187. Amelia Earhart Survived: The Theories Behind The Crash and Newly Discovered Evidence

On the morning of July 2nd, 1937, Amelia Earhart lifted off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, and flew into the most famous disappearance of the 20th century. The official story says she crashed into the Pacific and sank. And yet, evidence now shows the distress calls kept coming for days, the castaway campsite was discovered on a remote atoll, and a strange shape was spotted on Apple Maps in 2020. Now, with an expedition setting out to finally identify the object buried off Nikumaroro, the mystery of what really happened to Amelia may be about to break wide open. Subscribe on⁠ Patreon⁠ https://www.patreon.com/heartstartspounding to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society and enjoy ad-free listening, monthly bonus content, merch discounts and more. Members of our High Council on Patreon also have access to our weekly after-show, Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt. You can also enjoy many of these same perks, including ad-free listening and bonus content when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow on⁠ Tik Tok⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@heartstartspounding?lang=en and⁠ Instagram⁠ https://www.instagram.com/heartstartspounding/ for a daily dose of horror.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Kaelyn Moore?

  Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your host, Kayla Moore. Today, I want to tell you a story that you maybe have heard a little bit about, but I'm betting you haven't heard the whole thing. In 2020, a man was at home scrolling through satellite images on Apple Maps when he saw something just off the coast of a small island in the Pacific. It was something that looked like a plane underwater. He shared it online and immediately, some historians felt like they knew what this was: Amelia Earhart's plane. There is actually an expedition that is set out to go this summer to see once and for all if this object could be Amelia Earhart's plane. And this is potentially going to blow

• 0:43Kaelyn Moore?

  the lid off of this mystery, because other evidence that was found on the very island where they think this plane is, doesn't really paint a picture of her plane crashing and sinking. It paints a picture of someone who survived on the island and waited for help for a very long time. See, there's a lot that we were not told about Amelia Earhart's disappearance. And while the official story from our government was that she crashed and sank it to the ocean, I think we have plenty of evidence to prove not only was that not true, but what really happened to her might have been covered up. And that is what I want to tell you about today. But before we dive in, I do want to mention, we have a really amazing program getting started

• 1:23Kaelyn Moore?

  that I'm very excited about, and that is for teachers in our community. If you are a current US K through 12 teacher, we here at Heart Starts Pounding would love to help you out. You can go to hearts start pounding.com backslash back to school and share your Amazon wishlist, because we want to help you get the supplies that you need for your school year. We're going to take a look at these submissions and choose as many classrooms as we can support. Once again, you can check out hearts start pounding.com back to school. There's a form there to submit all your information and get it over to us. And I'm excited to start supporting some of your classrooms. Okay, that's all I have for now. Let's get into the episode.

• 2:04Kaelyn Moore?

  It's the morning of July 2, 1937, and Amelia Earhart is on the tarmac in Lae, Papua New Guinea, running her final checks. Ahead of her is the hardest flight that she's ever attempted: 20 hours over open ocean to land on an island the size of a postage stamp. It's one of the last legs in her journey around the world. The day before, she and her navigator Fred Noonan had stripped her Lockheed Electra of every spare pound of cargo, because every pound that they shed was more fuel that they could have on this leg, and a single gallon could be the difference between landing or not. But on this day, their radio was acting up. First, it was a short in the wiring, and then a blown fuse. Without it, Amelia would be flying blind. So Amelia queues the mic.

• 2:49Kaelyn Moore?

  K H A Q Q calling tower, check. There's a beat of static, and then Tower to K H A Q Q, we copy you. The radio is working. There's a storm on the horizon, but it's still miles off, and she's almost home. Tell Fred I'm rolling to him, she says. To understand this moment in Amelia's life, you have to go back, because by 1937, Amelia Earhart was the most famous woman in the sky. She'd become a household name a decade earlier as the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air, only as a passenger. And then she spent the years proving that she could do it herself. She was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, the first person of any gender to fly solo from Hawaii to California. She'd befriended

• 3:31Kaelyn Moore?

