July 2, 1937: Clouds hang low in the sky. The Lockheed Electra 10E airplane hovers above the Pacific Ocean, low on fuel. A nearby Coast Guard ship receives Amelia Earhart’s last worried radio transmission. Earhart is never heard from again. She leaves the world with an enduring mystery: What happened to her and her navigator Fred Noonan?
A new analysis may finally put the 81-year-old mystery to rest.
Just three years after the Electra disappeared, bones were found at one of the locations people guessed Earhart may have been stranded: Nikumaroro Island in the Western Pacific. A physician named D. W. Hoodless studied the remains. He concluded in 1940 that they had belonged to a man, not a woman. This conclusion left the Earhart mystery wide open for conjecture. Did Earhart and Noonan die somewhere else as castaways? Did their plane crash into the ocean, drowning them? Some even guessed President Roosevelt had hired the famous female pilot to spy on the Japanese, who shot down her plane and forced her to live in captivity.
In his new study, anthropologist Richard Jantz revisits Dr. Hoodless’s research—but he can’t replicate the research exactly. The bones Dr. Hoodless studied have vanished. Jantz uses the seven surviving measurements Hoodless took. He compares them to the inseam length and waist circumference from a pair of Earhart’s trousers. He references a photo of Earhart holding an oil can to estimate the lengths of two arm bones. Jantz says the bones match the data, and that it’s highly unlikely a random person would resemble the bones as closely as Earhart. Other items found on Nikumaroro in the past point to Earhart and Noonan too: a piece of a woman’s shoe, a box that would fit a navigation device, and a Benedictine bottle. (Benedictine is an herbal liqueur Earhart was known to carry.) “I think we have pretty good evidence that it’s her,” says Jantz.
But what about Hoodless’s analysis? Jantz says Hoodless wasn’t a bad anthropologist. He just didn’t have the technology needed to draw the correct conclusion. For his study, Jantz uses a computer program called Fordisc. Today, Fordisc is standard equipment for most board-certified forensic anthropologists. The program can analyze skeletal measurements and estimate a person’s sex, ancestry, and stature. And in this case, it seems to prove history’s assumptions wrong.
People are captivated by the Earhart story partly because of how it ended. But people also love Earhart for the person she was. Ever since she was a little girl, Earhart was daring and courageous—even if a bit reckless. She played sports—and she played hard, like the boys. She rode her sled lying down instead of sitting up—something people then called “unladylike.” Earhart’s unconventional ways led her to become a great pilot. In 1921, she was 24. She bought a bright yellow plane she called The Canary. A year later, she flew The Canary 14,000 feet in the air. No female pilot had ever flown a plane that high before. In 1932, she achieved one of her greatest accomplishments. She became the first woman to fly over the Atlantic Ocean.
Then she attempted something even bigger: circumnavigating the globe. How did the mission end? Jantz’s evidence points out a strong possibility she and Noonan died on Nikumaroro. But until people find the missing bones, some mystery remains.
