Amelia Earhart Died as a Castaway

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.

A recently discovered photograph that some believe shows Amelia Earhart alive and well on an atoll in the Marshall Islands has exhumed the never really buried mystery about the pioneering aviator's disappearance after her Lockheed Electra vanished in the South Pacific on July 2, 1937.

But while feverish speculation about how she died has long dominated her story, breeding ghoulish theories including that her body was eaten by giant coconut crabs, it might be more enlightening to look at what she liked to eat on those long 15-hour solo flights across the oceans.



"A question I'm asked frequently concerns what a pilot eats on long flights," Earhart said in a radio interview she gave sometime between 1935 and 1937 . "This aspect of 'aeronautical housekeeping' particularly interests women."

Her answer was simple and surprising. "Tomato juice is my favorite 'working' beverage, and food too," said Earhart. "In colder weather, it may be heated and kept hot in a thermos."



The first, she said, was to be fed enough to "prevent fatigue but not enough to prevent drowsiness." This balance may be difficult to achieve because it's hard to exercise in a cockpit, she said, joking, "Probably football players are easier to feed than pilots."

The second was that the food had to be something that she could eat easily — she was fond of Chinese, but chopsticks in a cockpit were a tricky affair. "Since pilots have only two hands and dozens of things to do, mealtime technique has to be simple," she explained. "So I've developed a gadget, which is really a fat ice pick. With the can between my knees, one-handed, I punch a hole in the top. A straw just fits the hole — and the rest is easy."