  Eleanor Roosevelt, who personally leaned on the State Department to help make this trip happen. And now, she was ready for her biggest challenge yet: becoming the first woman to fly around the world. But friends and fellow pilots were wondering if she had gotten a little too swept up in the myth about herself. If the need to keep topping her own records had crowded out plain common sense. She was about to turn 40, and she decided that if she didn't do this trip before her birthday, she never would. Now, this was not going to be an easy trip, to say the least. Even maxed out, the Electra could only fly about 4,000 miles before it ran out of fuel, and that was not enough to cross the Pacific in one shot. So Amelia would have to stop and

• 4:14Kaelyn Moore?

  refuel halfway on this tiny, tiny, tiny island called Howland Island, one square mile of dirt in the middle of the ocean. Finding it would take extremely accurate navigating, which is exactly why Fred Noonan was aboard this flight. He was one of the best open ocean navigators alive, the man who trained Pan Am's entire navigation crew and crossed the Pacific 18 times in a single year. If anyone could find Howland Island, it was going to be Fred Noonan. The trip had gotten off to a rocky start. The first attempt back in March ended on a Honolulu runway when the Electra crashed on takeoff and had to be shipped home for repairs. So Amelia reworked the whole plan, reversing her route to fly with the prevailing winds instead of

• 4:59Kaelyn Moore?

  against them. That would save fuel, but it also meant saving the brutal Pacific crossing for the very end of the trip, when they were going to be tired and just ready to be home in general. Now Amelia trusted Fred with her life. Nobody questioned his skill. But Fred had a reputation as a drinker. He'd actually been let go from Pan Am, and the rumor was that his drinking habit was why. This made Amelia nervous, but there was no backing out at this point. This was one of the most anticipated flights in history. And once they took off, it was going to be in every newspaper around the world. The whole globe was following this journey, and Amelia was wiring dispatches to the paper at every stop. But somewhere past the two-thirds

• 5:42Kaelyn Moore?

  mark of the trip, cracks started showing. From Calcutta, she called her husband George and told him, quote, "I'm starting to have personnel trouble." No one has ever been able to prove exactly what she meant by that, but a lot of people assumed that she was talking about Fred, and that he was drinking again. Then, there were monsoons on the trip, and then one of their navigation instruments went down for a week, and of course, the radio blew a fuse. It was fixed, but it started acting up all over again by the time they reached Lae. From there, she wired George one last cryptic line. It just read, quote, "Radio misunderstanding and

• 6:21Kaelyn Moore?

  personnel unfitness." People have argued for decades over what that meant. Fred, or was Amelia herself simply running on empty? Whatever it was, on the morning of July 2, she settled into the cockpit on the tarmac of Lae, the clouds going gray in the distance, and she told herself the same thing over and over again. The radio works, the storm is miles away, we're almost home. The little silver plane gathered speed, it lifted off, and it started climbing, and the ground crew watched it take off. But they would be the last people to ever see Amelia Earhart alive. 22 hours after takeoff, Amelia still hadn't landed at Howland Island, and now,

• 7:05Kaelyn Moore?

  no one could reach her on the radio. Her last message was sent over an hour ago. She said she reached the, quote, "line of position of the island and was now running north and south, up and down the line, looking for land." So she was, in theory, close. The Itasca, a 250 foot long Coast Guard vessel, was docked off the northeastern side of the tiny island, hoping to make it stand out that much more from air. The engines were churning out this constant plume of black smoke as kind of a makeshift beacon for Amelia to find. But every minute that ticked by solidified the unthinkable. She's not coming. At 9:45 GMT, the Itasca

• 7:47Kaelyn Moore?

  control room makes the call that will go down in history. Amelia Earhart is lost at sea. The bulletin is then broadcast everywhere: all ships, all stations, the Navy, the Coast Guard, commercial radio operators. Amelia's disappearance is now the top headline of basically every newspaper in the world. The US Navy immediately dispatches its fastest ship, the Lexington, from Honolulu to lead the search efforts, but it will still take a week and a half for them to reach Howland. In the meantime, the Itasca mounted its own search effort, but in the thousands of miles of surrounding ocean, I mean, where do you even start? Amelia's last broadcast to the Itasca said that she was on the line of position, meaning that they had traveled far

• 8:32Kaelyn Moore?

  enough east to reach Howland Island, but they just couldn't find it. And that had always been the biggest risk in this plan. So the Itasca set out to search the open water surrounding the island. Amelia's plane was equipped with an inflatable raft that had been stocked with food and water. She also had trained for how to safely perform an emergency water landing. Her empty fuel tanks would help her here, because they'd provide some buoyancy to the plane, giving Amelia and Fred enough time to escape the cockpit and deploy the raft. And yet, the Itasca found nothing: no sign of a crash, no raft. They kept searching into the night using high-powered spotlights until a storm rolled in, turning the water with these

