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TIGHAR Returns Empty Handed (Again)

Well, it’s official: My prediction back in June has proven true: The latest fantasy “Search for Amelia Earhart” is on its way back to reality, skunked again!

After twenty years of escorting gullible thrill seekers to Gardner Island in the Pacific, the “IGHAR” organization has yet again come away from their fantasy island empty handed.

After making monumental fools of themselves back in May and June with their usual brand of self-serving hyperbole and claims of “evidence” of finding Amelia Earhart, “TIGHAR” as it pompously calls itself, has begun their voyage of shame back to the U.S., and, also in their now predictable pattern, they are saying little about their colossal failure, as they begin the months of preparations for what one could be forgiven for predicting will be yet another issuance of claims of “evidence” followed by the announcement of, yes, another fantasy expedition to “Nikkumororo” after bulking up on financial contributions.

In late spring, as they began breathlessly hyping their latest exploit to the news media, the IGHAR posted a plea on their website for more money, promising, this time, to really, really, really, really bring home the definitive evidence that Amelia Earhart landed and died on “Nikkumororo,” leaving her Lockheed Electra lying upside down with its landing gear sticking up out of the Gardner Island lagoon in plain sight of any of the scores of people who have lived on or visited Gardner in the last seventy-five years to see. (There were, of course, no reports).

In the highly unlikely event that any of my readers have been on a truly deserted island or for some other reason not read a newspaper or watched a television news program in the last twenty years, I will spell it out for you in plain, if rather exaggerated bold-faced type for emphasis:

AMELIA EARHART DID NOT LAND ON OR ANYWHERE NEAR, BY A FACTOR OF HUNDREDS OF MILES, GARDNER ISLAND. THERE IS NOT AND NEVER HAS BEEN ANY EVIDENCE THAT WOULD CAUSE A REASONABLE PERSON TO BELIEVE THAT AMELIA EARHART AND HER NAVIGATOR FREDERICK NOONAN ALIGHTED ON GARDNER ISLAND, OR ANYWHERE WITHIN HUNDREDS OF MILES OF THAT LOCATION.

More on what actually happened to Amelia Earhart may or not be posted here later, but one thing is certain, she didn’t land on Gardner Island or anywhere else in the Phoenix Islands. Period. That should be the end of it.

More Bogus Claims of “Evidence” in Amelia Earhart Case

Here we go again…

I would  invite–and challenge–all professional writers and news reporters to do a little research on the history of the “TIGHAR” organization before publishing their press releases as news.

Since the 1990s, this organization has repeatedly made claims of having discovered “evidence” of Amelia Earhart having crashed at their preferred expedition site, Gardner Island (“Nikumororo”). Again and again, they have conducted these commercial expeditions and every time, they have brought back some form of “evidence” of Amelia Earhart having been there.

This “evidence” is merely a repetition of a very old pattern of bogus findings and is not a “clue” in the Amelia Earhart story. This is but the latest in a twenty-year series of specious and misleading statements issued by this organization, “TIGHAR”, designed to garner attention to itself and to promote its for-profit fantasy-expedition “research” into the Amelia Earhart story.

The entire Phoenix Islands area was thoroughly searched at the time of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, in July, 1937. Since then, here was a British colonial settlement (the last) on the island throughout much of the mid-twentieth century, as well as U.S. military installations built there and staffed during and after WWII, with scores of people living there and visitng in the intervening years. Any evidence of Amelia Earhart’s having ever been there would have been discovered decades ago.

Last month, the “TIGHAR” organization issued a press release, stating that they had discovered a photograph purporting to show the landing gear of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra sticking up out of the Gardner Island lagoon. The idea of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra landing gear protruding out of the surface of the lagoon at low tide and not being seen at some point in the last 75 years is patently absurd.

Analyses of radio direction-finder and aeronautical navigation data, along with official documents and the testimony of credible witnesses, have conclusively shown that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were in the Marshall Islands group and never closer than a thousand miles from Gardner Island.

The “TIGHAR” organization has fixated on Gardner (aka “Nikumaroro”) Island, because it suits their profit-making tour business, which escorts its customers on paid expeditions every year or so, and has for many years. A simple check of the press history of the organization will reveal many instances of so-called “discoveries” of “evidence” (airplane parts, bottles, shoes, etc.) from this same location, all of which have been swiftly debunked by actual bona fide historical experts, not “experts” associated with this commercial, for-profit company.

This latest publicity-seeking exploit, which also involves a ploy to co-opt the U.S. State Department into lending its imprimatur to the group’s business activities–will die down quickly, and, in all likelihood, will re-surface in a few months with new “evidence” to compel adventurers to pay handsomely for the TIGHAR “historians” to escort them on another two-week expedition to the Central Pacific.

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