by Monty Fowler, former TIGHAR member no. 2189 E C R SP, 1998-2016

A Thought Experiment

1) You are handed a closed, unlabeled cardboard box about 2x2x2 feet square.

2) When you open the box, you find a hodgepodge of: various-sized  pieces of aluminum sheet metal, some formed into shapes, many bent and corroded, a few with many small holes drilled in them; small plastic bags containing odd-looking lumps of dirt; various unidentifiable bits of metal, many severely corroded; glass fragments of different colors; everyday things like buttons and zipper pulls; pieces of scratched translucent plastic; numerous web page printouts and thick technical-looking reports; odd-shaped pieces of wood and maybe roofing material; broken cutlery of some kind; parts of what might be several different shoes and shoe soles; coated and uncoated bits of wiring in various colors and lengths; some kind of round machined-looking metal parts; black rubber and plastic-like tubing pieces; badly-rusted metal fragments ... you get the idea.

3) You are then told by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recover (TIGHAR) that the "preponderance of evidence" in this average-sized cardboard box conclusively solves one of the greatest and most enduring mysteries of the 20th century - the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

Pause for a moment to take that in.

pause again . . .

OK? Now for some context.

For more than 30 years, TIGHAR has vociferously and aggressively publicized its "Nikumaroro Hypothesis" - its unwavering belief that famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan crash-landed on Nikumaroro Island during their around-the-world flight in 1937, survived for a time, and then died as castaways on that remote Pacific Ocean island. To try and prove that hypothesis, TIGHAR has spent more than $5 million^* and mounted more than a dozen "expeditions" to Nikumaroro in an effort to find the evidence that will solve the Earhart mystery once and for all.

Has it succeeded? Ric Gillespie, TIGHAR's longtime executive director, emphatically says, "Yes, the basic mystery is solved. Earhart and Noonan landed and died on Gardner Island [Nikumaroro], but there's still plenty to learn."

Many others disagree that what TIGHAR has found amounts to anything more than bits of random stuff with numerous plausible explanations as to how it got on Nikumaroro. Some who disagree have been strongly criticized, belittled and/or attacked by TIGHAR whenever such disagreements are publicly raised.

The Background

Nikumaroro Island is one of the most remote places on Earth by virtue of its location in the central Pacific Ocean just below the Equator. It's about 2,050 miles southwest of Hawaii and 625 miles north of Samoa. It is also about 400 miles southeast of Howland Island, Earhart's intended destination in 1937. At about five miles long and one-and-a-half miles wide, the triangular-shaped atoll contains a shallow central lagoon and wide fringing reef. It is densely vegetated and populated by dozens of species of birds, insects, animals and fish. Offshore, the atoll slopes steeply down to the ocean floor a thousand or more feet below.

Previously known as Gardner Island, Nikumaroro is one of the Phoenix Islands and part of the Republic of Kiribati. Although it was uninhabited for much of modern history, it has seen spurts of human activity, starting with the ancient Polynesians who left a few traces of possible graves and other indications behind. Below are some of the major known visits:

• 1824: British whaling ship Eliza Ann sighted and noted the island.

• 1825: US whaling ship Ganges recorded the island's position and named it Gardner Island.

• 1840: On August 19, the USS Vincennes of the US Exploring Expedition confirmed the island's position and gathered information for the first crude map of the island.

• 1892: On May 28, the island was claimed for the United Kingdom by HMS Curacoa. Entrepreneur John T. Arundel then moved 29 islanders there to plant coconuts as a cash crop. Some simple structures were built, but the project failed within a year due to severe drought.

• 1929: On Nov. 29, the British steamer SS Norwich City ran hard aground on the western reef of Gardner at night during a storm. The crew of 35 abandoned ship. Eleven men died trying to make it to shore; three of those were buried on the beach after they washed ashore and eight bodies were not recovered. The survivors camped near collapsed structures from the derelict Arundel coconut plantation and were rescued a few days later.

