Seeing this thread, I went to read the linked post. Then I read the entire thread that post was on. It includes some personal anecdotes of close calls people have had, as well as references to other searches for missing hikers.
It provided food for thought about TIGHAR's searches. Some tidbits:
1. People don't always do what appears logical to the searchers, or might even appear logical to the missing people if they were in their right minds. Bill Ewasko was found in an area that had been dismissed as a place to which he would never go. Now that this is known, the people who have been looking are trying to reconstruct how he got there, including whether there was something that made sense to him at the time that isn't evident to them, and whether (or to what extent) his judgment was impaired by thirst, hunger, fatigue and possibly injury.
2. It is easy to miss something, even when you are looking for it. Tom Mahood and another search party had both been close to the location but not seen anything. How much easier it is to miss it when you are not looking for it, and don't even know it is there. A question that comes up sometimes about Earhart is how all the visitors to Gardner starting in late 1937 didn't see anything, if there was something there to see (which in fact the islanders did later see). (That said, Ewasko's remains were found accidentally by a party of hikers who just happened to go to that spot.) The earliest contemporary report of finding anything on Gardner was when Gallagher reported the bones, and the islanders had found them some little time before. Reports that there was a plane wreck on the island when the colonists arrived are not contemporary (they were made years later). A lot of people had been mapping and surveying, yet saw nothing.
Then I went and read more of Otherhand, which I have also read a good bit of over the years -- he hasn't put anything there yet about the discovery, but I spent an hour reading about his search for traces of the Michelson experiment locations. Down the rabbit hole I go...
LTM,
Don
