What Really Happened To Amelia Earhart?

Find Michele at https://www.bookclues.com

A voice from the golden age of flight opens the door to one of history’s most enduring mysteries. We sit down with National Geographic writer Rachel Hartigan, author of Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life, to trace Earhart’s path from a refined but unstable Midwestern childhood to global fame—and the fateful push toward Howland Island that still puzzles pilots and historians.

Across this episode, we unpack the pressures and logistics behind the round-the-world attempt, from Purdue University’s backing to the costly reset after a ground loop in Hawaii. Rachel explains how Earhart’s training and tech intersected with 1930s realities: a new direction finder she barely used, a likely damaged antenna out of Lae, strict radio schedules that clashed with Itasca’s expectations, and the navigational knife-edge of finding a 20-foot-high island in open ocean. We examine the competing theories with fresh detail. The Nikumaroro hypothesis offers intriguing clues—burn features, period artifacts, detection dogs—but no confirmed plane. The Saipan capture narrative thrives on secrecy and conflicting memories from wartime, yet lacks verifiable proof. The ditching scenario remains the most parsimonious: fuel exhaustion, a missed visual, and a descent into the Pacific near Howland.

What makes Earhart timeless is more than her records; it’s the mindset. She moved through barriers with a matter-of-fact confidence, managed fame as strategy, and insisted on her own terms in marriage and work. Rachel’s field experience—from coral atolls and coconut crabs to deep-sea search tech—grounds the story in evidence while honoring the human drive behind it. If you care about aviation history, navigation, search and rescue, or the psychology of unsolved cases, this is a clear, compelling guide to what we know, what we don’t, and why we still look.

Subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review to keep thoughtful conversations like this in the air. Which theory convinces you most?

Find Rachel at https://rachelhartiganauthor.com/

National geographic Books https://www.nationalgeographic.com/books

Transcript

Opening And Earhart’s Voice

Amelia Earhart 0:00

The pilot, winging his way above the earth at two hundred miles an hour, talks by radio telephone to ground stations or to other planes in the air. In thick weather he is guided by a radio beam and receives detailed reports of conditions ahead, gleamed through special instruments, and new methods of meteorological calculation. He sits behind engines, the reliability of which, measured by yardsticks of the past, is all but unbelievable. I myself still fly a washed motor, which has carried me over the North Atlantic, part of the Pacific, to and from Mexico City, and many times across this continent.

Introducing Rachel Hardigan And Lost

Michele McAloon 0:45

Hello, you're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michele McAloon. That recording that you just heard is the voice of Amelia Earhart. And this is the interview that I'm having today with an author named Rachel Hartigan, a National Geographic writer, who's written a book called Lost about Amelia Earhart and her mysterious disappearance. It is a great interview. It's a fascinating subject, and I hope you enjoy it. Please, if you like this, please subscribe, please tell a friend, and find out more about me at bookclues.com. Happy listening, fly safe. God bless. We have another great book to talk about today, where we have a heroine, we have mystery, we have adventure, we have a little bit of conspiracy. And the book is Lost, Amelia Earhart's Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life, and it is by Rachel Hartigan. Hi, Rachel. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm glad you're here. Rachel Hardigan is a former senior writer and editor with National Geographic, where she's focused on culture and history. Everybody loves National Geographic because it has a lot of great pictures in it. It is. It's a good magazine. It is fabulous. She has participated in two expeditions to the uninhabited island of Nikumaroro. Yes, he did it. Oh, he did it. Okay, there it is.

Rachel Hartigan 2:24

That's a hard one.

Michele McAloon 2:26

In search of the remains of Amelia Earhart. Previously, she served as editor of Book World at the Washington Post, and we are so sad that that is gone. Yeah. Yeah. And as deputy editor for culture and education at U.S. News and World Report, she grew up in Reno, Nevada and lives outside of Washington, D.C. When did Amelia Earhart's plane go lost?

Rachel Hartigan 2:52

July 2nd, 1937. Right. So almost 90 years.

Why Amelia Still Captivates

Michele McAloon 2:57

Yeah. Almost 90 years. And you know, it's funny, people still talk about it. I wonder what the psychology is behind that collective memory of not being able to let it go. And we'll talk a little bit about that. I love how you have done this book because what you do is you show the three theories of what happened to Amelia. Was she kidnapped on Saipan? Was she, you know, a castaway in a deserted island? Or did she drown in the Pacific? And you kind of you take that, those three theories and you intertwine it with her life. All right, Rachel Hardigan, why Amelia Earhart?