• 1935: On August 18, HMS Wellington stopped at the island and completed the first reasonably accurate survey of its shape.

• 1937: On Feb. 15, HMS Leith stopped at the island briefly to erect a flagpole and notice board proclaiming it as British territory.

• 1937: On July 2, Pilot Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan vanished somewhere in the central Pacific Ocean during their World Flight attempt.

• 1937: On July 9, a flight of US Navy seaplanes flew over Gardner Island as part of the Navy's massive search for Earhart. They noted "signs of recent habitation" but saw no people after repeated circlings and power-dives to attract attention.

• 1937: On October 13-15, a party of Gilbertese islanders and British colonial officials inspected Gardner Island as a possible site for future colonization by settlers from the overcrowded Gilbert Islands.

• 1938: On Dec. 1,  members of the British Pacific Islands Survey Expedition arrived from New Zealand to evaluate the island as a possible location for either seaplane or aircraft bases.

• 1938: On Dec. 20, the first party of Gilbertese islanders and a British colonial official landed to begin constructing the new island village. This effort peaked in the mid-1950s with a population of about 100 and continued until 1963.

• 1939: In November and December, the USS Bushnell completed a detailed land survey of the entire island.

• 1940: On Sept. 23, the Gardner Island colonial officer sent a telegram to British colonial headquarters in Fiji about the discovery of a human skull on the island. He searched further and eventually sent on to Fiji a total of 13 human bones, a small finished wooden box, part of a shoe and some small wooden casks discovered nearby.

• 1941: On June 20, US Navy flying boats visited the island to photograph it and survey the lagoon for possible future war use.

• 1944: In July the US Coast Guard arrived to start building a LORAN (aerial direction finding) station on the southeast tip of the island. It operated until December 1945 and was disassembled and removed in mid-1946.

• 1963: Due to extreme and prolonged drought, the British evacuated almost all of the villagers to another island.

• 1964: A scientific expedition from the Smithsonian Institution visits to study the island's bird and plant life. Only a few residents remained.

• 1975: Smithsonian naturalists return at the behest of the US Air Force to survey the uninhabited island as a possible test site for biological weapons.

• 1978: On October 24-27, a party of geologists surveyed the lagoon for exploitable minerals. None were found.

• 1989: From September 17 to October 6, TIGHAR’s Niku I expedition covers the length of breadth of the now Nikumaroro Island looking for traces of Amelia Earhart or her aircraft. TIGHAR mounted subsequent expeditions in 1991, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2007, 2010, 2012, and 2015 that have included aerial, land and underwater searches.

• 2002: In June, a New England Aquarium expedition surveyed the plant, animal, fish and coral populations of the island.

• 2009: On Sept. 13, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute surveyed fish and coral populations around the island.

• 2017: In June some TIGHAR members participated in a research/tourist trip to Nikumaroro organized by Betchart Expeditions. It included a land search with specially-trained human remains locating dogs, and underwater searches.

• 2019: In August, famed oceanographer Robert Ballard mounted an exhaustive deep sea search around the perimeter of Nikumaroro; there was also a separate land search.

So, while Nikumaroro Island is isolated, it has also seen a fair amount of human activity. The above-listed visits do not include the numerous, and generally undocumented, visits by private yachts, commercial fishing boats, etc., over the last hundred years - all of which created opportunities for humans to leave something behind on the island.

Enter TIGHAR

Since 1937 the leading theory of what happened to Earhart and Noonan could be summed up in three words: Crashed and Sank. They ran out of gas somewhere near Howland Island, ditched their plane in the ocean, the plane sank, and if they survived the crash, the two fliers faced an unpleasant death drifting around in the scalding sunlight of the shark-infested Pacific Ocean (they had two lifejackets; it is unknown if they carried a life raft).

TIGHAR agreed with that theory and Ric Gillespie publicly said he wanted nothing to do with "solving" the Earhart mystery - until 1988. That was the year two TIGHAR members experienced in overwater navigation approached Gillespie with a different theory: Earhart and Noonan couldn't find Howland Island, their intended destination, so they flew southeast about 400 miles with their remaining fuel to successfully land on uninhabited Nikumaroro Island, where they survived for a time.