• 9:15Kaelyn Moore?

  big 10-foot waves. And from the transition logs, it's clear that Amelia had been having issues with her radio again. She was supposed to contact the Itasca every half hour, and likewise, they were supposed to send weather updates. But the Itasca had only received 10 transmissions over the course of the flight. Some of them were totally unintelligible, and Amelia only heard one of the weather reports. And this is why that matters. The radio was really important to Fred's navigation. He could determine their direction using the position of the sun and the stars, celestial navigation, but the varying wind speed over the open ocean impacted the distance that they had actually traveled. So when Amelia radioed that they had reached

• 9:58Kaelyn Moore?

  the line of position, without the radio reports, this was actually probably just Fred's best guess based on how long they had been in the air. It's also known as dead reckoning. And of the messages the Itasca did receive, two of them mentioned how cloudy and overcast it was. So who's to say that Fred was even able to see the stars and navigate correctly? In addition, the Itasca should have been able to provide directional bearings on Amelia's plane. Based on where the radio transmissions were coming from, they could double-check that she was on course, but they weren't able to get her bearings. And even if they had, the messages just weren't going through. So knowing all of this, the search party expanded their radius

• 10:40Kaelyn Moore?

  over other small island clusters in the vicinity: the Phoenix Islands, the Gilbert Islands, and the Marshall Islands. In total, a squadron of 62 planes searched 150,000 square miles surrounding Howland, and they came up totally empty-handed. And when no sign of Amelia was found, no wreckage, no life raft, nothing, they could only come to one conclusion. And this has been the official stance for decades. She crashed over the open water, and her plane sank to the bottom of the ocean before she had time to escape. She and Fred were dead, and they would never be found. The end. And this is the theory that's been most widely accepted. Even Amelia's husband eventually believed that this was the case.

• 11:25Kaelyn Moore?

  But this is not the only theory out there. I mean, we know how lost they could have been. Who's to say they were even in the radius that was being searched? And in the last 90 years, we have found plenty of evidence to dispute this explanation. And that's what I want to tell you about today. So the first biggest piece of evidence we have all surrounds this one photograph known as the dock photograph. In 2015, a retired US Treasury agent named Les Kinney is at his house digging through an old box of declassified files copied from the National Archive. It's mostly a collection of reports from naval intelligence about the Marshall Islands, a collection of small islands and reef atolls roughly 800 miles northwest of Howland Island,

• 12:09Kaelyn Moore?

  also famous for military testing and weapons testing during the atomic bomb era. The reports included details and surveillance that were gathered during World War II. But tucked in amongst these papers, Les sees a black and white photo labeled Jaluit Atoll. He had seen it in the box before, he skimmed past it, but for whatever reason, today, he really looks at it. And in the photo, there's a group of people gathered at the end of a dock. And two of the people on the dock look much lighter skinned than the other ones. They actually kind of stick out because of that. One of them is seated, their head is half turned, you can see their profile. And this person has short, kind of wavy hair, but their profile looks very feminine.

• 12:54Kaelyn Moore?

  And he thinks to himself, hey, that kind of looks like Amelia Earhart. Now, the other lighter skinned person in the photo is a man holding on to a pole. It's hard to see his face, but you can see that he has this thick, dark hair, and his hairline has a very defined widow's peak. It looks, at least based on that, just like Fred Noonan. And in addition to this, Kinney identifies the Navy ship in the background as one that was one of two Japanese destroyers in the area the day of Amelia's crash. In the photo, there's something tied up behind the ship, covered by a tarp. And based on its estimated dimensions, Les believes that it's the Electra. But could this be?

• 13:35Kaelyn Moore?

  Could this photo show that Amelia and Fred landed in the Marshall Islands? Now, we know that because of the radio issues. Fred Noonan was navigating by dead reckoning. If he was estimating their distance traveled based on flight time, but he was missing crucial information of wind speeds and radio bearings, maybe they hadn't traveled as far east as he thought. And when they started running north-south, about to run out of gas, desperately searching for Howland Island, they finally spotted an island and they landed, but it wasn't actually Howland. It was one of the Marshall Islands, which, you know, at the time, they were controlled by the Japanese. And as the theory then goes, the two of them were taken into Japanese custody.

