Vanished Without a Trace: The Amelia Earhart Mystery

at 08:43 in the morning on 07/02/1937 a voice came over the radio it was flying along the line 15733 7 then silence last week we had a body without a name this week we have two of the most famous names of their time amelia earhart and fred noonan and no bodies at all no plane no wreckage just an empty space in the sky over the pacific ocean the file is almost 90 years old now the pages are worn thin the objective was simple on paper fly a specially modified lockheed electra from lay new guinea to howland island a distance of over 4,000 kilometers the target a slip of

land just three kilometers long a speck to find it earhart had one of the best in the business navigator fred noonan he knew the pacific he'd flown these routes for pan american this was supposed to be leg 32 of a 34 leg flight around the world they were almost home almost the us coast guard cutter itasca was waiting for them at howland island their job was to provide radio guidance but the communication was a disaster the radio logs show the problem clearly the itasca could hear earhart but she couldn't seem to hear them it was a one way conversation between 02:45 and 08:45 in the morning her voice came and went growing stronger than fading

she was close she reported cloudy weather she asked them to take a bearing on her but they couldn't get a lock they couldn't use morse code she couldn't use their frequencies correctly it was a chain of small fatal errors then came that last clear message we are on the line 157337 a navigational line that should have passed directly over the island and then nothing the official conclusion is neat tidy the lockheed electra ran out of fuel and it crashed into the ocean somewhere near howland island the united states government mounted the largest sea search in history at the time sixteen days nothing not a single piece of confirmed wreckage has ever been found not a

life raft not an oil slick she was officially declared dead a year and a half later but a declaration isn't evidence it's just paperwork and paperwork doesn't close a case like this so you start looking at the other files the ones in the back of the drawer the nikumaroro hypothesis it suggests they missed howland island and flew south making a forced landing on what was then called gardner island an uninhabited atoll expeditions there have found artifacts an old shoe a piece of plexiglass that might match an elektra it paints a different picture not a sudden crash but a slow desperate survival story castaways but the proof it's not there it's suggestive it's not conclusive you can't build a case on might then you have the wilder theories espionage capture by the japanese a secret mission for the government there's no credible

evidence for any of it just whispers what you're left with is the silence after 08:43am the central question isn't just what happened we have a good idea they got lost they ran out of fuel the real question the one that keeps this file open on my desk is where the ocean is vast and without a single piece of the plane you don't have a crime scene you don't even have a search area you just have that last transmission hanging in the air a final clue that leads absolutely nowhere