New Amelia Earhart documents challenge thoroughness of search

( NewsNation ) — The disappearance of Amelia Earhart is one of the most enduring mysteries of the modern age. Now, documents released last year could suggest the search for the aviator was not as thorough as it has been portrayed.

Jeff Garcia, a systems designer and investigative researcher, joined “Reality Check” to discuss his analysis of the files and the contradictions in the search.

He believes that the Navy had tunnel vision during the search and that claims of a thorough search for the plane are not entirely accurate.

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“It contradicts itself, you can’t have a thorough search yet put all your efforts around one location, that just doesn’t make sense,” he said.

The plane carrying Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, was over the Pacific Ocean as Earhart attempted to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe in flight. The U.S. Coast Guard ship Itasca was sent to assist with navigation at sea.

The last radio transmissions indicated Earhart was having trouble locating the Itasca and was running low on fuel.

When the ship lost contact with Earhart, a search was launched, centered around Howland Island.

Garcia suggests that focus was a mistake that could have kept searchers from finding Earhart and Noonan.

The last thing Earhart said was that she was following “the line,” referring to a sun line, a typical line of position of the era.

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“If you would go north, running the line north, there’s just open ocean,” Garcia said. “If you run it south, then you have the Phoenix Island group, and there’s a bunch of atolls down in that direction.”

In that scenario, Garcia said, it would make more sense for Earhart to head south in hopes of finding a place to land.

He highlighted the Nikumaroro theory, which suggests that Earhart went down on the uninhabited island, which was then known as Gardner Island.

In the files, Garcia found that Navy ships searching for Earhart had seen lights, which could have been flares from the south, toward Nikumaroro. There were also reports of distress calls from a woman.

The Navy dismissed both of those, Garcia said, because they believed that Earhart went down in the water, where it would have been impossible for her to make a distress call.

“They called off the search to go that direction and focused all their effort on Howland Island because they thought it was a plane that went down in the water and was a possible rescue mission,” he said.

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Later, in the 1940s, human remains were discovered on Nikumaroro. At the time, they were believed to belong to a European man, based on the measurements. The remains were lost at some point, preventing DNA analysis that could positively identify them with modern technology. But a later reexamination of measurements found them consistent with Earhart’s build.

More recently, a pilot found an anomaly on Google Earth that could potentially be a crashed plane on Nikumaroro, and efforts are underway to conduct a new search of the island, which is part of Kiribati.

Garcia noted another contradiction in the files regarding Earhart’s last transmission. In one version, she says the plane is running out of gas with only half an hour left. In another, she is recorded as simply saying the plane is low on fuel.

If searchers believed the first transmission was the accurate one, then it might have led to the limitation of the search, Garcia suggested, based on how far she could potentially fly before crashing.

“If you lock onto something, that she went down around Howland, everything else might get dismissed,” he said. “It could have been a very extensive search focused on the wrong area.”

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