Alternative theories

TIGHAR believes that the Niku hypothesis is the theory that best fits all of the facts of the case as known to date. Others disagree. TIGHAR has made a good-faith effort to take other theories into consideration and see how well they fit the facts of the case.

Splashed-and-Sank

This is the most intuitively appealing and a very reasonable theory. The official verdict was that the plane had probably gone down at sea and sunk without a trace. The supposed distress calls were declared to be either misunderstandings or outright hoaxes.

"Commander Walter K. Thompson decided fairly early that Earhart must have run out of fuel and that she landed the aircraft at sea shortly after the 08:43 (20:13 GMT) transmission received by Itasca."

Near Howland Island

Elgen Long assumes that Earhart ran out of gas very shortly after the last transmission, relatively near to Howland Island.

Nauticos has made at least two deep-sea searches within the zone that Long calculates to be the most like region to find the downed aircraft.

After spying

There are a multitude of theories that Earhart and Noonan used the round-the-world flight as a cover story for spying on Japanese military installations in the Pacific en route to Howland Island.

The first version of this theory appeared in Flight for Freedom, a 1943 movie that showed a woman pilot and her navigator plunging into the ocean, sacrificing their lives in a noble attempt to glean valuable information about the Japanese military buildup in their Pacific territories.

Most of the "Captured by the Japanese" scenarios below are variants of this theory, although some may suppose that the Japanese captured Earhart and Noonan by accident and merely held them as prisoners of war on suspicion of spying.

Caught spying

Died on Tinian

Two TIGHAR members helped to excavate an area on Tinian where a person claimed to have seen Earhart and Noonan buried. Many interesting things were found, but no human remains.

Died on any number of Pacific Islands

The Pacific islands are awash with stories about people seeing a woman who looked like Earhart being held captive in Japanese prisons and/or executed by the Japanese.

Moleski argues that any white woman held a sufficient length of time in a prisoner-of-war camp would come to resemble Earhart: slender (emaciated), with close-cropped hair, wearing prison garments. There may be a grain of truth about women prisoners-of-war, but no persuasive evidence has been presented that any of them are true.

If one of the "caught spying" stories is true, then all of the rest have to be cases of mistaken identity. It is inconceivable that all of the legends about Earhart suffering at the hands of the Japanese can be true--there are too many of them from too many sources for one person to have been the same victim in all of them.

Survived and came home

The unsigned Love to Mother letter fueled many theories about Earhart surviving captivity and returning to the United States in secret. Ron Bright has uncovered the full story of this enigmatic note.

Came home and hid in New Jersey

Colonel Rollin Reineck, USAF (ret.), thought he saw Earhart at a party, disguised as Irene Bolam. He developed this theory at length in Amelia Earhart Survived (The Paragon Agency Publishers, 2003). TIGHAR judges that there are many serious defects in his case, not the least among them the fact that Mrs. Bolam strenuously denied the allegation and won a judgment against Reineck in court.

Crashed elsewhere

In the Phoenix Islands

Kanton Island

In 1998, a thirteen-person team investigated whether one of the Electra's engines had been helicoptered into Kanton (Canton) Island. No radial engine was found, though the dump was it was probably buried was located. Subsequent research among personnel who served on Kanton at the time and calculation of the fuel necessary to carry a radial engine from Nikumaroro to Kanton by helicopter ruled out the likelihood that the engine was from the Electra. In all likelihood, it was from an aircraft that crashed on Kanton itself.