The TIGHAR Amelia Earhart Niku Expeditions: 20 Years of Searching on Nikumaroro

If you've ever visited TIGHAR.org (or The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery), you've probably seen a special section devoted to one of the most extensive missions ever undertaken to solve the 72-year-old mystery of Amelia Earhart's disappearance. The Earhart Project started twenty years ago as of this article under the direction of Executive Director Ric Gillespie who's headed TIGHAR since 1985 and held up an initially disputed theory that Earhart and her co-pilot Fred Noonan ultimately landed and survived for a time on a Pacific atoll. That particular island from the one-time Phoenix Group was called Gardner Island in 1937. Later, it became Nikumaroro and eventually an Earhart holy grail for what was dubbed the Niku expeditions.

When Gillespie assembled the Niku I expedition in the fall of 1989, it started the evolution of the theory that Earhart and Noonan landed on a nearby reef, swam to the atoll and survived there for a time until eventual death. But it also led to a major problem for the Niku expeditions: How to assemble all the miniature pieces of potential evidence after (at that time) 52 years.

TIGHAR, though, continues to hold to the idea that the case isn't impossible to solve and considered any failures more a fundraising matter than an evidential one.

What evidence could possibly be found now after previous discoveries on prior Niku missions? The biggest missing piece is Earhart's plane itself that Gillespie and his TIGHAR associations believe is still, in part, underwater in a coral reef just off Nikumaroro's shore. Diving in that coral reef is going to be one of the prime objectives of the next Niku mission (Niku VI) coming up in the summer of 2010. And if Earhart's DNA can be matched with the artifacts found on the island over the last 20 years, the story may have some kind of resolution.

Yet it's challenging to contemplate the mystery being solved, or even if anybody really wants it solved. I've likened it to the D.B. Cooper case and the FBI possibly keeping the case perpetually open for the sake of pop culture when plenty evidence exists to move forward in solving it. With Amelia Earhart, though, it seems more akin to too many decades passing on an island battered by the elements to make the chance of solving the case slim. Not that the aging mystery hurts the profitability of Earhart in pop culture as we see in increasing magnitude, including two record appearances on film in 2009 with Hilary Swank's "Amelia" and Amy Adams' more comedic portrayal in "Night at the Museum Part Deux."

TIGHAR's Niku expeditions keep that pop culture alive while also keeping the money flowing in to create these adventure trips that usually turn into endurance tests for rich adventurers. These infrequent expeditions every two or three years can't be labeled as being for anybody possessing any timid traits. Amid all the adventuring, a lot of backbreaking work has been done there to sift through the impossible brush and muck where fragments of human-made objects that were there before still exist.
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If you've kept up with the Niku missions, you'd know the ones from the first ten years were much more fruitful than the ones of recent years. In the very first expedition, plane parts turned up that looked very much like the Lockheed model Earhart flew. Then there was the famous sole from a shoe found there that was determined to possibly be similar to the shoe Earhart wore on her fatal flight. Later, the stories came from former Gilbertese inhabitants of Nikumaroro telling about the bones of a man and woman found in a grave there decades earlier. The bones were intended to be studied but almost too conveniently managed to disappear.

After all this tantalizing compendium of evidence, the following expeditions were increasingly expensive, fraught with mishaps and resulted more in finding minutiae on the island that were too small to successfully be matched up with anything related to Earhart. The problem was that Nikumaroro's former Gilbertese occupants left countless traces of their three decade life there behind. Add to that dozens of other plane crashes there during WWII, and you have the near impossibility of finding truth through a vast tapestry of artifacts fused together by nature.

Now with Niku VI happening in 2010, the funds have been raised to finally dive into the coral reef to search for remnants of Earhart and Noonan's plane. However, when it was noted several years ago how expensive the equipment would be for a coral reef dive, those giving money must have thought of how remote finding the plane would be after decades of deterioration, high tides and other violent natural phenomena.

Fortunately, this isn't funded by our government to add to our running tab. TIGHAR lets their members contribute and even participate on their own, with mention of those earlier caveats in plain black and white. Based on the best available evidence, it's what happens back here in America that may solve whether Earhart and Noonan set up a survival camp at Nikumaroro, tried to flag down planes for rescue and later died there. That earlier-mentioned DNA evidence in tattered clothing found on the island could be the clincher. It seems, though, that DNA testing could have been done a lot sooner here in the States and never seems to arrive to a point where a definitive answer can be had.

Rick Gillespie and his TIGHAR crew nevertheless deserve tremendous applause for risking their personal safety all these years to find answers when all other theories have been put to rest. Even if his crew never solves the case, the Niku expeditions continue to give new pathways into a better likelihood Earhart and Noonan didn't just have a fatal nosedive crash into the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

What isn't subjective is that the continuation of the Niku missions keeps the pop iconography of Earhart alive and well. The money made in her name through books and other media (some via Gillespie himself) never gets reported, despite being indisputably large. A conclusion to the story would arguably end much of that.

In the meantime, if you have $50,000 on you and want to be a part of 2010's Niku VI expedition and likely future ones, click the link below to find out how to be a Sponsor Team Member...

http://www.tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/NikuVI/SponsorTeamMembers.html