This was the genesis of Gillespie's "Nikumaroro Hypothesis" and the start of a $5-million dollar-plus, decades-long, single-minded effort to prove that hypothesis by mounting a dozen of what he called "expeditions' to Nikumaroro looking for evidence of Earhart, Noonan or their airplane.

Each expedition returned with at least one, sometimes more, artifact(s) that might have had something to do with a human dying as a castaway on Nikumaroro, perhaps sometime in the 1930s. It has gotten TIGHAR, and Gillespie, an enormous amount of media attention over the years due to the enduring fame of Earhart.

It has also garnered Gillespie a fair share of criticism for definitively proclaiming - more than once - that the Earhart mystery was "solved" based on some item TIGHAR had found on Nikumaroro. Dorothy Cochrane, aircraft curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, who has long disagreed with Gillespie, puts it succinctly: "The point is that he’s got a theory and so he’s got to prove his theory. He’s used the same quote unquote evidence over and over again. He does this on a routine basis whenever he wants to mount another expedition … It’s his business. It’s his livelihood.”

The Evidence Matrix

Out of the hundreds of "artifacts" of varying sizes, shapes and materials that TIGHAR has found at different locations on Nikumaroro over the past three decades, only a handful rise to the significant or diagnostic level, where they might be proven to be only from Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10-E aircraft, or Earhart or Noonan themselves.

Taken individually, each artifact can "tell" a different "story" depending on how it is interpreted - and by whom. Throughout TIGHAR's investigations at Nikumaroro, Gillespie has shown a consistent tendency to declare that a particular artifact "must be Earhart's" until exhaustive analysis proves otherwise - which is something he has not always been willing to do in a systematic or timely manner.

When you list out some of what are considered the "major" artifacts in tabular format to form an evidence matrix, along with information about when they were found, other possible sources for them, and the current status of that particular artifact, a different picture emerges. See below:

Tells a different "story," doesn't it? Nothing TIGHAR found has been proven, by a preponderance of evidence or otherwise. More to the point, none of TIGHAR's self-published "research papers" or "technical papers" or "reports" have ever been subjected to independent third-party review by outside experts qualified to do so - the peer review that is a cornerstone of modern science. And more than one of the artifacts Gillespie has attached great significance to at various points has been "disproven."

The remainder are "equivocal" - Gillespie has proposed one (or sometimes multiple) versions of how an artifact could be Earhart's, relying on what he calls "the preponderance of evidence" to cement his claim. We are expected to accept his conclusions as true simply because he says so.

But once you start asking questions that require consistent, logical and fact-based answers ... Consider the three examples below.

First is the sheet of aircraft aluminum TIGHAR found in 1991 near the ruins of the former Gardner Island village cooperative store. Gillespie promptly authored an article for Life magazine and declared, “We found a piece of Amelia Earhart’s aircraft. There may be conflicting opinions, but there is no conflicting evidence. I submit that the case is solved.” He then spent the next 30-plus years attempting to match what TIGHAR labeled as Artifact 2-2-V-1 with a location anywhere on Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10-E aircraft.

That he failed, and how he failed, is exhaustively detailed here: A Piece of Amelia Earhart’s Aircraft? that goes through the entire saga of Artifact 2-2-V-1 year by year. The number of missteps, missed opportunities, wrong assumptions and misinterpreted or discarded testing results is rather astonishing when taking in sequence. Gillespie admitted in a Facebook post in February 2024, "Yes, the aluminum panel is from a C-47 [aircraft]. It had us and dozens of experts fooled for many years, but we eventually identified it," his first public confirmation of that fact, and some 18 months after he was told that 2-2-V-1 was definitely from a C-47 (one of which crashed on a nearby island in 1943). 

