Amelia Earhart Theory

Amelia Earhart once said that, “Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace”. However, since her mysterious disappearance in 1937, her story has known anything but peace. After inspiring the world by being the first woman to fly solo over the Atlantic, Earhart became a face of the 20th century. On July 2, 1937, Earhart and navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished in their attempt to make a circumnavigational flight around the world. After taking flight from Lae, Papua New Guinea, they failed to locate the small island of Howland and disappeared. Over the years since, there have been many theories to prove what happened to the aviation pilot, like the most widely known theory that Earhart simply ran out of fuel and crashed in the Pacific

Three years after Earhart and Noonan went missing in 1937, Nikumaroro was being colonized by the British when thirteen bones were discovered, on the until then uninhabited island, and were promptly sent to Figi to be examined by physician, David Hoodless. In 1940, Hoodless recorded that the bones belonged to a “stocky male”, most likely of European descent (Salmon). This conclusion did not match the description of Earhart, nor her navigator Noonan, and the case was disregarded until forensic anthropologist, Richard Jantz, reanalyzed Hoodless’s conclusion by placing the data he took through a computer program called Fordisc, which is used by anthropologists in the U.S. and around the world to estimate sex, anscestry, and stature from skeletal measurements (Neuman). This resource is far more advanced and useful than the resources that were available around the time of Earhart’s disappearance, and Jantz’s reexamination of the evidence found that David Hoodless had incorrectly determined the sex of the remains, meaning that if the bones did not belong to Amelia Earhart they had to have been from someone very similar. Jantz’s discovery took place 80 years after the ill-fated pilot vanished, which proves that the mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance is still a subject being explored and investigated. With new technology and advancements of scientific knowledge, it has become easier to investigate and understand what really happened to Earhart on her doomed journey, therefore providing peace to her name and story that has infatuated people all over the world for