The lesson here to me is that while so many things are possible, and so many ideas are attractive to adhere to, they are all conjecture until one has firm evidence in-hand.
There is to me also a difference in how these scenarios may offer traction toward testing the hypothesis / solving the mystery, or not. I'm not sure this level of discussion actually moves the effort forward at this point; perhaps it will be useful one day to interpret more fully 'what happened'. Until we have a true smoking gun in-hand, this level of discussion is all just so much speculation, IMHO.
Mr. Neville, while it may be good fun to play cat and mouse with this subject, as I indicated down thread there is no evidence or proof that Amelia Earhart or Fred Noonan were ever injured as a result of a crash on Gardner Island, said crash is a bone of contention in and of itself. I would highly recommend closing this thread unless and until tangible evidence is shown to the contrary. Science doesn't embrace speculation.
The logic of science boiled down to one, essential idea. It comes from Richard Feynman, one of the great scientists of the 20th century, who wrote it on the blackboard during a class at Cornell in 1964.
Think about what he's saying. Science is our way of describing — as best we can — how the world works. The world, it is presumed, works perfectly well without us. Our thinking about it makes no important difference. It is out there, being the world. We are locked in, busy in our minds. And when our minds make a guess about what's happening out there, if we put our guess to the test, and we don't get the results we expect, as Feynman says, there can be only one conclusion: we're wrong.
The world knows. Our minds guess. In any contest between the two, The World Out There wins. It doesn't matter, Feynman tells the class, "how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is, if it disagrees with the experiment, it is wrong."
This view is based on an almost sacred belief that the ways of the world are unshakable, ordered by laws that have no moods, no variance, that what's "Out There" has no mind. And that we, creatures of imagination, colored by our ability to tell stories, to predict, to empathize, to remember — that we are a separate domain, creatures different from the order around us. We live, full of mind, in a mindless place. The world, says the great poet Wislawa Szymborska, is "inhuman." It doesn't work on hope, or beauty or dreams. It just...is.