There's an odd paradox in the historical record.
• British administrator Gerald Gallagher suspected that the castaway whose partial skeleton he found on Gardner Island in 1940 might be Amelia Earhart.
• Gallagher, a licensed pilot himself, certainly knew that Earhart had disappeared in an airplane.
But, in all of his correspondence about the bones there is no mention of a search for - or even curiosity about - possible aircraft wreckage.
• At least some of the Pacific Islanders who lived on the island knew about the discovery of the bones and the suspicion that they were Earhart's.
• There was clearly a tradition among the islanders during and after WWII that there had been an airplane wreck somewhere on the island in the early days of the settlement.
But, none of the stories about "the downed plane" connect it with the stories about the bones that were said to be Earhart's.
How could two legends - to us so obviously related - exist independently and simultaneously on the same island without being connected to each other?
I think it a paradox if looking for a tie in of the two events, bones and wreckage.
I would imagine if Gallagher reported bones, he would have also reported wreckage. Yet he did not, and one simple explanation is the wreckage memories and stories happened AFTER Gallagher was dead.
We have Gallagher's writings that don't mention wreckage at all. I believe the reason is the fore mentioned theory that Gallagher thought the castaway had floated ashore or otherwise arrived without plane.
Then years later, after Gallagher had passed, the stories came out from the islanders and Navy men remembering at least partial aircraft wreckage. As mentioned numerous times, memories are shaky, and years get confused.
Are these later reports any more or less valid than the "saipan" memories?
I take them all with a grain of salt, years melt memories into shapes that only vaguely resemble reality.
The truth is there is not one letter or memo dated when Gallagher is alive, from anyone military or civilian, that mentions aircraft wreckage being found or reported found on Gardner. This complete lack of historical papers or letters mentioning aircraft wreckage, likely means there was no visible aircraft wreckage.
Therefore there is no paradox if the two events (bones/wreckage) were disassociated entirely in time.
Good points I think. As much as I'd like to claim the paradox as such, whatever wreckage may have been around at the time of the bones discovery must have not been evident to Gallagher - whether unfound or simply not present. Maybe if it even occurred to Gallagher to wonder about it, and it was not in evidence, he simply dismissed the notion as if "who knows, perhaps gone into the sea". The apparent paradox therefore seems to me to be merely a reflection of what Gallagher could directly observe and report, with little speculation.
We know that aircraft stuff did turn up - at least some of it not of an Electra; we also know the PB4Y stuff likely didn't fly in and crash or land there, but must have been imported. We also know by TIGHAR's own experience with them that islanders own expression of things isn't always as straightforward as we think - whether innocently wanting to please the listener, or simply connecting the dots slightly differently out of a language/comprehension gap. Emily's story can be compelling; so can the story of wreckage as a source for the fishing tackle, etc. - but how can we know that an "airplane wreck" wasn't just some junk brought to the island from another place for the raw material, happening to arrive early in the colonization of Gardner?
I'd like to make more of those accounts as having to do with the Electra and wonder more at the "paradox", but objectively I don't think I can. Of what I've seen of all this to-date I think the airplane wreckage remains elusive and still demanding of Electra wreckage if the airplane, or stories thereof, are to serve as a smoking gun.
Personally, I can look at the body of things found to date and assign some notion of probability of Earhart having been there (subjectively by perusal - YMMV). But with the intriguing exceptions of the artifact
2-3-V-2 curved plexiglass and artifact
2-2-V-1 'skin' I don't see a lot of hope for proof via airframe, short of finding major wreckage. I don't think Gallagher was able to get us closer to it simply because it was probably not on the island to be seen or reported credibly at the time.