Following up on the satellite photo idea and the NASA web-report of the summer study that included investigation of Nikumaroro, let me raise a question of the expertise available on the forum.

The NASA site Remote Imagery indicated that there was no SAR imagery of the island and that was the ideal product to have:

Active radar satellite images were needed to see objects under water. The only way to get active radar satellite images of Truk and Gardner would be to pay thousands of dollars to send commercial satellites to cover the area. The image in Appendix A-2 is a photo of Gardner Island also with varying amounts of cloud cover. On this image, however, there is a break in the clouds and Gardner can be seen clearly. By finding an active radar image researchers would have been able to see if anything could be identified along the shoreline or in a lagoon at the southeast end of the island.

There is another NASA program, AIRSAR. This uses a DC-8 to obtain SAR images. It appears to be primarily used for resources surveys, sometimes archeology. It is at least partly user-funded. AIRSAR is on the web at AIRSAR and they just finished the 2000 Pacific Rim survey. They obtained no images of Nikumaroro. As to the future, well, the possibilities need discussion.

First:

AIRSAR flights are performed in response to flight requests submitted by the Principal Investigators (PIs) of NASA-sponsored scientific investigations and by sponsors from other organizations who contract to acquire AIRSAR data on a reimbursable basis.

There are 2 NASA/Space shuttle photos of Nikumaroro on the internet. NASA lists it as Gardner Island in their search list. The typical shuttle photos don't have enough resolution to be of much use, other than for drawing an outline map of the island. You can see that it is an atoll, with vegetation, a reef, and beaches. You can not see the wrecked freighter, or anything smaller. I'd sure like to see a high resolution photo, either from space imaging or some fly-over .

Dan Postellon
TIGHAR#2263

In Betty's notebook there is a reference to AE signal as "This is Amelia Putnam."

I ran across an interesting entry about AE as described by George Putnam in his autobiography Wide Margins, written in 1942. He is describing various Ameila traits and preferences and his marriage to her. He writes:

But she had a kind of flat conviction that she should continue as a matter of course to be called by her own name. If it had been hers by happenstance in the beginning, in the end she had done the things which gave it distinct personal significance. In this I sided with her... and cannot remember introducing her even once as Mrs. Putnam.

Of other note, GP doesn't describe any of the search and World Flight events in this book except receiving some letters after her disapperance and that she was "lost near Howland Island."

I didn't see any other insights into the mystery in this book.

LTM,
Ron Bright

According to Betty's anecdotal elaboration on the notebook, she first heard, "This is Amelia Earhart" repeated several times, which prompted her to get out her notebook and started copying down what she heard. When she later heard, "This is Amelia Earhart Putnam" she wrote only "Amelia Putnam" to save time.

What Betty actually wrote in her notebook is, "This is Amelia Putman" (not Putnam). As part of my inteview with Betty, I asked her to write down phrases I dictated out of the notebook. When I said, "This is Amelia Putnam" she wrote "This is Amelia Putman."

It's also worth noting that, although she was otherwise able to copy down the words and phrases I read quite accurately, when I read off the strings of numbers from the notebook she did much worse.

LTM,
Ric

I had an insight over Christmas vacation.

Sorry I can't link it to preceding threads. But someone had asked why all of the post-loss stories presume or assert that Fred must have been addled in the landing.

My theory is that if Fred was not out of commission due to an injury, he would have given Amelia far more specific information to broadcast about where they were. I suppose it's also a way to account for the fact that all of the post-loss transmissions star Amelia (they do, don't they?).

No big deal if I'm wrong. The wreckage will still be where it is or isn't regardless of what we imagine happened to Fred's head.

Marty #2359

Interesting insight. So far, of the reports of post-loss voice receptions that include mention of gender, most --- but not all --- report hearing a woman's voice.

Do we know how many of the 22 losses went down at sea, as opposed to crashing on an island/reef where the metal could be recovered?

--Chris Kennedy

Here's the list:

LTM,
Ric

Any carriers ever in the area? How about cruisers with aircraft embarked? The Japanese might have sent a sub with its airplane to have a look at some point.

Mike

There was, of course, intense carrier activity up around the Gilberts associated with Operation Galvanic (the landings at Tarawa) in the late fall of 1943 but we know of no such operations anywhere near the Phoenix Group. No need. Little or no enemy activity in that area. Canton got bombed a couple times by very long-range missions from Tarawa and there was apparently some prowling around by long-range flying boats. There were some submarine scares at canton and even one at Gardner in 1944, but no evidence that any subs were actually there. Airplane-carrying submarines were very rare.

Aside from events at Canton during the fall of 1943, the Phoenix group was really outside the active war zone.

Yes, but how many before 1940, or whatever date the earliest accounts of airplane wreckage on Niku date back to ?

Emily's anecdote about old aircraft wreckage on the reef dates from sometime between her arrival on Gardner in early 1940 to her departure in November 1941. There are no known losses in the region, or the whole Central Pacific for that matter, prior to that time which could account for that wreckage --- except one.

The chances of an unknown aircraft loss in that region prior to that time is so remote as to approach nil. Bottom line: if Emily saw aircraft wreckage, it was NR16020.

Actually, I find there to be something really disturbing about the similarities noted in all the post loss messages that I don't think has been brought up before. That is, none of them, to my knowledge, gives any indication WHERE Earhart is, when she should have been easily able to give a rough distance and direction calculation from Howland even if Noonan were unable to give a longitude/latitude fix. Why are we all assuming that Earhart needed Noonan to be coherent in order to tell her where she was before she could report an approximate position to the world? This reminds me of the assumption we are all making that Noonan died first on Gardner.