• 14:18Kaelyn Moore?

  And what's interesting is this isn't the only piece of evidence that the two had potentially been taken prisoner by the Japanese. In 1960, three men stationed at the Air Force Base in Guam claimed that they had found several witnesses who remembered seeing Amelia and Fred taken prisoner. They released a list of names and their statements. And after it was published in the newspaper, at least one other independent witness came forward. This woman named Josephine Blanco Akiyama. Now, before I tell you what Josephine saw, I need to take a quick geography detour. There's tons of these little islands in the South Pacific, and this theory involves a bunch of them. So we have Howland, the tiny speck that Amelia was aiming for. Then we have the Marshall Islands, which are roughly 800 miles northwest,

• 15:02Kaelyn Moore?

  where Amelia might have landed by accident. And then there's the Northern Mariana Islands, another 1,200 miles northwest of that. The largest of those islands is Saipan, and the Japanese used that island as a military headquarters for all of their operations in the South Pacific during World War II. So if Amelia was captured anywhere in Japanese-controlled waters, the most likely place that she would have been taken was Saipan. Okay, back to Josephine. So she grew up on Saipan. And one day, when she's 11, she's running an errand for her sister, dropping off lunch to her brother-in-law who works at the Japanese naval base. When she gets there, there's a crowd of Japanese soldiers out front, surrounding two white men. There's a lot of commotion, a lot of talking.

• 15:46Kaelyn Moore?

  The white guys don't speak any Japanese. Josephine hangs back, and she's just watching. She doesn't really want to get too involved. But she overhears one of the guards use the word "her." They say, "Where will we put her?" And Josephine realizes that one of the men is actually a woman. Her hair is just cut short, and she's wearing men's pants. What a concept. She's never seen anything like this before, though. It's such a novelty that the picture is burnt in Josephine's memory for the rest of her life. And when she sees these headlines in 1960, she feels compelled to come forward and share this story. And that's when the Japanese capture theory first really took off. Journalist Fred Gornor was so inspired by the Saipanese witness statements

• 16:30Kaelyn Moore?

  that he spent the next six years running down leads. He led four expeditions to the South Pacific in search of clues. And in 1966, he published a book with all of these findings, claiming that beyond a shadow of a doubt, Amelia and Fred were taken prisoner and died in Japanese custody. Here's how Gornor thinks that all of this went down. So Amelia and Fred crash-landed around Millet Atoll, the southernmost part of the Marshall Island chain. They were discovered by a Japanese fishing boat who alerted the Navy. There were two Japanese naval destroyers in the area that day, the Kamoi and the Koshu. Gornor posits that Amelia and Fred were taken onboard one of these ships. And then they and the wreckage of the Electra

• 17:15Kaelyn Moore?

  were transported to the main base on Saipan, where they were imprisoned. That would also explain the photograph. During his multiple expeditions to the area, Gornor interviewed several locals, both on Saipan and the various atolls. Again and again, the people mentioned the white pilots. He found remnants of airplane wreckage in the harbor of Saipan with dimensions that did match the Electra. But this is all circumstantial. Nothing was ever definitive. That is, until Les Kinney pulls that photo out of a box of files in 2015. Now, I remember when this photo was made public, it really does look like it could be her. After all this time, this mystery had been blown wide open, and we finally had some sort of answer.

• 18:00Kaelyn Moore?

  The History Channel even aired a two-hour special featuring interviews with Kinney and other researchers, and many of the Saipan and Marshallis natives that spoke to Fred Gornor back in the 1960s. But in less than 24 hours, the whole theory kind of collapsed. A Japanese blogger posted the original source of the photo. It was from a travel book called "The Lifeline of the Sea: My South Sea Memoir." It was published in Tokyo in 1935, which was two years before Amelia and Fred went missing. So they couldn't possibly be the figures on that dock. The blogger also proved that the ship in the background was the Koshu Maru, not the Koshu, which Les thought it was. It's an entirely different ship, and it wouldn't have been there at the time of Amelia's crash.

• 18:45Kaelyn Moore?

