Tinian
From TIGHAR
The search for graves in 2004 was not an official TIGHAR project, but members of TIGHAR participated and filed regular reports about their work.
St. John Naftel (born 1902), a resident of Montgomery, Alabama, was a Marine gunner on Tinian after it was taken from the Japanese in 1944. He said he was shown a set of graves where Earhart and Noonan had been buried after being executed. In 2003 he returned to the island accompanied by then-U.S. Navy archaeologist Jennings Bunn and pointed out the site. Bunn, now retired, put together an excavation project, funded out of his own pocket and staffed by volunteers, obtained a permit from the Northern Marianas Historic Preservation Office, and conducted a search for the graves.