Here's my argument: First, no one disputes that Earhart knew she must have been close to Howland the morning of July 2nd (the "we must be on you but cannot see you" message). Using this as a starting point, I think it is a safe assumption that she would also have known her approximate speed. She also would have known roughly how long she was flying after that message, and the general direction (we are "running north/south on the line"....) Am I missing something, or can you simply multiply your hours in the air from the "we must be on you" message times your airspeed and direction, and then report something like "This is Earhart. Crash landed on reef about 450 miles south of Howland". While it's hardly exact, this is a simple calculation that she wouldn't have needed Noonan to calculate as a longitude/latitude. Also, if Earhart was in the situation we suspect (crashed, delirious navigator, rising water and very low power supplies to use for radio transmission) this message, or one like it, has real value--I'm trying to get rescued fast. The best way to do that is to use my limited resources to give rescuers the best message I can as to where I can be found. I wouldn't worry about hoaxes, reading off the names of wrecked ships near me, embarrassing the Roosevelts, etc. Indeed, I am beginning to wonder whether the "injured Noonan" similarities is a fiction created by hoaxers to conveniently remove him from the picture so as to account for the fact that Earhart doesn't include a position report in her messages? What hoaxers probably would not have known at the time is that the "we must be on you" message existed, that a time can be assigned to it, and that Earhart also gave the "running north/south on the line transmission". From these, she should have been able to give a rough distance/direction from Howland calculation, yet none of these transmissions (including Betty's) report this. This may be the most telling coincidence of all the post loss messages.

--Chris Kennedy

Actually, several of the alleged post loss messages contain apparent attempts to describe location. "281 north Howland" is just one example. There are several references to latitude and longitude, and other cases of estimated distances from Howland. We're not going to be able to draw any conclusions about this until we've looked at all the alleged post-loss messages as a body and made what determinations we can about which are more and which are less credible.

8th Edition owners will find a ton of new material authored by Randy Jacobson mounted online effective 01/22/01, including a moment-by-moment, message-by-message account of what happened in the Itasca radio room. We expect to begin sending out hard copy soon.

In other news, the analytical laboratories at the Winterthur Museum here in Delaware are testing the shoe fragments recovered on Niku in 1991 to confirm their material makeup ( a case of dotting old "i"s and crossing old "t"s) while the forensic imaging lab at Photek in Oregon is doing a hi-tech measurement of the shoe-on-the-wing photo to address the questions about sole versus heel length raised recently by Rollin Reineck.

Other work by Photek has determined that the "dash-dot" object visible in the 1937 Bevington photo is in the same location as a large section of Norwich City debris which appears in photos taken during the 1938/39 New Zealand survey. I'll write up a Research Bulletin showing how this was done but the net effect is that we do not (yet) have photographic corroboration of Emily's anecdote about aircraft wreckage on the reef.

Expedition Team member Van Hunn and I are finalizing our plans for a research trip to Tarawa in early March, and Expedition Team member Skeet Gifford will soon be coordinating with Space Imaging on the acquisition of satellite imagery of our favorite atoll.

Meanwhile, Tom King and his co-conspirators are wrapping up the last details of their book about TIGHAR's investigation-so-far and hope to have it to the publisher for production next week. Release is targeted for July.

Preparations are also underway for this year's offering of the TIGHAR Introductory Course in Aviation Archaeology and Historic Preservation combined with a Training Expedition to a real live (or real dead) historic crash site. We hope to be able to announce the details and begin accepting registrants by February 15th.

And the beat goes on.......

LTM,
Ric

I had time today to read the TIGHAR Tracks for January, 2001. It is a great publication, and I hope it helps to bring in the cash you need for Niku IIII.

I'm very sad that you threw in the false, unproven, and unprovable generalization that "You can not [sic] prove a negative hypothesis" on p. 7. Mathematicians, scientists, and historians do this all the time. For example, the Michelson-Morley experiments in the late 19th century proved that there was no aether acting as a substratum for electro-magnetic radiation. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is a universal negation thoroughly supported by all available evidence from quantum mechanics: measuring the velocity of quantum particles disturbs their position and vice-versa. To come closer to home, your trip to the Lady of the Lake showed that parts were missing from the airframe; there is no reason why further evidence, as yet undiscovered by TIGHAR, might not prove some day that the belly antenna was lost at Lae. Just because the photo alone is not sufficient evidence does not mean that the hypothesis of antenna loss is an Unprovable Negative.

A few more negatives known to be true:

• There is no Man in the Moon.
• The moon is not made of green cheese.
• There are no canals on Mars built by intelligent beings and visible on earth.
• There is no face on Mars.
• There is no formal system of logic that can be proven to be both consistent and complete.
• There is at the present time no commonly-accepted Grand Unification Theory of the four forces of nature.

• AE and FN did not splash down in mid-ocean.
• AE was not taken prisoner by the Japanese.
• AE did not return to the U.S. in disguise.

Marty

Any hypothesis can be stated in negative terms. That doesn't make it a negative hypothesis. A hypothesis can only be proven by confirming the truth of a positive statement.

We can only prove that AE and FN did not splash down in mid-ocean by finding them someplace else.

Ditto for AE was not taken prisoner by the Japanese.

To prove that AE did not return to the U.S. in disguise we'll need to find her remains someplace else.