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American Morning
Rick Gillespie of Historic Aircraft Recovery Group Discusses Plan to Find Amelia Earhart's Long-Lost Wreckage
Aired July 24, 2001 - 09:22 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BRIAN NELSON, CNN ANCHOR: Today would have been Amelia Earhart's 104th birthday. She remains a legend and at the center of a continuing mystery. In 1937, Earhart's plane disappeared over the Pacific Ocean, during an attempt to circumnavigate the globe. There are some possible new leads in the search for Amelia Earhart and the wreckage of her plain. The island of Nikumaroro, some 2000 miles off the coast of Hawaii, is the focal point. Some rust-colored objects have been located by satellite imaging, and some believe that those objects may be Amelia Earhart's long-lost wreckage.
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery is sponsoring this investigation, and the group's director, Rick Gillespie, joins us live from Wilmington, Delaware.
Mr. Gillespie, thanks for being with us.
RICK GILLESPIE, TIGHAR: My pleasure.
NELSON: What makes you believe that that wreckage out there is Amelia Earhart's plane?
GILLESPIE: Let me make it clear that we suspect that it might be. It's one more lead to follow up on. The anomaly in the satellite image -- just a few rust-colored pixels, spots of color -- indicates the presence of rusty metal in a location that matches the location where a woman who grew up on the island and was a 16-year-old girl in 1940 saw what her father told her was airplane wreckage out on the reef in that location. So we have this matching of an anecdote with satellite imaging that seems to confirm the presence of metal in that location. So it's worth looking at.
NELSON: As I understand it, there is a shipwreck, also, very close to that, just south of it. What makes you believe that it couldn't have been a piece of that shipwreck that has been carried up, perhaps by cyclone or something like that?
GILLESPIE: It certainly could be a piece of the shipwreck, but most of the weather that hits that island comes out of the west and northwest when the waves are big. And we see the debris field pattern from the shipwreck scattered to the east and southeast. The anomaly is about 100 meters directly north of the shipwreck, which would seem to reduce the possibility that it is a piece shipwreck. But the proximity of the ship certainly makes it a good possible source, but because we have the anecdote that says there was airplane wreckage there in 1940, we need to check it out.
NELSON: There was a ship, I think back in 1940, that arrived on the island. Somebody discovered a sextant, human bones, and a woman's shoe. Why don't you get into how that sort of bolsters your the belief that this may be Earhart's wreckage?
GILLESPIE: The documentary evidence we have really prompted this expedition in the first place. The satellite imagery is icing on the cake, if you will. In 1940, a British colonial officer found the bones of a castaway, a campsite where someone had died. There was a campfire, some dead birds, a dead turtle, and some artifacts, including the remains of a woman's shoe and a box that had once contained a nautical sextant. He thought he found Amelia Earhart, and he reported that to his superiors in Fiji, a thousand miles away. They ordered him to box this stuff up and send it there.
The bones and artifacts arrived in Fiji in the spring of 1941. The bones were looked at by a colonial doctor, who pronounced them to be bones of a short, stocky European man. The British pretty much closed the file based on that and never mentioned it to the Americans.
However, we have the measurements that the doctor took. I wish we had the bones, but they seem to have been lost. But we do have the measurements, and modern scientists tell us that those measurements indicate a white female of northern European descent who stood roughly Earhart's height.
NELSON: We've only got a couple of seconds left. When you reach Nikumaroro, in August, what exactly are you going to do? What are you going to be searching for, and how long will it take?
GILLESPIE: We will put divers on the edge of reef. We will also search the bottom of the lagoon for aluminum. We will examine the location where we think the bones were found in 1940 and some other locations that seem to match island folklore about bodies being found. We'll be there for three weeks.
NELSON: The continuing mystery of Amelia Earhart may be coming to an end. We wish you the best of luck.
GILLESPIE: Thank you.
NELSON: Thanks for being with us, Rick Gillespie from the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery.
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