Finding Amelia Earhart with Hard Facts and Sound Science

[bsteadman]

Finding Amelia with Hard Facts and Sound Science

[bsteadman]

NEW DISCOVERY -- Comparing Earhart to the Bones on Nikumaroro

TIGHAR --The Earhart Project Research Bulletin #78
10/22/2016

Excerpt:

There is a newly discovered similarity between Amelia Earhart and the castaway whose partial skeleton was found on Nikumaroro in 1940.

The bones, suspected by their discoverer of being Earhart’s, were dismissed by British authorities after a doctor judged them to be male. The bones were subsequently lost and the entire incident forgotten until TIGHAR discovered the original British files in 1998, including the skeletal measurements the doctor made. An evaluation of those measurements by forensic anthropologists Karen Burns, Ph.D. and Richard Jantz, Ph.D. led to the conclusion that “the morphology of the recovered bones, insofar as we can tell by applying contemporary forensic methods to measurements taken at the time, appears consistent with a female of Earhart’s height and ethnic origin.” (See Bones & Shoes.)

That was eighteen years ago. Recently, in preparing an updated evaluation of the bone measurements, Dr. Jantz noticed a peculiarity. Among the bones recovered was a humerus (upper arm bone) and a radius (lower arm bone). In the British doctor’s notes, the humerus was reported to be 32.4 centimeters long. The radius was 24.5 centimeters – a ratio of 0.756 to the length of the humerus. Statistically, women born in the late 19th century (Earhart was born in 1897) had an average radius to humerus ratio of 0.73. In other words, if the castaway was a middle-aged, ethnically European woman, she had forearms considerably longer than average. Dr. Jantz wondered if Amelia may have had similarly longer than average forearms.

To answer that question we called on forensic imaging specialist Jeff Glickman. Selecting an historical photo of Amelia where her bare arms were clearly visible, and working with Dr. Jantz to identify the correct points on the shoulder, elbow and wrist for comparing bone length, Jeff found that Earhart’s humerus to radius ratio was 0.76 – virtually identical to the castaway’s. Click ... for Jeff Glickman’s full forensic report.

The match does not, of course, prove that the castaway was Amelia Earhart but it is a significant new data point that tips the scales further in that direction.
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View the complete article, including image and links, at:

https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/...rhartArms.html

[bsteadman]

New Analysis Strengthens Claims That Amelia Earhart Died as a Castaway

Reexamination of data from a 1940 skeleton, suggests that the long forearms may match those of the missing aviator

Smithsonian.com
by Jason Daley
11/2/2016

Excerpt:

On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan were on the third-to-last leg of her 30,000 mile attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the earth. The twin-engine Lockheed Electra departed from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on its way to Howland Island—a speck in the Pacific several hundred miles south of Hawaii. The Coast Guard ship Itasca was assigned to aid the world-famous pilot but captured only a few garbled communications from before the radio fell silent. Earhart and Noonan never made it.

The search for Earhart following that fateful day was massive, including 3,000 personnel, ten ships and 65 airplanes. But they came up empty handed. Now, new analysis of some of her purported remains hints that Earhart may have not immediately perished in the crash.

From her short radio exchange, the crew aboard the Coast Guard ship believed she was near the island and running low on fuel in the final moments before crashing somewhere in the Pacific. But in the 80 years since they vanished, speculation buzzed around the mystery, with many still chasing down answers to this day. The theories have grown increasingly wild—some say she was a U.S. spy and was captured by the Japanese, others claim she returned to the U.S. anonymously after World War II to live out her life as a suburban housewife named Irene Bolam, still others say that she landed on a desert island but perished before rescue (and was perhaps eaten by coconut crabs).

This last idea is where the new analysis comes in.

For 25 years, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has slowly built a case that Earhart was several hundred miles off course and landed on Nikumaroro in the Republic of Kiribati, also known as Gardner Island. The main evidence is a skeleton that was recovered from the island in 1940, reportedly found with women's shoes and an empty box claimed to be a navigator's sextant box.

However, the British doctor D.W. Hoodless of the Central Medical School in Suva, Fiji, who examined the remains declared that they were they were from a short stocky male and could not be Earhart, according to a press release. The bones eventually went missing, but in 1998 TIGHAR researchers examining old files on the disappearance came across the doctor’s report and took the recorded measurements to forensic anthropologists for reexamination.

These researchers studied the data and compared the measurements to current larger databases of expected bone dimensions based on sex, age and race, concluding that the “measurements taken at the time appear consistent with a female of Earhart’s height and ethnic origin.”

When one of the anthropologists was recently updating this evaluation, however, he noticed that the ratio of the length of the skeleton's humerus, or upper arm bone, and radius, one of the bones in the forearm, was 0.756. Women of Earhart’s day typically had a ratio of 0.73, meaning that if the skeleton was from a woman of European ancestry, her forearms were longer than average, according to the press release.

TIGHAR contacted forensic imaging specialist Jeff Glickman, who evaluated a historical image in which Earhart’s bare arms are visible. According to his report, the ratio of Earhart’s humerus and radius that he could estimate from the photo is 0.76, very close to the ratio from the medical exam.
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View the complete article, including image and links, at:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-...e-1-180960995/