Amelia Earhart has captured the imagination of generations since her disappearance in 1937, but as much as her disappearance has added to her mystique it also left her tragic tale without resolution.
So why haven't investigators been able to find her body?
Because they probably already did back in 1940, when a skeleton discovered on Gardner Island (now called Nikumaroro) was dismissed as male by a doctor and eliminated from evidence.
But when The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) re-examined the skeletal evidence in 1998 they determined the bones found on that island in the South Pacific most likely came from a tall caucasian female.
Forensic anthropologist Richard Jantz recently took it a step further by comparing the skeleton's unusually long forearms to Earhart's own radius-to-humerus ratio:
In the British doctor’s notes, the humerus was reported to be 32.4 centimeters long. The radius was 24.5 centimeters – a ratio of 0.756 to the length of the humerus. Statistically, women born in the late 19th century (Earhart was born in 1897) had an average radius to humerus ratio of 0.73.
In other words, if the castaway was a middle-aged, ethnically European woman, she had forearms considerably longer than average. Dr. Jantz wondered if Amelia may have had similarly longer than average forearms. To answer that question we called on forensic imaging specialist Jeff Glickman. Selecting an historical photo of Amelia where her bare arms were clearly visible, and working with Dr. Jantz to identify the correct points on the shoulder, elbow and wrist for comparing bone length, Jeff found that Earhart’s humerus to radius ratio was 0.76 – virtually identical to the castaway’s.
We'll probably never know for sure if the bones belong to Amelia Earhart, but maybe it's time to simply accept these findings and put this mystery to rest once and for all.
-Via Fox News
The more you work out the details, the more unlikely it becomes. Gardner Island offered a perfect landing spot for their sea plane, yet it wasn't there when search parties came looking days later. So they had to crash and sink elsewhere, but get out, be close enough to that island to make it there alive, go inland and die somewhere hidden (despite available water and food) before they could start a signal fire, and before the search party reached the island? If they didn't choose to land there, there's nothing special about Gardner over any of the other dozens of islands in the vicinity.
So they made it onto the island, but their plane did not, and they very quickly died somewhere hidden from aerial view? Possible, I suppose, but rather far-fetched.
There's a lot of water in the Pacific Ocean, and very little land. It's infinitely more likely they splashed-down, somewhere, and sunk, but I guess you can sell more books with an unsupported fringe theory...