The Online Photographer

Amelia Earhart in 1937 in front of her Lockheed Electra

Using the faintest of photographic clues as inspiration, one of history's greatest treasure hunters may be on the brink of explaining one of the 20th century's enduring mysteries. Robert Ballard, the man who found the Titanic, is hot on the case of the mysterious disappearance of aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, looking for her Lockheed on the slope of an underwater volcanic mountain.

People like mysteries, but people especially like it when mysteries are solved. For instance, the world's attention was transfixed when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared from radar without apparent explanation en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in 2014. Many people (among them comedian Kathleen Madigan, who has made Flight 370 a staple of her stage act) became obsessed with the case. That one is all but solved now—although the main part of the plane hasn't been found, the circumstantial evidence is very strong that it was a case of mass murder / suicide by the plane's "sad and lonely" pilot in command, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and was planned carefully in cold blood. The evidence is set forth in a June, 2019 article by William Langewiesche in The Atlantic. [UPDATE: There are alternative theories, including the ones set out by Jeff Wise, who has written a book about Flight 370 and thinks the Russians were behind it. The problem with Wise's thesis as I read it is "...the inevitable question: Why? The unsatisfying answer is, we just don’t know." The foundation of my belief system is psychological, so motive tends to loom large in the avenues by which I typically try to get at truth. If I can't even imagine a motive and/or no one can propose one, then piles of Lincoln-Kennedy-type evidence really start to look circumstantial to me. But who knows what really happened? I certainly don't. (Thanks to Jonathan Murray for this.)  —MJ.]

Many theories about Earhart's fate have been put forward over the years, ranging from the plausible to the fantastical. One hangs on very slender evidence—a photograph taken near a tiny remote island by a man named Eric Bevington in 1937 (that date is per Wikipedia; an article on Artnet has it as 1940). Then called Gardner Island and now known as Nikumaroro, it is in the Phoenix Islands, lying Southeast of Earhart's intended target, Howland Island. A tiny, blurry object in a corner of the photograph, known as "The Bevington Object," is believed by a group called The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) to be the landing gear of Earhart's Lockheed Electra. TIGHAR has enthusiastically endorsed the possibility that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan landed on the island, were marooned, and perished there.

According to that Artnet article, "In order to enhance the blurry speck on the old photograph, TIGHAR’s Jeff Glickman, a forensic imaging expert, reached out to the government for help. The image ended up at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which employed classified technology to better see what Bevington had captured with his lens. An independent review by intelligence analysts at the Pentagon agreed with TIGHAR’s conclusion that the indistinct object looked like the plane’s landing gear."*

The Nikumaroro hypothesis is considered the most plausible of the "landed and survived" theories. Most experts and analysts believe the pair ran out of fuel over the tractless reaches of the Pacific and simply crashed into the ocean, and such "crashed and sank" theories perhaps have greater plausibility. TIGHAR's claims that sundry objects discovered on Nikumaroro—including a skeleton and scraps of aircraft aluminum and Plexiglas—could have belonged to Earhart have so far not risen to the standard of proof.

But TIGHAR's numerous search expeditions were not very well funded, and its efforts at underwater searches were hampered by technical difficulties. Enter the celebrated Ballard, whose backer is none other than The National Geographic Society. His search will be very well funded indeed...the "landed and survived" Nikumaroro Theory put to the acid test. Meanwhile, TIGHAR has gone silent. What do they know?

They'll tell us soon...in a National Geographic Special, naturally, set to air on October 20th.

My guess, and of course it's only a guess, is that it will be fascinating as well as entertaining to revisit the great Earhart saga. It always is. She's become a staple of dramatic narrative biographies for young adults, such as Candace Fleming's Amelia Lost**, not to mention the inspiration for romantic pop-culture masterpieces like Joni Mitchell's stunning "Amelia." But it's probably most likely that no new light will be shed on the fate of the woman whom Tom D. Couch, Senior Curator at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, once called "our favorite missing person." The vast Pacific has swallowed her up, along with all the other mysteries it holds.

Mike

*Quite a stretch to use "the" as the fourth-to-last word in that last sentence rather than "a." Seems to me like just another incidence of that popular trope about photographs, found in numerous television show plots, that you just need to "enlarge" photographs more and more to see effectively infinitely more information, or "enhance" an image infinitely to uncover endless additional information...that is, you can start with a little blurry speck that is not even clearly part of an airplane, then determine that it is part of an airplane, then determine that it is part of a 1930s airplane, then determine that it is part of a Lockheed Electra, then determine that it looks like part of "the" plane's landing gear...that is, part of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan's plane's landing gear. I'm not a "forensic imaging expert," but I know enough about photography to call big fat BS on that one. And incidentally, this whole quotation, just by itself, is a sterling example of a logical fallacy called "appeal to authority."

**Unlike most adults, I don't scorn to read books for young adults occasionally—they are often excellent brief primers and are usually better illustrated than books aimed at adults. As I mentioned recently, my favorite biography of Mathew Brady is a young adult book, albeit one written by a Brady expert and scholar, George Sullivan.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Severian: "Mike wrote: 'Unlike most adults, I don't scorn to read books for young adults occasionally....' Good company you are keeping, Mike. The recent massive winner on Jeopardy, James Holzhauer, claimed that children's books were a key part of his strategy to learn a decent amount about a lot of subjects. According to James, 'They are chock-full of infographics, pictures and all kinds of stuff to keep the reader engaged.' Mike, hopefully your reading also leads you to a $2,462,216 payday.  :-) "

Rob White: "I was privileged to be visiting the wonderful Naval Air Museum in Pensacola, Florida, about 10 years ago when they introduced a fully restored Lockheed Electra like the one Amelia Earhart flew on that fateful mission, and I saw a presentation by TIGHAR on their search efforts, including archival movies of the actual start of her mission. One of the intriguing parts showed what they believe was damage to the radio wires as the plane took off from the airport on the final leg. The theory then was that this hampered the ability to communicate their location and may have contributed to the failure to find them."

Chuck Albertson: "I would much rather that Ballard and Nat Geo take a look for MH370. I fly 777s all the time."