Second, the "story" the skeleton tells is a little murkier, but no less inconclusive in the end - if you look at the things that were found and the evaluations of them in sequence, and then apply normal scientific rigor:

• 1940. The British colonial administrator on Gardner Island was told by island residents that they had found a human skull a year or so prior. The colonial administrator launched a new search and eventually recovered the almost intact human skull and 12 other bones, a small finished wooden box with dovetail joints, part of a shoe and some small wooden casks discovered nearby, and sent it all on to colonial headquarters in Fiji. The chief colonial medical officer measured and analyzed the bones and said in his report that the skeleton was of a male, probably not Micronesian or Polynesian (as would normally have been expected), and added "It could be that of a short, stocky, muscular European, or even a half-caste, or a person of mixed European descent."

• 1997. TIGHAR was made aware of and unearthed the original chief medical officer's report, which crucially contained his measurements of the various bones. The bones themselves have been lost. Drs. Richard Jantz and Karen Burns of the United States re-analyzed the bone measurements in 1998 using a modern forensic skeletal analysis program which indicated the skeleton might have been of European descent, sex undetermined. Gillespie stated that it was probably Earhart's remains and the spot where it was found, the TIGHAR-labeled Seven Site, with the various bits of debris around it, indicated that she died on Nikumaroro as a castaway.

• 2015. Researcher scientists Pamela Cross of the United Kingdom and Dr. Richard Wright of Australia re-analyzed the 1940 report using a different forensic skeletal analysis program and concluded that the colonial medical officer got it right - the skeleton was a male and might be of mixed European descent. This conclusion was immediately attacked by Gillespie, who considered the skeleton a cornerstone of his Nikumaroro hypothesis. Gillespie also called into question the expertise of the 1940 colonial medical officer's education and experience.

• 2018. Jantz re-analyzed his 1998 analysis since his skeletal analysis program now had more data sets available. Based on his finding that the skeleton was likely a White person of European descent, he said it could only be Earhart's - solely based on TIGHAR's self-proclaimed "preponderance of evidence" and absent any other corroborating evidence.

• 2019. Jantz used new data provided by TIGHAR researcher Kenton Spading about the Arab sailors who drowned in the 1929 shipwreck of the SS Norwich City to conclude that the skeleton might belong to one of the Arabs who was assumed to have drowned in the shipwreck. Research into that is ongoing.

So ... a partial human skeleton was found on Nikumaroro in 1940. Analysis at the time indicated it was probably male and might be of European or mixed European descent. Numerous subsequent re-analyses have either agreed or disagreed with that finding. A missing sailor from the SS Norwich City is only one possible source of the skeleton - eight of the bodies were never recovered. It may have been an anonymous Polynesian who shipwrecked on the island. It may have been another anonymous shipwrecked sailor - TIGHAR has never made a systematic investigation of that possibility. Records of missing mariners from the 1930s are either scarce on-line or still in paper form and not digitized and readily accessible, but the historic record for the Pacific Ocean area is rife with reports of unknown skeletons being found on deserted islands, with or without abandoned boats nearby.

Since the bones themselves have been lost, the only information we have are the measurements and observations from the original 1940 report - and what those mean remains in dispute.

Third is a small wooden box found on the island in 1940 along with the partial skeleton, all of which was collected by the colonial official for forwarding on to headquarters at Fiji. Once there, the box was judged to have possibly held a sextant or other nautical instrument due to the workmanship, specific internal bracings and the presence of dovetailed joints. The outside of the box had two numbers on it, 1542 and 3500. TIGHAR would proceed to devote many, many years and thousands of hours and dollars to try and link that box, and those numbers, to Earhart and Noonan.

Gillespie believed that Noonan, a renowned aerial navigator of the day, had taken along a nautical sextant as a back-up in case he had issues with his specialized aerial sextant (used for over-water navigation in the days before GPS). The two numbers on the box were mostly likely inventory numbers from the sextant's maker and the US Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, which at the time was charged with calibrating and verifying the accuracy of all US Navy sextants. Trying to make 1542 and 3500 fit into a verifiable pattern spawned the creation of an entire sub-forum on TIGHAR's forum (https://tighar.org/smf/index.php?board=4.0 ), with people turning in dozens of photos of sextants from around the world and building a database of sextant makers' and US Naval Observatory numbers. This went on for decades.