Rachel Hartigan 3:41

Well, for me, it was just chance because I had a very classic National Geographic experience. I was not one of the super adventurous people at National Geographic. I mean, I have friends and colleagues who hunted falcons with sheikhs in the Arabian Peninsula and did all sorts of exciting things. I mostly edited from my desk, but I did have this amazing encounter with an editor when I was going to the copy shop or the copy room. And he stopped me in the hall and he said, you know, we have a berth on this ship that's going out to the island where some people think Amelia Earhart disappeared. Do you want to go on the expedition? And I said yes before I even realized, you know, where we were actually going. I just knew that it was way out in the middle of the ocean and farther than I'd ever been. And I didn't at the time know a lot about Amelia Earhart beyond what everybody kind of knows. She was a flyer and a feminist and she disappeared. But as I started to learn more and more about her and saw what a complicated person she was and how interesting that that time period was, especially the 20s and 30s, the more I got fascinated by her. And I was also fascinated by the people who are still looking for her. And so I wanted to delve deeper into why they were doing that.

Early Life And Restless Upbringing

Michele McAloon 5:02

She's a story, but the people that are still looking for her are also, I mean, the the fact that people are still fascinated after so many years is definitely part of her story. Let's set Amelia up into a timeline. She was born in 1897, correct? Correct. In Achison, Kansas.

Rachel Hartigan 5:22

In Acheson, Kansas. Yeah. And she lived there. Her parents didn't actually live there, but her grandparents had were prominent members of Acheson Society. Her grandfather, you know, was part of the bank. He was a lawyer. They were the Earharts and they lived on a bluff above the river. But her mother had married another lawyer who was not nearly as successful as her grandparents. So he finally got a good job with a railroad company, but had a hard time keeping it because he was an alcoholic. And they ended up bouncing around the Midwest for most of her life, certainly her teenage years. And she really glossed over that later on, saying, oh yes, we were just Rolling Stones. But really, it was because they were sort of bouncing from nice house to less nice house to less nice house and really struggling for money. And I think that had very formative, it that definitely shaped her.

Michele McAloon 6:22

Do you know what I find interesting? And this I might be jumping ahead of the story, but the Fred Noonan, the man that she was going to navigate with, he had a reputation as a terrible drinker. And I kind of found that interesting because she had had really a bad childhood experience because of alcoholism in the family. But then now she's depending on this guy, Fred Noonan, to be her navigator on this around the world trip.

Risk, Alcohol, And Choosing Noonan

Rachel Hartigan 6:47

Did you find that interesting? I did find that interesting. And you know, if he he's not the only one who's not the only alcoholic whose life she how would I say that? She put her life in the hands of more than one alcoholic because when her first flight, when she first flew across the ocean as a passenger, flew across the the Atlantic, she basically had to roust the pilot out of bed after he'd had what would you call a vendor. They'd been waiting for the weather to turn for, I can't remember, I think it's about 13 days, so they could take off in their pontoons from Trapassi in Nova Scotia. And it would, they were getting sort of crazed by the fact they were stuck in this little town. And the pilot, Bill Schultz, was drinking a lot. And this is during the prohibition, so it took a little bit of effort to find alcohol. And finally the weather turned, you know, sunny with the right amount of wind, and he was sleeping it off, and she just pulled him out of bed and said, We gotta go. So that was super risky, but apparently, at least in her telling, he sobered up right away when they started flying and then ended up flying. I can't remember how long that flight took, but it was it was an overnight flight, so at least 12 hours. She did that more than once. And I like to be honest, I don't understand why she would take such a terrible risk. I think probably with Fred in Fred Noonan's case, he was one of the best navigators around. He had been a navigator for Pan Am. He helped them map their flights across the Pacific. He'd already crossed the Pacific 18 times. So he had a lot of skills to outweigh the drinking. And some people said that yes, he would go on these benders, but that was only when he had the time to do it. You know, that he didn't do it when he was flying. There are some hints that he may have done that when they were in New Guinea because that was the where they took off for their last flight. And again, it was the waiting. They were waiting for the weather, they were waiting for his equipment to sink up. So I don't know, but still, yes, she really did put her life in her hands, in the hands of these guys.

Michele McAloon 9:09

Interesting, very interesting. I didn't realize she kind of grew up, I want to say she was more upper crust growing up. This wasn't a uh, she wasn't a hanger rat. She had actually she was looked like she was very fashionable and very classy and and didn't really grow up around aviation. How did she come into aviation?

