Earhart Evidence Offered: Metal, Sole, Bottle Cap

Tiny stitching on a woman’s shoe, the cap of a medicine bottle and letters on a scrap of metal were held out Monday as proof that legendary aviator Amelia Earhart died on a waterless South Pacific atoll, rather than in the ocean or at the hands of Japanese soldiers.

At a packed press conference here, an investigator for a nonprofit group asserted that his organization’s four-year search had solved a mystery that has puzzled and fascinated the world since Earhart and her navigator disappeared during their 1937 attempt to circle the globe.

“For 55 years her fate has been a mystery,” said Richard Gillespie, executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery of Wilmington, Del., as he stood near a glass case containing the group’s evidence. “Today that mystery is solved.”

Other experts remained unconvinced, however. Gillespie’s group turned its evidence over to the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency that investigates plane crashes. While it found nothing inconsistent with Gillespie’s theory, officials also found no absolute proof among the debris.

And Thomas Crouch, chairman of the aeronautics department of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, said he doubts that Gillespie’s evidence will end the long-running controversy. The proof is circumstantial and lacks any irrefutable evidence, such as the serial numbers that appear on so many aircraft parts, he said.

“You don’t have AE’s signature anywhere; you don’t have any serial numbers,” said Crouch. “This still requires a great leap of faith. I’m a skeptic.”

Gillespie’s theory is based on a presumption that after leaving Lae, New Guinea, Earhart failed to find her destination of Howland Island and instead headed for Nikumaroro Island, 1,600 miles southwest of Hawaii.

When they reached the atoll, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan made a safe landing on a flat, dry reef that was temporarily exposed because of low tide, he said. For three days, they sent out radio distress calls.

Then a punishing storm smashed their Lockheed 10-E Electra aircraft and swept it over the edge of the reef into deep water. Within days, the pair probably died of exposure and lack of fresh water, Gillespie theorized.

Perhaps the most important piece of evidence, said Gillespie, was a 23-by-19-inch scrap of alloy fuselage “skin” that the investigators believe was ripped from the belly of the aircraft when it was pounded by the storm.

The scrap, recovered last year amid beachfront vegetation, is made of the same aluminum alloy that was used to repair the Earhart plane’s underside after it was damaged during an abortive takeoff earlier in the journey. Two letters, “AD,” that appear on the scrap identify it as coming from the manufacturer’s lot that was used on the aircraft.

The letters also establish that it was made before World War II, and thus did not come from any wartime military aircraft. Earhart’s craft was one of only three planes that are known to have flown in the region, Gillespie said.

He said that a 34-inch copper antenna wire also found on the island was of the type used on the Electra aircraft. The antenna was attached at one end to the aircraft skin and at the other to the engine.

“The match is perfect with every documentable aspect of that skin,” Gillespie said.

He said that examination of a Cat’s Paw brand rubber sole found on the island showed it to be a replacement for a woman’s shoe sole, probably a Size 9. The examination was made by employees at Biltrite Corp., which now owns the Cat’s Paw company.

The sole had the kind of fine stitching and small eyelets that would be found on women’s rather than men’s shoes, Gillespie said.

Although Pacific islanders called the Gilbertese occupied the island from 1937 until 1963, their women never wore shoes, Gillespie said. He showed 1937 photographs of Earhart wearing a blucher-style oxford of a kind that he said would use such replacement soles.

He said that while Nikumaroro has all the beauty of a South Seas island, it also has the harsh conditions that probably would have killed Earhart and Noonan within days. Temperatures on the beach rise as high as 120 degree Fahrenheit, he said, noting that the island got less than three-quarters of an inch of rain that year.

Gillespie said that his group is attempting to raise money so it can return to the site in mid-1993 to try to recover the aircraft, which it believes lies in deep water off the edge of the reef.