  But just because this photo is not of Amelia and Fred doesn't mean that this entire theory falls apart. There are still locals who remember seeing Amelia on Millet, on Jaluit, and on Saipan. Can we really ignore these multiple accounts? I mean, just because the photo is debunked, do we have to throw away the entire theory? Because if we go back through the story of Amelia Earhart even further, there's a lot that happened in this story that was not reported on at the time. And it paints a very different picture from what the official report said.

• 19:26Kaelyn Moore?

  Now, remember I said that in his final report, after the search for Amelia and Fred ended, the commanding officer of the Itasca concluded that the Electra must have crashed over the open water and sank. He wrote that, quote, "All available land areas were searched. Therefore, Earhart's plane was not on land." In addition, he said, quote, "It was extremely doubtful that Earhart ever sent distress signals after 8:46 on July 2nd." Well, no offense to that officer, but that's not even close to being true. In the first five days after her disappearance, there were actually over 100 radio signals that were sent. Some were only harmonic warbles, some were Morse code dashes,

• 20:12Kaelyn Moore?

  but they were messages all the same. And they lay out maybe the most convincing argument that Amelia and Fred did survive the crash, but just weren't rescued in time. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGER as they're known, is a nonprofit research group founded by Richard Gillespie in 1985. They have spent decades researching the Amelia mystery and compiled a thorough accounting of all of the messages that were heard in the immediate aftermath of the crash. These were taken from the radio logs of the Itasca, other ships that were in the area, nearby naval bases, commercial radio operators, and also amateurs. TIGER believes that 57 of the radio transmissions

• 20:55Kaelyn Moore?

  can be qualified as credible beyond a reasonable doubt. So for example, at 7:00 PM local time on July 2, the radio operator on the Itasca hears something on the line. It's a woman's voice, and it sounds like Amelia. He asks her to send long dashes in response, and all he gets is silence. The Itasca doesn't hear anything in reply. But two other ships, the HMS Achilles and the New Zealand Star, log in their reports that they heard a series of long dashes at the same time. An hour and a half later, the Coast Guard station in Hawaii hears another series of dashes. A similar scenario plays out again the next night.

• 21:39Kaelyn Moore?

  The commercial radio station in Hawaii, KGMB, makes a broadcast asking Amelia to send dashes on radio frequency 3105. And this is important because only registered American aircraft are allowed to send voice signals on this frequency. So they really felt like anything coming through on 3105 had to be from Amelia. The KGMB broadcast goes out at 11:00 PM on July 3, and over the next 30 minutes, the Hawaii Coast Guard, a Pan Am operator, and a Navy ship all hear dashes on 3105, as well as someone trying to speak over the radio, but the transmission just isn't coming through. And there's more examples of these near misses in the TIGER report,

• 22:22Kaelyn Moore?

  but you get the picture with these ones that I just showed you. The idea that Amelia never responded after her last broadcast is probably not true. So why were these messages written off by the search party as potentially being hoaxes? Well, one theory is because it made them look really dumb. They just launched the most expensive rescue operation in history, and they came up empty-handed. If Amelia and Fred were really out there and the search party overlooked them, that would be a massive scandal. But according to TIGER research, that actually might be what happened. Now, let's back up for a second to Amelia's last officially confirmed message. "We are on the line of position. We are now running north and south."

• 23:07Kaelyn Moore?

  400 miles south of Howland Island is another little chain of coral reef atolls, the Phoenix Islands. And this has been suggested as a more plausible crash landing site than the Marshall Islands. Instead of dramatically changing course, turning back west, if Amelia and Fred were running north and south, it's much more believable that they could have come across these islands almost directly to the south. There's this one island in particular. And back then, it was called Gardner Island, but today it's called Nikumuroro. It's slightly bigger than Howland, about five miles long by two miles wide. And there's an old freighter shipwrecked on the northwest side of the island, the SS Norwich City. But this island is kind of a funny shape.

• 23:52Kaelyn Moore?

