00:00Few mysteries have captivated the world more than the disappearance of Amelia Earhart in 1937,
00:06the aviator whose star shone as bright in her day as it has through history.
00:10As the first woman to traverse the Atlantic on a solo flight,
00:14and the first pilot of any gender to fly between the continental U.S. and Hawaii,
00:19Earhart represented the seemingly infinite potential felt at the dawn of aviation.
00:24Her ambitions knew no bounds,
00:25eventually leading her to attempt one of the boldest endeavors in human history.
00:30On June 1st, 1937, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan embarked on a flight around the world,
00:36which would have made Earhart the first woman to circumnavigate the Earth by plane.
00:41Their chosen route, beginning and ending in Oakland, California, was set to cover 29,000 miles,
00:47and its tragic end has come to overshadow the fact that they made it over three-quarters of the way.
00:52However, on July 2nd, while attempting a two-600-mile leg of the journey
00:57between New Guinea and a refueling point on tiny Howland Island, the plane disappeared.
01:03Neither Earhart nor Noonan have been heard from since that day.
01:06The U.S. Navy conducted a two-week search for their plane to no avail,
01:11and two years later, both were declared legally dead.
01:15This unsolved mystery has only grown stranger in years since,
01:18as countless explanations have been offered for the death or potential survival of Earhart.
01:24Here are the best-known theories, including a new discovery that could change everything.
01:29Many theories have suggested that Amelia Earhart was unable to locate Howland Island from the air,
01:34and was thus forced to land elsewhere.
01:36The island is a small coral atoll barely half a mile in land area,
01:41and aircraft of that era, including Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10E, did not yet have radar.
01:47The U.S. Coast Guard stationed a patrol boat at Howland Island to help guide her via radio.
01:53But in her final transmissions to the ship, Earhart mentioned that she was running low on gas
01:58and could not catch sight of her destination.
02:01If Earhart did indeed give up on finding Howland Island and made an emergency landing elsewhere,
02:07the most likely point would be Nicomararo, formerly known as Gardner Island,
02:11an uninhabited atoll 350 nautical miles from the intended destination.
02:17In 1940, British colonists on Nicomararo found 13 human bones,
02:22which they suspected to be the remains of the lost aviators.
02:26The bones were sent to Fiji to be studied, but were subsequently lost.
02:31However, measurements indicated that the bones belong to a person of a similar build to Earhart.
02:37The main problem with the Nicomararo-Castaway theory is that no definitive evidence of Earhart's Lockheed Electra has been found
02:44in the area.
02:45Robert Ballard, famed for discovering the wreck of the Titanic,
02:48even directed an undersea search around Nicomararo, but to no avail.
02:52Two of the more persistent theories regarding Amelia Earhart's disappearance center on the fraught geopolitical climate of 1937.
02:59This was only four years before the attack on Pearl Harbor,
03:03and tensions between the U.S. and Japan were already at a dangerous point.
03:07Japan was rapidly taking control of the South Pacific.
03:10In fact, one reason that Earhart was forced to choose Tiny Howland as her pit stop
03:15is the fact that Japan had banned Americans from the surrounding islands.
03:19Given the intensity of the situation, some have come to believe that Earhart's flight had an ulterior motive,
03:25spying on the Japanese territories.
03:27The secret spy theory proposes that U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted intel on the Japanese military's movements
03:35through the South Pacific, hoping to expose their activities to the world before a full-scale war could break out.
03:41To achieve this end, Earhart and Fred Noonan were instructed to fly over Japanese-controlled islands
03:48and take photographs from above.
03:50It's been suggested that the Japanese shot down Earhart's plane,
03:54either resulting in the aviators' deaths or their capture and imprisonment by Japanese forces.
04:00The idea that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were captured by the Japanese military
04:04has been one of the most prominent and consistent theories regarding their disappearance.
04:09Some believe in the aforementioned spy theory,
04:11but others propose that Earhart was simply forced to make an emergency landing
04:15on one of the Japanese-controlled Marshall Islands,
04:18where she and Noonan were subsequently taken into custody.
04:22One of the main pieces of evidence fueling this theory is a photograph taken on the Marshall Islands
04:27that shows a white woman with short hair similar to Earhart's.
04:31However, the woman's back is to the camera, making the resemblance shallow.
04:34This supposed evidence has since been debunked,
04:37as the photograph was found in Japanese archives dated two years prior to Earhart's disappearance.
04:43One version of this theory suggests that Earhart was forced to broadcast propaganda for the Japanese.
