Amelia Earhart's Remains Might Have Been Found

When Amelia Mary Earhart was in her early twenties, she attended an air show in Long Beach and was invited to take a short 10-minute plane ride. Those 10 minutes were to change her life forever. “By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground, I knew I had to fly” she said. Shortly after, she began her flying lessons, and just six months after, she purchased her first plane, a bright yellow, second-hand biplane that she named The Canary. It wouldn’t be long until she would achieve the world altitude record for women pilots — 14,000 feet.

Years later, shortly before Amelia’s 40th birthday, she had a revelation. “I have a feeling that there is just about one more good flight left in my system.” She hoped that it would be a flight around the world. If she achieved this, she would become the first woman to do it.

It was a 29,000-mile journey along with her navigator, Fred Noonan. The plan required landing on Howland Island, a tiny island between Hawaii and Australia. Yet as they neared it, they were unable to make sufficient connection with the Itasca to land. Amelia’s last words were heard at 8:43 a.m.: “We are running north and south.”

The unsuccessful rescue missions began immediately and the search continued heatedly for weeks until on 5 January 1939, 552 days later, Earhart was declared legally dead.

In the 1940’s, some bones where found on the Pacific Island of Nikumaroro, 350 nautical miles southwest of Howland. All guesses pointed at them belonging to the great female pilot. However, after short examinations performed by two doctors, the conclusions showed them to belong to an elderly Polynesian male or to a European male, anyhow, male and therefore not Earhart. Shortly after, the remains were lost.

Now, new forensic evidence indicates that the bones may have indeed been Amelia Earhart's all along and, with the help of modern technology, we can have a glance into the last weeks of her short but eventful life.