heard about
32:36Amelia Earhart's disappearance
32:38and decided to jump on the bandwagon
32:40for their 15 minutes of fame,
32:42but Betty and Dana did not know each other,
32:45and they lived thousands of miles apart.
32:47In 2011, Earhart researchers compare
32:51when the radio transmissions were received
32:53by both Betty Klink and Dana Randolph.
32:56They began to detect what they say is a pattern,
33:00that these transmissions were happening
33:02at certain times of the day,
33:05at low tide on Gardner Island.
33:07Low tide would only happen at night or early morning,
33:10and that just happens to be when these purported transmissions
33:13from Earhart were received back in the States.
33:16In order to use the radio, the plane's engine needs to be on.
33:25But in order for the plane's engine to be on,
33:28it could not be even partially submerged in water.
33:31If the Lockheed was stuck on a sandbar or an atoll,
33:37only when the water had receded
33:40would they have been able to start up the engine,
33:43thus allowing them to transmit that message.
33:46So that means that they could only turn the plane on at low tide.
33:50Many researchers believe
33:52Earhart was navigating toward Gardner Island when she vanished.
33:56Earhart's final documented message by the radio is,
34:01K-H-A-Q-Q to Itasca.
34:04We are on the line, 157-337.
34:07So this is a navigational indicator
34:10that the plane is flying on a northwest to southeast route.
34:13And it cuts right through Howland Island.
34:16But if they can't find Howland Island,
34:19are they northwest of it or they're southeast of it?
34:22Northwest, there's nothing but open ocean.
34:24But southeast, Baker and Gardner Islands are not too far away.
34:30If she ended up on Baker Island,
34:32search crews would have found her pretty easily
34:34because it's so close.
34:36So that leaves us once again looking at Gardner Island.
34:39Three months after Earhart's disappearance,
34:42a British official who scoped out Gardner Island
34:45to see its suitability for a colony finds evidence
34:49that somebody had been camping there overnight.
34:53Did it ever cross his mind that it may have been Earhart and Noonan?
34:56Maybe not because that report simply got shelved.
35:00In 2018, the issue of the bones found on Gardner Island
35:06comes back up again.
35:08Now, the bones themselves are long gone at this point,
35:11but an anthropologist at the University of Tennessee
35:15uses software entering all the measurements and information
35:20that had been taken down years earlier
35:23and finds that the original investigator was wrong,
35:28that this well could have been a human female skeleton,
35:33and that it is more like Amelia Earhart
35:37than 99% of bones could have been.
35:41Unfortunately, the bones were discarded as medical waste.
35:44So we'll never know because those bones were thrown away.
35:48Without those original bones to analyze,
35:51it's just too inconclusive.
35:53However, new evidence has developed
35:56that leads us in a completely different direction.
35:59It's been more than 80 years since Amelia Earhart disappeared,
36:04and the search for her lost plane is heating up once more,
36:07thanks to a private expedition.
36:10Tony Romeo is the founder and CEO
36:13of Deep Sea Visions, an underwater exploration company
36:17that's based in the United States.
36:19In the fall of 2023, using his own new state-of-the-art technology,
36:25he begins to scour the seafloor in the vicinity
36:28of where Earhart is purported to have gone down.
36:31We said to ourselves, it's been 86 years since Amelia's disappeared.
36:34We have a really good trail of evidence as to where she went down.
36:38The technology is available today to do a deep-water search.
36:42Why not take a shot at this?
36:44We mobilized out of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea,
36:47not too far from where she took off from.
36:49We intended to cover about 5,000 square miles.
36:51We did that in about 100 days of searching,
36:54and we scanned an area around Howland Island
36:57about the size of Connecticut.
36:59Tony Romeo conducts this search of the area
37:02using an autonomous vehicle that travels 18,000 feet below the surface,
37:08about 160 feet from the ocean floor,
37:12taking sonar images as it goes.
37:15It shoots out these powerful pulses of sound,
37:18and it goes back and forth looking off to the side about a mile,
37:21so you've got about a mile swath as it does each turn,
37:24and it looks at the reflection when it comes back to the sonar system
37:29and it paints an image of what it's looking at.
37:32When Romeo and his team head home in December 2023,
37:36they review the sonar data received by their underwater drone
37:40and find a startling image.
37:43They find something at a depth of 16,000 feet,
37:47about 100 miles off the coast of Howland Island,
37:50an image that looks a whole lot like a small, twin-engined aircraft.
37:57And it was just incredible, and I remember sitting down
38:00and thinking, this is it.
38:01This is the first time our plane's been seen in 80-some years.
38:04The measurements of the Lockheed Electra, that's not secret information.
38:15He compares what this image is to the size of that plane
38:20and the vertical stabilizers that he sees on it,
38:23and they're pretty much a match.
38:25Could this be some other twin-engine plane?
38:28Well, there are no reports of a crash of a plane of that design anywhere close to there.
38:35For that reason, he becomes convinced that it's actually the plane.
38:38But Romeo and his team aren't celebrating just yet.
38:43There was some stuff that we were skeptical about.
38:46It is blurrier than we would like.
38:49It was taken at quite some distance from the sonar,
38:52so the resolution isn't as good as what we would have hoped.
38:55But we suspect very strongly that it's a plane.
38:58The other really strong possibility is that it's just a natural formation
39:02that's a cruel trick of nature that looks just like a plane.
39:05Ten months later, in October 2024, Romeo and his crew return to the site
39:11and send their submersible down again.
39:14And this time, the pictures they take are much clearer.
39:18Hopes that Amelia Earhart's long-lost plane had been found were dashed this week.
39:24Researchers scanning the Pacific Ocean for the wreckage
39:27thought they had found it last year, but upon further inspection,
39:31it's just a natural rock formation shaped like a plane.
39:35It was obviously a real disappointment, no question about that.
39:39We really thought we had a very promising target,
39:42but we didn't go with the champagne bottle open.
39:45Despite the disappointing setback, the researchers vowed to search on.
39:49The group says they've covered nearly 7,700 square miles so far
39:54in their efforts to find the ill-fated plane.
39:57It's a really small target, right?
39:59I mean, and it's a really big ocean.
40:01But with the ability of deep-sea sonar systems to scan the seafloor,
40:05it's just a matter of time till all the major mysteries of the ocean are solved,
40:10including finding Amelia's plane.
40:12Why are we so interested in what happened to a woman who disappeared 80 years ago?
40:18Well, she was a superstar.
40:20She was somebody who was known by everyone,
40:23and there were a lot of people cheering for her to finish this round-the-world voyage.
40:29To suddenly find such a huge source of inspiration to have vanished,
40:34the question of what happened to her will be a question that we will never, ever be satisfied not knowing.
40:40Romeo plans to return to the site sometime in the near future.
40:48Until then, the fate of history's most famous female pilot
40:52will remain the unfinished final chapter of her legendary career.
40:57I'm Lawrence Fishburne.
40:59Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.
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