04:49During WWI, Japan used English-speaking women to broadcast anti-American messages by radio.
04:55The women were known only as Tokyo Rose, and the theory claims that Earhart was one of them.
05:00However, Earhart's husband, George Putnam, personally reviewed hours of the Tokyo Rose recordings
05:06and did not find any that resembled his wife's voice.
05:10Perhaps the most outlandish of all the theories surrounding Amelia Earhart's disappearance
05:14is the idea that she survived her journey and returned to the U.S.,
05:18where she lived out the rest of her life under an assumed identity.
05:22This theory first appeared in a 1970 book titled Amelia Earhart Lives by Joe Kloss.
05:27The author partnered with a former Air Force major named Joseph Gervais,
05:31who had spent a decade trying to prove that Earhart had been captured by the Japanese,
05:36returned to the U.S. after the war, and started a new life in New Jersey.
05:41Kloss and Gervais pointed the finger at Irene Cragmile Bolum,
05:44a banker whom they claimed was really Earhart under a new name.
05:48Gervais claimed that he had met Bolum at a party for an aviators organization
05:52and that she told him she was a member of the 99s,
05:56a women's aviation group famously founded by Earhart herself.
06:00However, Gervais was unable to locate Bolum in the group's registry.
06:04He noted that she bore a strong resemblance to Earhart,
06:07but beyond that, there was little evidence.
06:09Bolum sued the book's publisher for libel and settled after court.
06:13But in a mysterious turn, when Bolum died in 1982,
06:17she instructed that her body should not be fingerprinted,
06:21and her death certificate lists no parents.
06:23The final, and sadly most probable, theory surmises that Earhart and Noonan
06:28did not survive their attempted flight,
06:30and that their plane crashed in the South Pacific,
06:33somewhere between New Guinea and Howland Island.
06:36Numerous expeditions have searched the ocean floor for the wreckage of her plane,
06:40with a recent development coming in January of 2024.
06:43A group of marine archaeologists and robotics experts
06:46from the American oceanic exploration company Deep Sea Vision
06:49announced the potential discovery of Earhart's plane
06:52with the aid of sonar systems,
06:54which send sound waves into the water
06:56and identify objects in the ocean
06:58based on how the waves are reflected back.
07:01Deep Sea Visions collected sonar images
07:03from 100 miles off the coast of Howland Island
07:06that appeared to show the outline of
07:08a plane matching the dimensions of a Lockheed Electra.
07:12The site was 16,000 feet below the surface of the ocean.
07:15That's over 3,000 feet deeper than the wreck of the Titanic,
07:19making efforts to verify the discovery extremely challenging.
07:23After nearly a year of searching,
07:25Deep Sea Visions announced on Instagram
07:26that the object they discovered
07:28was actually a deceptively shaped rock formation,
07:32shattering the hopes of millions.
07:34With every search,
07:35the suspected area of Earhart's disappearance
07:37seems to have less and less potential,
07:39but as long as the aviator's fate remains a mystery,
07:42the effort to find her will persist.
07:44Has the U.S. government been hiding Earhart's secrets?
07:47Throughout the decades,
07:49since Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan
07:51vanished over the Pacific Ocean,
07:53numerous conspiracy theorists have suggested
07:55that the United States government
07:56may have had a hand in the matter,
07:58or at the very least,
08:00in covering up the results of the search effort.
08:02These theories are typically interwoven
08:04with the previously mentioned theories
08:06that Earhart and Noonan were spies
08:08or were imprisoned by the Japanese government.
08:11Documents related to the search for Earhart
08:13were declassified and released
08:15by both the FBI and the National Archives.
08:18But one powerful voice believes there is more to be seen.
08:21On September 26, 2025,
08:23President Donald Trump called for full transparency
08:26on the Earhart search in a post on Truth Social.
08:29While these are not the files
08:31many have been hoping for him to release,
08:33they certainly have garnered attention
08:34due to Earhart's mythical status.
08:36According to Trump,
08:38I am ordering my administration
08:39to declassify and release
08:41all government records related to Amelia Earhart,
08:44her final trip,
08:45and everything else about her.
08:47However, it's not exactly clear
08:48what records he is referring to.
08:50After the previous releases by the FBI
08:52and National Archives,
08:54aviation scholar Rick Gillespie
08:56told the Associated Press,
08:57there's nothing still classified
08:59by the U.S. government on Amelia Earhart.
09:01It appears he may be right,
09:03as, despite Trump's assurance,
09:05no further information about the aviator's disappearance
09:08has come to light since his post.