In 2013, a TIGHAR member suggested an alternate origin for the sextant box - the 1939 survey of Nikumaroro by the USS Bushnell. Gillespie bluntly dismissed the proposal as "wasting time on snipe hunts" and told the member bluntly to "go do some real research" on their "thoroughly bizarre" theory.

Which the TIGHAR member eventually did, going to the National Archives and Records Administration on two separate occasions to pull the original records of the Bushnell's 1939 survey. Which included the records of which sextants were used and the serial numbers thereon. In his 2018 blog post about his research, the now-former TIGHAR member summarized:

"Item 12 on the list is 'Sextant, Brandis N.O. 1542  General Overhaul'.  A note penciled into the margin indicates that this sextant was returned to the Bushnell on January 17, 1939.  The ’N.O.’ is obviously an abbreviation for Naval Observatory.  So here in this memo it is documented that a Brandis sextant with U.S. Naval Observatory number 1542 belonging to the USS Bushnell was refurbished by Naval Observatory in late 1938 and was back aboard the Bushnell by January of 1939, about a year and a half after Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan went missing, and about a year before the Bushnell stopped at Nikumaroro to survey it.  The sextant box found on Nikumaroro marked with the numbers 3500 and 1542 wasn’t Fred Noonan’s, it was a Brandis sextant box that a Bushnell surveyor happened to lose in the vicinity of the remains of the castaway’s final campsite."

Gillespie admitted shortly thereafter that more than two decades of TIGHAR's attempts to link the box to Earhart and Noonan was wrong, and apologized to the now-former TIGHAR member for being so dismissive of his original suggestion.

Conclusion

Nothing definitive despite more than 30 years of looking.

Nothing irrefutable despite reams of self-labeled research reports, technical reports and analyses.

Nothing that multiple qualified experts in that particular field have independently looked at and subsequently publicly agreed with TIGHAR's assertions on any particular artifact or topic.

The piece of aircraft aluminum, the skeleton and the sextant box discussed above are just three examples of TIGHAR's research processes, but they seem to fit a consistent pattern:

• TIGHAR/Gillespie finds something on remote Nikumaroro Island, or in the historical record, or through his self-generated research;

• Gillespie says it supports his Nikumaroro Hypothesis that Earhart and Noonan landed successfully and died there;

• It is added to his "preponderance of evidence";

• This then becomes his absolute proof that "the mystery is solved."

It hasn't been. As of this writing (December 2024), Amelia Earhart, Fred Noonan and their aircraft are still missing.

Update

On Dec. 2, 2025, Gillespie announced the third book in his Amelia Earhart "trilogy," Preponderance of Evidence - The Earhart Artifacts. "The artifacts are a rich and fascinating body of archaeological evidence. They deserve their own book," he said. "As with the first two books, we’re counting on you, the members of TIGHAR, to fund the writing with the TIGHAR Literary Guild. For a $100 dollar donation you get a signed copy of the book as soon as it’s published."

But ... after reading this page, and a thorough discussion of Artifact 2-2-V-1 found here - https://mffowler.net/piece_of_earharts_aircraft.htm  - one is left wondering what of any even remotely possible scientific merit is left to discuss? There is no actual proof, as noted repeatedly above. There has not been any actual proof since Earhart and Noonan disappeared almost nine decades ago. Gillespie's "artifacts" mean what he says they mean. No one with the credentials to do so has ever agreed with him.

Final Thoughts

"I'm a lot less willing to say, unequivocally, now, 'This is what happened.' ... I have to have really solid evidence." Dr. Thomas F. King, former chief archaeologist, TIGHAR's Earhart Project

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken."     Carl Sagan, scientist