I, and I'm sure others, miss Gary's contributions to the discussion on the forum. Now we know what he's been spending his time on over the past two years.
The problem I have with Gary's way of seeing things is that it seems to come from his modern day view of what Amelia and Fred "would have" done, i.e. they would have set up an expanding box search for Howland, or how he dismisses potential evidence such as the Navy overflight or the post loss radio signals. Gary is convinced that the Navy flyers "would have" spotted AE and FN with some 95% certainty during a 20 minute search, and therefore dismisses the possibility that they could have been on Nikumaroro at the time of the overflight.
Similarly, he dismisses the post loss signals as being broadcasts out of Russia on reciprocal bearings to those that converge near Nikumaroro, but doesn't explain the lack of such receptions being heard prior to the flight (OK, maybe they just weren't reported), or more importantly why such random Russian transmissions just happen to peter out 5 days post loss. If Gary is right, the incidence of reported receptions should actually increase with the vastly increased number of listeners, but they don't, they peter out and stop altogether just when the entire world was listening most intently. One wonders what Gary thinks of the sonar anomaly that is the subject of TIGHAR's next expedition.
How does Gary explain these things? He doesn't, he conveniently ignores them and everything else related to TIGHAR's work on Nikumaroro because it does not match up with his crashed and sank theory. They are simply a series of odd coincidences to be ignored. I see a series of odd but possibly related events as the dots that need to be connected in order to solve a mystery.
The website is a nice slick piece of work full of opportunities to "support" the Status Project, but it doesn't indicate what anyone gets for contributing. To me, with all the secrecy, it looks like a big commercial publicity venture. Don't get me wrong, looks like you're having a lot of fun with all of this, but without any disclosure from the Stratus Project it is impossible to evaluate the merits of the current thinking and what Gary has channeled from Fred that has been overlooked by all the other Earhart researchers. Without some sort of visibility into the nitty gritty of your research, I'd be hesitant to donate money to the project.
Colin - perhaps you can elaborate on whether all of this is a commercial venture, and what you plan to do with the aircraft after you dredge it up from the bottom somewhere near Howland?
Conversely, what are you going to do if the Electra is found in the deep water next to Nikumaroro?
Are you sure you don't want to hedge your bet and apply some of your funding to the Niku deep water anomaly search? :-)
Looking forward to our next Guinness together.
Andrew