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In 2017, Rachel Hartigan embarked on a remarkable journey to the remote island of Nikumaroro, a desolate coral atoll nestled in the western Pacific Ocean. Tasked by National Geographic Magazine, her mission was to document the efforts of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR).
Their ambitious goal: to unravel the enduring mystery of Amelia Earhart’s fate.
Earhart, a trailblazer as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, vanished in 1937 during a daring attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Her disappearance, along with her aircraft and her navigator, Fred Noonan, has captivated and confounded historians and aviation enthusiasts for nearly nine decades.
TIGHAR proposes a compelling hypothesis: that Earhart and Noonan veered off course, landing on a coral reef approximately 400 miles away from their intended destination, ultimately succumbing to the harsh conditions of an uninhabited island.
Yet, they are not alone in their quest. Other dedicated “Earhart hounds” pursue alternative theories, suggesting she might have been captured by the Japanese, drowned at sea, or even survived under an assumed identity back in the United States.
Hartigan tries to make sense of them all in her new book “Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life” (National Geographic).
As the author unspools each of the main theories, “Lost” uncovers an obsessive subculture of amateur sleuths and conspiracy theorists — as well as legit scientists and historians — who have dedicated their lives to solving the mystery.
“I think people are drawn into theories around Earhart because they want an ending to the story,” Hartigan told The Post. “She was a super famous person. How could such a super famous person disappear? And how can we not know the ending? We need to know the ending to the story.”
Her book, however, resists that temptation.
“I didn’t want to write a book where I was saying, ‘This definitively is what happened,’ because I don’t know,” Hartigan explained. “Nobody knows what happened. Even if they say they do, they don’t really, because there’s just really no definitive evidence.”
What is known: At 10 a.m. on July 2, 1937, Earhart’s silver Lockheed Electra took off from an airport in Lae, in modern-day Papua New Guinea. She and Noonan had already flown 22,000 miles over the course of a month. But this leg of the trip would be their most difficult.
Their intended destination was Howland Island, a teeny speck of land spanning just 1.5 miles in the vast Pacific Ocean. It would take 18 or more hours to get there, and they had just enough fuel to do it. If they missed, though, there was nowhere else to go.
Of course, the pair never got there. The radio operator on the Itasca — the ship awaiting them at Howland — heard Earthart’s increasingly frantic messages but couldn’t get through to her.
“We must be on you but cannot see you,” Earhart said. An hour and a half after her last message, they notified the Coast Guard in San Francisco that she never arrived.
The US government looked for 16 days before abandoning the official search. But, as Hartigan writes in her book, “the unofficial one was just beginning.”
Theory No. 1: Captured
Immediately after the search was abandoned, some Americans began to wonder if Earhart had been captured.
“It was sort of in the air when she disappeared, partly because the Japanese had control of all these islands in the Pacific … and they weren’t letting many foreigners in,” Hartigan told The Post. “So, paranoid-minded people started to wonder what was going on there.”
After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, such theories reached a fever pitch.
“People in the US had developed really negative opinions of the Japanese,” Hartigan explained. “They thought the Japanese were capable of anything, including maybe the capture and killing of America’s sweetheart, Amelia Earhart.”
Most of these theories have Earhart and Noonan getting off track and ending up in either Japan-controlled Saipan or the Marshall Islands, where they were captured and imprisoned.
That’s where things start to diverge.
Some conjecture Earhart was “shot or had her head cut off or died of dysentery [in jail],” Hartigan said.
Others claim that the aviator had been shipped to Tokyo, where she spent World War II living in the Emperor Hirohito’s palace and even took part in planning the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The wackiest involves Earhart being smuggled back into the states disguised as a nun and resuming her life under the name of another aviatrix.
In the 1950s, a dentist named Casimir Sheft said that while working at a Navy base in Saipan after World War II, his assistant, Josephone Blanco, had told him that she had seen “an American girl flyer” in Saipan shortly after Earhart’s disappearance.
According to the doctor’s account, Blanco said that Japanese soldiers marched this woman into the woods and that she had heard shots. Nobody saw the girl pilot again,
But when Blanco came forward with her own recollection of the events, her story kept changing,
“I don’t think she was lying on purpose,” said Hartigan, who interviewed Blanco before her death in 2022 at the age of 95. “I just think memories can get really twisted just based on what people are asking you.”
