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After 22 years of rigorous research and 10 grueling expeditions, we can say that all of the evidence we have found on Nikumaroro is consistent with the hypothesis that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan landed and eventually died there as castaways (http://news.discovery.com/history/amelia-earhart-island-artifacts.html - broken link)," Gillespie said. Indeed, a number of artifacts unearthed on the uninhabited island provide strong circumstantial evidence for a castaway presence.
I place very little stock in anything I see on the Discovery/Science/History channel. It is heavily hyped toward the speculative. I used to try to verify some of the "facts" that they purport to represent, with such a high failure rate that I don't even bother anymore. The Earhart feature even ends with an admission that nothing conclusive was found, and piques the viewers interest with a diatribe of how spirit-sappingly difficult it is to continue to do the research.
The Mayan "Apocalypse Island" feature was outrageous. There is actually a permanent population living on the island, with an airstrip, and more than half the program was about the phony danger of landing a boat on the shore of the island, just in the nick of time to avoid seasonal storms. And then all they did was stand on the rock and say "I can see the sun from here". Jim Turner, the featured Canadian explorer, later said in his blog that after he had signed the contract, he was compelled to participate in a hokey staged "adventure" which had little relation to the actual work or research he was doing there, and served no other purpose but to sensationalize according to the producer's script.
The DNA testing should resolve the merits of the claims. I recall some years back when there was a forensic anthropologist named Clyde Snow who claimed he had found the graves of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Bolivia. The supporting circumstantial evidence was much akin to that which is being offered in this case...possibilities, but nothing close to conclusive, nor anything that could have no other possible explanation.
In the case of the Bandidos Yanquis, they dug up the grave Snow identified, took DNA samples from the remains found within, and compared them to DNA samples from living descendants of Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid. All this was made into a documentary which I saw on one of those Discovery style channels, I forget which. They held back the DNA results until the end, understandable since there turned out to be no match between the corpse and the descendant.
Speculation here is relatively pointless in that the means for scientific resolution is at hand.
Indeed, a number of artifacts unearthed on the uninhabited island provide strong circumstantial evidence for a castaway presence.
You'd think that artifacts might do a little better than circumstantial evidence. And they don't necessarily indicate that those castaways actually included Amelia Earhart. That's called jumping to conclusions. (At least the researcher wasn't named Von Daniken, or there would probably have been aliens from another planet involved!)
So Jesse James, John Wilkes Booth, and Billy the Kid made it to Texas, Butch Cassidey and Sundance Kid made it to Bolivia, Hitler made it to South America, and now Amelia Earhart wound up on an island somewhere between the islands on Lost and Castaway? I bet Elvis and Andy Kaufman went to Cuba.
You'd think that artifacts might do a little better than circumstantial evidence. And they don't necessarily indicate that those castaways actually included Amelia Earhart. That's called jumping to conclusions. (At least the researcher wasn't named Von Daniken, or there would probably have been aliens from another planet involved!)
Don't airplane crews keep logs the way ships do? Wouldn't a pilot, especially one who is attempting a historic flight, go out of their way to maintain their log even if the plane were lost? We can reasonably assume that Earhardt's plane was lost, likely at sea. But if she survived for any time at all, where is her log?
New evidence, from previously dismissed radio signal analysis, indicates that Nikumaroro Island does indeed appear to be the final destination for Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan. TIGHAR believes that the pair perished on this atoll. It has been not quite 75 years since they vanished, and remains one of the leading unsolved mysteries. www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/06/01/previously-dismissed-radio-signals-were-credible-transmissions-from-earhart/
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