  It's like a backwards J, and it has this huge lagoon in the middle. At low tide, there's this long coral reef bed that presumably would have been long enough for Amelia to land on. It's kind of like a landing strip in that way. And that is what TIGER thinks happened. When they looked at the radio logs, all compiled together, they noticed a clear pattern to when Amelia was sending transmissions. They were always clustered around low tide. And there might have been a reason for that. So the Electra's radio ran off of battery power, and to avoid draining the battery completely, Amelia could have waited until low tide so that she could run the engine and turn the propeller, which would have charged the battery. And that would have meant that she'd most likely

• 24:35Kaelyn Moore?

  be sending messages during low tide while she had a charge. And we haven't even gotten to the most compelling radio messages in these logs. All of the official channels reported dashes and warbles. But several amateur radioheads were on airwaves after Amelia went down, and their accounts are beyond compelling. So at 9:00 at night on July 2, Mabel Laramore heard an SOS call on her radio in Amoryo, Texas. The voice identified herself as Amelia Earhart, and she claimed that her plane was down on an uncharted island, partially submerged in water. She also said that her navigator was seriously injured and needed help. And then, at 8:00 AM the next morning, Nina Paxton in Ashland, Kentucky,

• 25:20Kaelyn Moore?

  hears another distress call. Amelia gave her call sign, KHQQ, and said that she was down in the ocean on a little island. And she said, quote, "We can't stay here long." Now, there's a handful of other amateur operators who say they all heard Amelia on the line over the next few days. And they all report the same thing, all independent of one another. The person was down on an island, needed help. This is 1937. Yes, the newspaper is publishing updates on the search. But even still, it's hard to not consider the validity of so many people reporting the same details hundreds of miles away from each other before the newspapers were even really reporting on these facts. And then there's Betty Clank. She's 15 years old.

• 26:04Kaelyn Moore?

  She lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. And on July 5, she was scanning through her father's shortwave radio. He's rigged up this huge antenna in the backyard, and she can pick up stations all over the world. It's this really cool setup for the time. That afternoon, she hears two voices come through. And she could tell it's a man and a woman. It's hard to hear everything they're saying, but she can tell that the man is clearly upset and the woman is trying to calm him down. Then, the woman identifies herself. This is Amelia Earhart. The scattered transmissions continue for almost two hours. And while she's listening, Betty's taking notes. She writes down everything that she's overhearing. The messages come in bursts, so Betty has to piece together what's happening. But even at 15 years old,

• 26:47Kaelyn Moore?

  she can tell that something is very wrong. Amelia is pleading for help, and Fred is suffering from a head injury. She hears Fred asking for Marie. It's a woman's name. It's at least something that sounds like Marie. Now, she might have misheard Mary, which was Fred's wife's name. And both of them kept saying New York, which some people have theorized that she misheard them saying Norwich, which was the name of the boat that was shipwrecked off of the island. As the transmission continues, both Amelia and Fred grow more desperate, pleading for rescue, saying that the water is rising. Fred starts panicking, and he yells that he has to get out. And Amelia keeps transmitting for a few more minutes, and then the line is silent.

• 27:32Kaelyn Moore?

  But why were amateur radioheads able to pick up Amelia's transmissions when the official channels never got more than dashes or warbles? I mean, that is a fair question, and I really can't say. But even if you take the civilian accounts out of it, there are more than enough examples in official logs, in government official logs, of Amelia trying to communicate after she went missing. And of those confirmed messages, the ones that they really, truly believe Amelia sent, radio operators were able to take direction bearings on seven of them. And five of those messages crossed over Nikumuroro.

• 28:14Kaelyn Moore?

  So let's keep going. And at least for now, let's accept the hypothesis that Amelia and Fred landed on Nikumuroro the morning of July 2. So why didn't anyone find them, even with that massive search that happened? Well, even though it was the largest and most expensive manhunt that ever happened at the time, it did take time for all of those planes and ships to reach the area. So no one actually looked on Nikumuroro until Friday, July 9. That was a week after the crash. It also wasn't a ground search. It was just a flyover pass that they did. And even with that, they did notice something strange about the island. So the search report noted that the pilot saw clear signs of, quote, "recent habitation", but, quote, "repeated circling and zooming,

• 28:59Kaelyn Moore?

  failed to elicit any answering wave from possible inhabitants, and it was finally taken for granted that none were there." So the pilot moved on. And if Betty Clank's account can be believed, it may have been that they were just too late. Luckily for us, plenty of people have visited Nikumururo over the last 90 years. And boots on the ground, they have made some really radical discoveries there. So shortly after Amelia disappeared, the British government decided to claim and colonize Nikumururo, classic. Similar to the US claiming Howland, they thought that it could be a strategic waypoint in the South Pacific for the war. It takes some time for them to really get going on the island. There's no fresh water

• 29:40Kaelyn Moore?

