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Monday, Nov. 16, 2009
We joke that nothing happens anywhere in the world that there is not a Dowagiac person around, if only they can be found. So it was at the national memorial service last week for the Fort Hood massacre, where Pvt. Derrek Hartman answered roll call. Recent news stories about where Amelia Earhart crashed partially rely on accounts of John Lambrecht, a former Dowagiac resident.
“We have things in our collection on Lambrecht, including letters he wrote – nothing about Earhart, mind you – clippings on his military career (including a few on the search for Earhart) and photographs,” says Steve Arseneau, director of The Museum at Southwestern Michigan College in Dowagiac.
Earhart mostly likely died on an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, according to researchers at The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). Earhart disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937, in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator.
For years, Richard Gillespie, TIGHAR’s executive director and author of the book “Finding Amelia,” and his crew have been searching the Nikumaroro island for evidence of Earhart.
A tiny coral atoll, Nikumaroro was some 300 miles southeast of Earhart’s target destination, Howland Island.
A number of artifacts recovered by TIGHAR suggest Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan made a forced landing on the smooth, flat coral reef. According to Gillespie, set to embark on a $500,000 Nikumaroro expedition next summer, the two became castaways and eventually died there.
“We know that in 1940 British Colonial Service officer Gerald Gallagher recovered a partial skeleton of a castaway on Nikumaroro. Unfortunately, those bones have now been lost,” Gillespie said. The archival record by Gallagher suggests bones were found in a remote area of the island in a place unlikely to have been seen during an aerial search. A woman’s shoe, an empty bottle and a sextant box whose serial numbers are consistent with a type known to have been carried by Noonan were all found near the site where bones were discovered.
“The reason why they found a partial skeleton is that many of the bones had been carried off by giant coconut crabs. There is a remote chance some bones might still survive deep in crab burrows,” Gillespie said.
Although she did not succeed in her around-the-world expedition, Earhart flew into the legend just after her final radio transmission. Books, movies and television specials about her disappearance abound, as well as speculation about her fate.
Theories proliferated that she was a spy, that she was captured by the Japanese, that she died in a prisoner-of-war camp and that she survived and returned to live her life as a New Jersey housewife. A new biopic about Earhart’s life, starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere, opened recently to stinging reviews.
The general consensus has been that the plane ran out of fuel and crashed in the Pacific Ocean, somewhere near Howland Island. But according to Gillespie, the “volume of evidence” TIGHAR gathered suggests another scenario.
“Propagation analysis of nearly 200 radio signals heard for several days after the disappearance make it virtually indisputable that the airplane was on land,” Gillespie said.
Eventually, Earhart’s twin-engine plane, the Electra, was ripped apart by Nikumaroro’s strong waves and swept into deep water, leaving no visible trace. The evidence is plentiful – but not conclusive – to support the hypothesis Amelia landed and died on the island of Nikumaroro. Another piece of documentary evidence comes from the accounts of Lt. John O. Lambrecht, a U.S. Naval aviator participating in the search for Earhart’s plane. Lambrecht reported “signs of recent habitation” on what was an officially uninhabited atoll. Lambrecht’s report begs the question: Why did no one follow up?
“I have stood in plain sight on Nikumaroro in a white shirt waving wildly as a helicopter flew over me and was not noticed until the video tape of the flight was examined,” Earhart author Karen Ramey Burns has said. “I find it very easy to believe Amelia and Fred would not have been seen by the pilot.”
“If the Electra was not visible at the time, their last chance of rescue was lost in Lambrecht’s notes,” she added.
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