The Earhart Project The Earhart Project was inaugurated in November of 1988 with the stated purpose of investigating the Earhart/Noonan disappearance according to accepted academic standards and using sound scientific methodology. Now in its fourteenth year, the project has conducted four expeditions to the Central Pacific and has raised and spent something over $2 million in contributed funds.
Valid conclusions can not be drawn from invalid information, and for that reason the Earhart Project began with, and continues to focus on, the gathering and study of the best original source information available pertaining to the Earhart/Noonan flight, disappearance and search. What we have found is a popular mystery shot through with myth and legend. In the course of TIGHAR’s investigation, many new and important observations have been gleaned from an abundance of original archival sources, and several previously unknown historical documents have been found which both correct and significantly add to our understanding of events surrounding the Earhart disappearance. For example: we know now that Earhart departed on her final flight with 1,100 U.S. gallons of fuel – enough for roughly 24 hours of endurance and enough to give her, at least in theory, more than three hours of flight time after she was last heard from. We also know that the Itasca radio log entry which records her as saying that she was “circling” is a strike-over of the erased original entry “drifting.” What she probably said was that she was “listening.”
The facts of the case point to Gardner Island, the place where the Navy flyers in 1937 saw “signs of recent habitation” on an officially uninhabited atoll. Today known as Nikumaroro, the island is part of the Republic of Kiribati. Although colonized by the British with settlers from the Gilbert Islands in late 1938, the atoll was abandoned in 1963 and has been uninhabited ever since. TIGHAR expeditions to the island have recovered a number of artifacts from the deserted and overgrown village which are known to be salvaged aircraft parts. Some of these are of World War II origin, but others are not and appear to be consistent with the Lockheed Model 10E Electra flown by Earhart. At another site on the island, the remains of an American woman’s shoe of the same style and size worn by Earhart were found in 1991. In 1997, further archaeological excavations at this site produced the remnants of a small campfire and a fragment of what appears to have been a label from a can of food. The site was originally discovered by TIGHAR field researchers who were investigating a legend that told of bones, a cognac bottle and an American woman’s shoe said to have been found on the island by the first settlers.
It wasn’t until the summer of 1997, months after the expedition that found the campfire, that a file was found in the national archives of the Republic of Kiribati in Tarawa which confirmed the legend as historical fact with sixteen pieces of official British colonial correspondence. Human remains, the sole of a woman’s shoe, a Benedictine bottle, a campfire and other artifacts were indeed found on the island in 1940 at a site which fits the description of the one later found by TIGHAR. The Colonial Service officer in charge of the island suspected that the castaway who had died at the primitive campsite might have been Amelia Earhart. The bones and artifacts were sent to British headquarters in Fiji for examination and the matter was declared “strictly secret.” In April of 1941, an analysis of the bones by a physician concluded that the individual was probably a muscular middle-aged male of European descent, and that is where the matter appears to have ended. Later that year, other events in the Pacific overshadowed any remaining curiosity about an unidentified castaway on a minor atoll.
More new clues have come in the form of anecdotal accounts by former residents of Nikumaroro who describe pieces of aircraft wreckage on the reef and an airplane wreck in the heavy vegetation along a particular section of shoreline which has not yet been searched by TIGHAR. Digital analysis of aerial photos of the island has corroborated this testimony with indications of metal objects in the reported locations.
New information, new historical documents and new physical evidence – all gathered and assessed according to rigorous scientific standards – have resulted in several field expeditions to Nikumaroro and to Fiji. Click on any of the links below to read archived daily reports, artifact assessments, and plans for upcoming field work.
https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Ove ... rview.html 