  there, so they have to set up wells. But after a few years, there's a group of settlers that are making their way. And in 1940, they find something on the southeast end of the island, a human skull. When the British administrator for the island hears about this, he launches a more thorough search of the area, and he finds more bones, as well as various artifacts. So Tiger catalogued all these. And they say that there was evidence of four campfires that had been built and rebuilt in the same clearing on the island. It's like whoever lit them was determined to keep a flame going for as long as they possibly could. And around the ashes of the fire were bones of fish, birds, turtles,

• 30:22Kaelyn Moore?

  and clams. So it was someone who had been eating whatever they could get their hands on. And you can kind of tell this because the fish were a random jumble of reef species, like the kind you would catch and end up with if you didn't know how to fish in the waters. And the heads had been cut off and thrown aside. And no one who grew up around these islands would ever throw away the heads of a fish. It's the best part. And the giant clams all kind of told the same story. They were cracked open the wrong way, not done in the way that the people of these islands had been doing for generations. So whoever ate here seemed to not be from close by. And whoever was there was improvising right down to the last detail. There were two glass bottles that had been standing

• 31:04Kaelyn Moore?

  upright in the coals until they cracked from the heat. Obviously, someone trying to boil the water clean on an island that has no fresh water of its own. And a few feet away, there were empty shells that were laid out in the open, looking like they were trying to catch rain. And then even more smaller details started to surface, things that made it really seem like the castaway was a woman. There was a little jar that had once held freckle cream, and a sliver of mirror from a woman's compact. The resold heel of a woman's shoe was also found, and there was a man's shoe near it. There was also a box for a sextant, which was the device that Fred Noonan would have been using to measure the angle between something in the sky and the horizon. And

• 31:46Kaelyn Moore?

  there was also part of a sextant's inverting eyepiece found. All of this was picked up and shipped off to a British command outpost in Fiji. But, you know, obviously, World War II was going on. It's not exactly high priority at the time. And so, all of that evidence, everything goes missing. Luckily, there was a doctor in Fiji who still was able to access the bones, and he analyzed them. And he made a detailed report before they were lost. That's basically all we have to go off of. And guys, there's been so much debate about these bones. I'm going to spare you most of the details. But basically, some people are convinced that these bones are Amelia's, and others are very adamant that they're not. But without the actual bones, never going to know for sure. As

• 32:29Kaelyn Moore?

  for the rest of the artifacts, without the actual objects, it's, again, just guessing. The sextant box is definitely interesting. It's a navigational tool used by people who are charting the sun and the stars like Fred Noonan was doing. But this particular sextant box is a very, very common brand. So can we say that it's definitely Fred's? No. But also, there is a picture of Fred from his Pan Am days, sitting in the cockpit of a plane, and he has the same brand of box with him. Tiger has conducted several research explorations on Nikumururo over the last 40 years, and they've turned up even more items in this vein. Like more glass bottles, another cosmetic jar, a bone handled knife,

• 33:11Kaelyn Moore?

  and a zipper. There's also pencil LEDs that were found. You can make a case for almost all of them. They might have belonged to Amelia, but it is just not enough to definitively prove anything. But the one thing that would prove Amelia was there is if we could find her plane. Now, Tiger and others have thrown all of the latest technology at trying to find it. They've used sonar, deep sea robots, you name it. Bob Ballard, who was the guy who found the wreck of the Titanic, took a swing at the island, and even he came up empty. I mean, surely, if the plane was there, he would be the guy to find it. Well, all of the searches so far have been deep water searches. They were under the assumption that Amelia had landed on the reef, and then slowly, over the course of the few

• 33:56Kaelyn Moore?

  days that she was still sending distress signals, the plane was flooded from the waves, and it eventually washed off the reef and out to sea where it sank. But now, we do have other evidence suggesting otherwise. So in 2020, a man named Michael Ashmore was at home. He was scrolling through satellite images on Apple Maps. He's a Navy veteran, and he's something of an Amelia hobbyist. And also, it was 2020, so he was probably stuck at home, hyper-fixating on historical disasters like the rest of us. I mean, I watched a lot of Titanic content back then. A lot, you guys, so much. But he's bopping around Apple Maps in the South Pacific, looking at all of the islands that Amelia could

• 34:36Kaelyn Moore?