Rachel Hartigan 9:28

She came in actually sort of indirectly through very indirectly through finishing school. Because yes, you're right. She they were upper class, she was trained in all the right manners. They just didn't have money, but they had sort of a certain amount of social status. And when they did, when the family did get come into a little bit of money, they sent Amelia and her sister to basically finishing schools. And one Christmas, this would be after the US joined World War I, but several years after Canada had, Amelia went up to Toronto to visit her sister Muriel at school over Christmas. And she saw wounded soldiers. Toronto was very much a city at war. There were soldiers everywhere. And at one point, she and her sister saw, you know, four soldiers without limbs walking down the street. And Amelia was so shocked by that because at that point the US was in the rah-rah, go us, you know, bands are playing, we're making bandages, sort of the precursor to the terrible parts of war. But she saw the terrible parts of war in Toronto. And they also were training a lot of pilots there, because that was the first war where aviation played a role. So she would go to demonstrations to see the pilots do their thing. And she tells this story, which may or not be exaggerated, but she and her friends were standing in a field near one of the airfields, and the pilot was doing all sorts of loop-de-loops and trips, tricks, and all the crowd was ooing and awing, and she and her friend were standing a little bit separate. And she said the pilot got a little bored, and he decided that he was just going to fly at those two young ladies. And their friend took off running away, and Amelia just stood there and felt the little red plane go by her and just felt there was whispering to her. But she didn't really have a chance. You know, she couldn't learn then because everything was focused on the war, so they weren't going to take up any civilians to learn how to fly. And she didn't really get to learn until her family moved to Los Angeles in 1920. And then she went to another air demonstration and realized that this was her chance to learn, but she really wanted to learn from a female instructor because she was afraid that a male instructor would be too patronizing and not take her seriously.

How Earhart Found Flying

Michele McAloon 12:02

She kind of learns hook by crook. And I know there probably wasn't a flight program. And it actually at the end, when some of her navigational issues when she got lost on that last flight were probably, and as I was reading, probably training issues. Like how could she not know Morse code? How could she not know the directional finder? How could I mean she wasn't even operation operating her in her directional finder was a very basic rudimentary navigational, but and maybe, I don't know, maybe it was new at that time, but she did not know how to operate it. So you can see where she had holes in her aviation training. That may have been true for everybody. It may have been true for men too, because who knows what kind of FAA training program was in place there. But it was probably challenging for her as a woman to get the same degree of training.

Rachel Hartigan 12:54

Yeah, I think part of the issue was that the male pilots had gone through the war and had been trained by the military. So, but the women didn't have that opportunity. She was entering the field as it was new, but then the war kind of made it more regulation in a way, because the military, of course, had skills that they wanted their pilots to know. Like you said, she was a bit more hook, hook and crook, hook by crook. Hook by crook, right?

Michele McAloon 13:23

How can you say that? A wing and a prayer, that's what let's put it that way. There we go. That's about so she, I mean, she quickly kind of gained celebrity status, though, because she enters in races. She's good looking, right? She's fairly young. She's very vibrant. She apparently she's well spoken. She's speaking, she's on speaking tours and things like that. She flies the Atlantic, what, 1932, I think it was. Yeah. Flies the Atlantic, becomes the first woman to cross the Atlantic, correct? Right.

Rachel Hartigan 13:55

And only the second, the first woman to cross, yeah. Okay. As a passenger. And that was in 28. And then 1932, she became the first woman to fly solo, and only the second person to fly solo after Lindbergh across the Atlantic.

Michele McAloon 14:10

Oh, I didn't realize that. Huh. That's interesting. And she marries, there's a character that she marries George Putnam. And you know what? I've read about George Putnam through the years, and sometimes he's cast as kind of a an overbearing publicity hound. In your book, you really don't characterize him that. And George Putnam is her husband. How did you see George Putnam?

Rachel Hartigan 14:33

Well, I think he was fairly overbearing. He had a nose for publicity for sure. And he got Lynn Burke to supposedly write his best-selling book within a month of making the flight. He really was a wheeler and a dealer. But I don't know how much he pushed Earhart herself. I mean, I think he did, but I think she also was a participant in that. Like he, it was helpful to her. She could be nice and humble and do all the things while he could be sort of the aggressive person making sure that she had all these speaking tours lined up and newspapers writing about her. She didn't have to do that then because she had him to do it. I don't know. Their marriage is super interesting. She wrote a letter to him on the morning of their wedding, which was a very, you know, small in his mother's living room. She wrote this letter saying, you know, let's give it a year. I'm really nervous about getting married because I don't want to be stuck staying at home. Maybe we'll meet other people, and that's fine, but we'll just check in in a year and see if we're gonna stay married. And they did stay married. They stayed married until she disappeared.

Michele McAloon 15:50

How old was she when she married, when they married?

Training Gaps And New Tech Limits

Rachel Hartigan 15:52

Um, let's see, that was 193, I believe. Oh no. It was 31. Yeah, 1931, right after her her father died.

Michele McAloon 16:09

Okay, so six years before uh she becomes lost. Right. They could have left each other in that time. And this was a business. And one thing that I learned from your book that I hadn't read before is that really at the end of this, I mean, they had really put all their chips in on her making this round-the-world flight. Every bit of resource and financial means they had went towards her success, was dependent on her success to get across the Atlantic. I mean the Pacific, yeah.