The theory is unlikely — Saipan is far from Howland Island, and much of the “evidence,” like a photo depicting a white woman in trousers on the island, have turned out to be red herrings. Yet it persists.
“It’s not like conspiracies get everything wrong,” Hartigan said about the appeal of the capture theory. “There’s enough truth or enough that’s intriguing that you want to keep digging. And it’s kind of addictive to find out more, even if it’s not necessarily pertinent to what you were looking for.”
Theory No. 2: Castaway
The idea that Earhart landed on a deserted island has long been sparked imagination. And, in 1937, the US dispatched planes to scout the Phoenix Islands during a search for her.
But in the 1980s, the group TIGHAR decided to look toward the Phoenix Islands, southeast of Howland, in the hopes of recovering the plane.
As Hartigan explained: They figured “if the plane was passing through Howland, then it would have passed really close to Nikumaroro.” Plus, she added, “there was a coral reef around the island that, at low tide, one could land on, theoretically.”
Furthermore, in the days after the disappearance, people around the world reported hearing Earhart’s distressed calls on their radios.
“There were a lot of hoax transmissions,” Hartigan said, but “some people from TIGHAR think that some of the radio messages were legit and they happened in the evenings, when it wasn’t too hot to be in the plane and [Earhart and Noonan] could run an engine and send out a message. And the only place they could have done that, in theory, is Nikumaroro.”
Since 1989, TIGHAR has gone on about a dozen expeditions to the island.
“They have found some things that are suggestive of a castaway living there, or being there at least for a short time,” Hartigan said.
The group has found burn features — places where someone lit a fire, along with glass jars, a compact mirror, and clam shells that had been opened in a way that Pacific Islanders do not open shells.
“All these are indications that somebody had been there,” Hartigan said. Though, she added, “there was a shipwreck that’s still there from several years before Earhart appeared. So the castaway could have been from this ship.”
When Hartigan visited the island with TIGHAR in 2017, the expedition brought dogs trained to sniff for bones. The canines did signal that they smelled human remains — and all in the same spot.
“But we dug and dug and dug and did not find them,” Hartigan said.
Hartigan said that that doesn’t disprove the theory, but adds there is no proof.
“There’s questions, but there’s nothing definitive for that one, she said.
Theory No. 3: Sank
The most likely, and least sexy, explanation is also the most straightforward: that Earhart couldn’t find the island, ran out of gas, and crashed somewhere in the Pacific.
First of all, “there is a lot more ocean than there is land in the Pacific,” said Hartigan.
And second, the radio operator communicating with the aviator from the Itasca reported that her transmissions sounded very close — which is an argument against her landing in Saipan or Nikumaroro.
There were several factors that could have made Earhart and Noonan miss their target. Neither of them really knew how to use their radio direction finder, which would have been needed to help figure out where the ship’s transmissions were coming from. Earhart had gotten a brief tutorial on this equipment before her journey, but reportedly seemed distracted with other preparations.
Neither of them knew Morse Code, which also made communication difficult.
Most significantly, Noonan’s flight charts were out of date: They put Howland Island nearly six miles east of its actual location.
Researchers and Earhart hounds are still looking for definitive proof — particularly, the plane.
Nauticos, a deep-sea exploration company, has spent more than 25 years trying to figure out an area in the Pacific where the twin-engine Lockheed Electra may have ended up. Searchers went on their first expedition in 2002 and are now gearing up for their fourth. These are costly and time-intensive expeditions, involving, for example, replicating Earhart’s transmissions with the Itasca by using a radio system identical to one from 1937.
The irony is that Earhart’s descendants have made peace with the ambiguity of her demise.
“I don’t believe one penny should be spent in that particular way,” Earhart’s niece Amy Kleppner told Hartigan. “There’s a lot of misery in the world that can be alleviated by those millions of dollars that have been spent on searching the ocean and digging up graves on various islands and all the rest of it.”
She would rather people celebrate her aunt’s indomitable spirit and accomplishments than focus on her death.
Hartigan, in writing her book, has come to agree.
“I think when we’re talking about what happened to her, we sometimes lose sight of who she was,” she said. “And I would prefer that we don’t, because she was a really compelling person.”