n July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart vanished somewhere
in the Central Pacific during an attempted flight around the world.
Finding Amelia has been an American obsession ever since.
At the time of her disappearance, Earhart
was the world’s most famous female aviator and one of the most admired women in America.
Accompanying her on the flight was Fred Noonan, a celebrity navigator
in his own right. When the two flyers failed to arrive at their mid-Pacific
refueling stop on Howland Island, the U.S. government launched what the
press called “The greatest rescue expedition in flying history.”
Expectations were high that the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard would rescue
the missing flyers, and for more than two weeks, newspapers and newsreels
led the public on a roller-coaster ride of promising leads and
rushing disappointments.
The ships and planes returned empty-handed, but the search for
Amelia Earhart was not over. Indeed, it had just begun. Over the ensuing
decades, researchers and enthusiasts have struggled to establish the validity
of competing answers to the riddle of the flight’s fate. Millions of dollars
have been spent combing tropical islands and scouring the depths of the
ocean. Hundreds of books, articles, and documentaries offer a dizzying
array of solutions to the mystery, and Amelia remains America’s favorite
missing person.
What has been missing, among all the hype and the hoopla, has been the
history. Not since George Washington chopped down the cherry tree has
the story of an American hero been so shot through with myth and legend.
In any investigation, establishing the known is essential to asking productive
questions about the unknown. The information commonly accepted to comprise
the facts of the Earhart case has traditionally been drawn chiefly from
Earhart’s own writings and from official government reports written after the
search for her was abandoned. The stories those sources tell are necessarily
colored by the motives and agendas of the people who wrote them.
Most of the arrangements for Earhart’s two world flight attempts–the
preparation of the aircraft, decisions regarding the route, the extent and nature
of the U.S. government’s involvement–were made via correspondence.
Nearly all of those documents survive, as do the logs of the ships and the
official records of the radio communications that directed the U.S. Navy
and Coast Guard search. All told, these sources amount to more than five
thousand individual items, each representing an undeniably genuine piece
of the Earhart story. Some of the pieces are well known and have been used
selectively in the past to support various theories, but the entire picture, scattered
and dispersed among dozens of archival files and private collections,
has been as indecipherable as a dropped box of jigsaw puzzle pieces. Once
collected, compiled, and assembled, however, these items provide a day-by-day,
and in some cases minute-by-minute, record of what really happened.
With the historical record in hand, information replaces interpretation,
documentation dispels speculation, and the mists of legend are swept away
to reveal a far more accurate and informative picture of what happened
than has ever before been available.
Finding Amelia means finding the real Amelia behind the public persona
and understanding the events that led to an empty sky over Howland Island.
Finding Amelia means sailing with the searchers, feeling their frustrations,
and observing their failures. Ultimately, finding Amelia means realizing that
there was always more confusion than there was mystery.
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