  have been to. And he sees a strange shadow of something in the water of Nikumururo. And to him, it looks like it could be the wing of an aircraft. He's pretty intrigued by this, so he shares the image with an online Amelia forum, just to see what they think. And thanks to years and years of satellite images, that group is able to compare pictures of the island from 2009 all the way to present day. And suddenly, we have this whole new lead. So in April of 2015, there was a massive storm on the island, a tropical cyclone, Pam. It caused a huge storm surge, which washed away a bunch of sediment on the coast. And that's when this object clearly appears in the photos. But then, in subsequent years,

• 35:19Kaelyn Moore?

  it's slowly covered up again, until it's only the outline that Michael Ashmore first noticed. And what this means is that it could be Amelia's plane. And because of the way that sediment washes in and out of the coast, it could have become completely buried and then resurfaced after a storm, which is why no one would have seen it until now. But not only that, using satellite imagery, they were able to measure the object. And it's roughly 12 to 14 meters long, right in line with the Electra's 12.2 meter fuselage. And its size and its outline resembles the fuselage and tail of the Lockheed Electra 10E specifically. So this object is not just plane sized, it's the right size and

• 36:03Kaelyn Moore?

  the rough shape of Amelia's plane. Second, it does read as metal, it doesn't read as vegetation. The newest imagery we have shows a long reflective shape beneath the water near the Teraya Peninsula. And it's been described as a metallic visual anomaly, whose high reflectivity and shape resembles a plain fuselage in some captures. A reflective, high-return signature underwater is what you would expect from aluminum. It's not from a tree or from coral. And it's not only satellite pattern matching, there's also a thread of older, independent reports of wreckage there. So the Kiribati and Tuvaluan

• 36:43Kaelyn Moore?

  colonists who lived on Nikumururo from 1938, reported aircraft wreckage on the northwestern reef and in the lagoon. A World War II Navy pilot reported locals using aircraft control cables as fishing line from a wreck that was already on the island. And 1953 aerial photos show objects on the reef with spectral signatures consistent with aluminum. That predates satellite and Apple Maps entirely. So if they're right, the plane was never at the bottom of the ocean. It was buried in the sand. This object, which is now called the Teraya object, is also on the opposite side of the island from where Tiger had been searching and conducting their excavations. And it's down the coast from the wreck of

• 37:27Kaelyn Moore?

  the Norwich City. So that also might explain why it wasn't discovered before now. This is a really exciting find, and it's something that could actually put this mystery to bed. We could have our answer on what really happened to Amelia. But even though it's exciting, there is kind of a sadness to it. Because the island paints the picture of Amelia and Fred, hungry, stranded, hundreds of miles from anyone who could bring them to safety, heating bottles in a fire to make drinking water, and setting out shells to catch the rain, desperately trying to radio for help until their plane sank in the sand, and all hope was lost. But we could still know very soon, because there's a search

• 38:08Kaelyn Moore?

  for the Teraya object that's, in theory, happening right now, like literally right now. There's a crew of researchers from Purdue University that are setting off to Nikumururo with the hope that we will finally be able to lay Amelia to rest, once and for all. I'm going to be tracking it really closely. I hope that this expedition actually gets to set off, and that they find something for real. I'm on pins and needles, and I cannot wait to see what happens with it. But what do you guys think? Now I turn it over to you. Is Amelia's plane really still out there? Did she survive this landing? And at the end of the day, did the government maybe cover something up? I know, shocker, that's never happened before. But what do you think? You can let me know wherever you listen. I love reading your theories. I love hearing about the more you know about

• 38:53Kaelyn Moore?

  this case, too, because some of you, like me, were also very passionately obsessed with older mysteries during our COVID era. So would love to know other things that you know about this case. I'm going to be over on Footnotes. There's a couple of things that I didn't put in the episode, specifically about this red herring, where this one poor woman was hounded by a researcher who thought that she was actually Amelia Earhart. That's a whole other subplot to this episode that I'm going to talk about on Footnotes, which is our high council on Patreon. After show, I go through some extra context on the episode. You'll want to meet me over there as I discuss that, too. But that is all I have for this week. I'm going to be back here next week with another story for you all, and I can't wait to see you then. And until next time, stay curious.

• 39:40Kaelyn Moore?

  Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Additional research and writing by Abigail Cannon. Sound design and mix by Red Rome Creative. Video editing by Creative Step. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Journequin, the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request, check out hearts start pounding.com.