Which is it? Did she crash and sink, or did she die as a castaway?
Nobody yet knows for sure, but which case is stronger?
New information on a new website may make it easier to decide. The website is called "Search for Amelia" and it presents the findings of the Waitt Institute for Discovery. Mr. Ted Waitt is an extraordinarily wealthy individual and a devotee of the Crashed & Sank theory of Earhart's disappearance advanced by author and long-time Earhart researcher Elgen Long in his 1999 book "Amelia Earhart - The Mystery Solved." In 2006, Waitt secretly funded a deep sea search for the Earhart Electra by the underwater technology company Nauticos. That search of the ocean floor near Howland Island was unsuccessful.
About that time, Waitt decided to start a motion picture production company called Avalon Pictures. It's one film so far is the 2009 Hollywood biopic "Amelia" starring Hilary Swank. (For my two-part review of the film see http://tighar.org/news/)
In 2007, Waitt formed a nonprofit organization called the "Waitt Institute for Discovery" and in early 2009 mounted another strictly secret deep sea search for the Earhart plane using sophisticated Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (UAV) technology from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. That 38-day search of the waters near Howland Island was also unsuccessful.
The Waitt Institute for Discovery has recently decided to go public with a website that presents the results of its multi-million dollar searches and the research upon which they were based. See http://searchforamelia.org/
We applaud the Waitt Institute's decision to follow TIGHAR's long-standing example and share its research. We'll take a close look at their work (as we hope they do ours) and offer them our observations. We'll share those observations with you here on the Facebook Earhart Project Group and on the TIGHAR website.
Is it likely that Amelia Earhart went down at sea as the Waitt Institute contends, or is the TIGHAR Institute's hypothesis that she ended her days on Nikumaroro the stronger possibility? Now that both sides have laid their cards on the table we can, at last, make a fair comparison.
As always, your questions and comments will be more than welcome. This should be an interesting exercise. Don't be selfish. Invite your friends to join the group. The more brains the better.
