On February 14, 1998
a 13 person TIGHAR team flew to Kanton Island in the Republic of Kiribati
to investigate the possibility that an engine reportedly found on the
reef of a nearby island and brought to Kanton in 1971 might be from the
missing Earhart aircraft. (For more background information see The
Canton Engine.)
The expedition went
smoothly and safely with no serious injuries or damage to equipment. The
chartered Gulfstream I twin-turboprop aircraft operated by Phoenix Air
performed flawlessly. The max-gross takeoff out of Palmyra Atoll was aided
by a 15 knot wind right down the runway. We got off with room to spare
and the birds were not a problem.
Identification of
the dump sight on Kanton was complicated by extensive bulldozer activity
which had occurred throughout the area after Bruce Yoho deposited the
engine there in 1971. It is clear that, prior to the departure of the
USAF in 1976, an effort was made to bury or cover over all of the junk
that once littered the landscape off the end of the main runway. Bruce’s
dump, it turns out, was probably just one of many areas where debris was
deposited. None of that activity was documented in the paperwork describing
the shutdown of the missile test project.
Despite the confusion
created by the massive rearrangement of the landscape and the considerable
increase in vegetation due to a wetter climate in recent years, we were
able to positively identify the original dump site. With the help of Bruce’s
on-site recollections and Dr. Tom King’s archaeological expertise, we
were able to match the ground exactly with the maps Bruce had drawn from
memory. Unfortunately, some time between when Bruce put the engine there
in 1971 and when the Air Force left in 1976, a large trench was dug just
beyond the dump and the contents of the dump were pushed into it, then
buried over with the removed coral rubble. What was once a shallow depression
littered with junk is now scraped clean. Just beyond is a low mound of
coral rubble liberally sprinkled with diesel engines, winches, aluminum
aircraft structures, etc., etc. Somewhere, buried under tons of coral
and junk, is Bruce’s (and maybe Amelia’s) engine. With a couple of days
and a large backhoe we could dig it out, but we had neither. The terrible
condition of the metal debris that we could see was not encouraging as
to the prospect of the engine being conclusively identifiable if we can
eventually find it. Nonetheless, we are actively pursuing several possibilities
for excavating the site.
As happened during
last year’s expedition, mother nature didn’t cut us any breaks on this
trip. It poured rain most of the day on Sunday preventing us from making
a aerial photo flyover of Nikumaroro. We were able to take on some additional
fuel at Kanton but not as much as we had hoped. We considered making a
run over Nikumaroro on the way home on Monday but, with continued low
weather, short fuel, unknown winds aloft, and unknown weather at our enroute
refueling point on Palmyra Atoll, we decided that one missing twin-engined
airplane in the area was sufficient.
TIGHAR members will
receive a full report of the Kanton Mission in the upcoming issue of the
foundation’s quarterly journal TIGHAR Tracks. The text of the magazine
will be mounted on this website.
TIGHAR wishes to
thank everyone whose contributions helped make this trip possible. Kanton
Island may yet yield up the proverbial smoking gun, but it will be harder
to get to than we had hoped. While we’re working on that problem we’re
also aggressivley pursuing many other lines of research. Progress has
been made toward identifying the fragment of can label found in the campfire
on Nikumaroro and we have found a new medical report in British archives
which provides more detailed information on the bones which were found
on that same site in 1940. It now appears that the individual whose remains
were found was probably male, of European descent and between the ages
of 45 and 55. The bones may also still exist and we are presently investigating
possible repositories.
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