TIGHAR

[upbeat music]We're still trying to figure out where Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan disappeared.

A few years ago, we had some of the leaders of an organization called the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery.

We had them on the program, and they talked about some of the things they discovered on Nikumaroro Island, which is part of a chain of islands called the Phoenix Islands in the Republic of Kiribati.

They think this is where Amelia Earhart set her plane down, on this atoll island in the middle of nowhere, roughly 400 miles off course from where was- where she was supposed to be.

First became aware of it when a man named Michael Ashmore brought this satellite image of it to his attention.

By the way, the only reason why people are even looking at Nekomororo relates to the work that also deserves credit, and that's the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, led by Rick Gillespie.

They've developed this concept called the Castaway Hypothesis.

which points to much evidence, a huge amount of evidence that they've amassed since the late 1980s for the proposition that Amelia and Fred Noonan did not crash at sea, which was the conclusion of the Navy and Coast Guard after that incident.

The island was never investigated again.

[Instrumental music] The efforts of TIGHAR have since established that no such group was active at the time, and more evidence was to emerge that Amelia had managed to reach land.

As the search scoured the Pacific, there were reports of radio transmissions from Amelia's plane.

Ships and islands in the region picked up new signals on her frequency.

In the 89 years since, several hypotheses have been tested with limited results.

The Teraya Object Expedition aims to prove the Nikumororo Hypothesis, based on data and evidence gathered by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGER, over almost 40 years and 12 visits to the island of Nikumororo.

Nikumororo is one of 32 atolls comprising the expansive South Pacific island nation of Kiribati and lies about 350 nautical miles southeast of Howland Island, which was Earhart's planned destination.

Remote, uninhabited, and without a reliable source of drinking water, the island may now have revealed its biggest secret.

In 2020, a Navy veteran fascinated by the mystery of Earhart's disappearance while viewing Apple Maps noticed an object lying in shallow water in the lagoon of Nikumaroro alongside the Teraya Peninsula.

He brought the image of what is now known as the Teriah object to the attention of Tiger.

A few months later, in early 2021, Dr. Richard Rick Pettigrew, ALI's executive director, became aware of it.

Rick had traveled to the island with Tiger in 2017.

Gardner Island, now known as Nikumaroro, sits about three hundred and fifty miles southeast of Howland along that very heading.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, known as TIGHAR, spent decades building a case that Earhart and Noonan may have made a reef landing on Gardner, survived as castaways for some period, and that the airplane eventually went over the reef edge into deep water.

The evidence TIGHAR assembled is circumstantial, but it is not nothing.

In nineteen forty, a British colonial officer on Nikumaroro found a partial skeleton.

Forensic anthropologists who reanalyzed the recorded measurements in later years concluded they were more consistent with a woman of Northern European descent than the original colonial-era assessment had suggested.

DNA testing of bone fragments recovered from the island ran into degradation problems, but the effort alone tells you something about how seriously researchers take the Nikumaroro theory.

TIGHAR also recovered a fragment of aircraft aluminum on the island that matches the type used on the Electra, with dimensions and rivet spacing consistent with a repair patch that photographic evidence shows was made on the airplane before the final flight.

They found a shoe heel consistent with a nineteen thirties women’s shoe of the type Earhart wore.

That one has pretty much been debunked in recent years and certainly doesn't have the evidence that our theory has.

So back to the TIGHAR story.

So the clue was that we think you ought to look at the very last radio transmission that was heard from Amelia and Fred in the morning of July 2nd.

Around 8:45 in the morning, they said, "We're flying north and south on the line 137 557." Now, what is that? Turns out that that's a line of position, roughly a longitudinal line running northwest to southeast.

There's a theory that Fred may have been injured in the landing and subsequent attempt to get on shore from the reef.

That's based on some things that were heard on radio transmissions.

So that takes us back to TIGHAR and the case that they've built.

Since 1989, they've really built what I consider as a lawyer to be an incredible circumstantial case.