Rachel Hartigan 16:41

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, she'd Purdue University had purchased the plane, but the problem was when she made her first attempt to go around the world along the equator, she had ground looped when she was taking off from Hawaii, which means she didn't get enough lift, apparently, and the wings tilted over and they were smashed up, the engine was smashed up. So they had to pay for all the repairs. And they'd already, it was just quite a logistical challenge to plan a flight around the world. You have to make sure that all the fuel is at all the stops. You have to make sure that all the permits are arranged, you know, that you have the right shots, all these things. And they had to undo all that. And then they ended up having to go in a different direction because of the monsoon season. She had intended to go fly west, but then she ended up having to fly east around the world. So there was a mechanic who was supposed to meet her in India and give a whole the plane a whole once over, and he'd already flown out there, so they had to pay for his flight. It's just there were all these costs that built up. They had to decide whether she was going to make an attempt again and whether they could afford it. And they did a little bit more fundraising through Purdue, but they also mortgaged their house. And at some point she say she explained it saying, Well, what are futures for without mortgaging them? Right. But he was, I mean, his Putnam's granddaughter said that he was he was absolutely broke after she disappeared because there was no the only way that the flights did not make money themselves. It was the speaking tours afterwards that made their money.

Michele McAloon 18:26

And the celebrity stuff afterwards, right? Right, exactly. Exactly. Very interesting. So let's explain this fight. So she takes off, she heads of it, she heads eastward instead of westward. She's going around the the equator, so basically the largest part of the the world. She's going around the equator. Her last leg, so she gets to Papua New Guinea, right? Okay. And Papua New Guinea, she is supposed to fly to a place called Howland Island. And my word, Rachel, I looked at that, that is a pinprick in the middle of the ocean. Folks, don't forget this. You're like, wow, okay.

Fame, Putnam, And The Business Of Flight

Rachel Hartigan 19:10

Yeah, it is so, so small. And yeah, it was very small. They were exhausted at that point because they were flying such long distances and having to get up before dawn to take off. And the island itself is interesting. I mean, if you take a step out, people were, countries were kind of jockey for influence in the Pacific. So Japan had all these islands under a mandate from the League of Nations. The U.S. had Guam, but also was trying to get a few more islands. And the U.S. had claimed Howland and a few of the islands nearby. So there were a couple of basically high recent high school grads from Hawaii who were brought down just to live on Howland Island, just to say, yep, there's people, there are people living here. And it didn't have an airfield at all, right? It didn't have any runways. So they had to ship people down to make these runways. The island was covered in birds. They had to use dynamite, which they weren't really supposed to do to clear all the birds. It was barely 20 feet above sea level, so really hard to see. There were it was kind of a nightmare. And, you know, in her first plan, that would have been her second leg. She would have flown from Hawaii to Howland. So when she was relatively fresh. But by going through the other direction, it was her second to last leg, or third to last leg, really. And, you know, you can imagine how tiring it was.

Michele McAloon 20:48

Right, right. So I learned how to fly in Hawaii. I was stationed in Hawaii. Yeah. So I learned how to fly in Hawaii. And I've been on those atolls, and they are not tropical paradises. They really are. They're pretty it's pretty rough going there. But uh is Howland Island, is that part of what is that a part of an island chain? I know it's Micronesia, but is that part of like the Gardner Line Islands? Okay. The Line Islands. Okay. Right. Yeah.

Rachel Hartigan 21:15

There's Howland and Baker and Jarvis and maybe Gardner. Is that one of them? Gardiner is part of the Phoenix Islands. So that's farther south.

Michele McAloon 21:27

Okay, so the but that's a key island, which we're going to talk about in just a minute. The so they were supposed to land. They had some Navy support. They had a ship, right? That was state outside of the island. They had two ships that they were actually relaying with and talking to. I know one was like the Itzaka or the Itzaka.

Rachel Hartigan 21:48

Itasca was the Itasca was the one waiting at Howland. Okay. And the Ontario was sort of halfway in between Papua New Guinea and Howland.

Michele McAloon 21:59

Okay. And These what these were gonna do is they were gonna kind of guide her in, but they more importantly, they were gonna be radio beacons for her in uh navigational, right? And and communications. They she doesn't make it. People keep they hear her voice for a while, right? They they keep hearing her and she keeps asking uh why what does she say? Um I'm circling, I don't see the uh yeah, I'm sorry.

Rachel Hartigan 22:27

What is she saying? It must be on you, but I cannot see you.

Michele McAloon 22:30

Right. So they really don't know where she was at this point, right?

The Final Route And Howland Island

Rachel Hartigan 22:35

No, but they thought, I mean, her signal kept getting stronger. And at some point, let's see, where when she yeah, when she said, We are circling but cannot hear you, she sounded so loud and clear that one of the radio operators ran up on deck. He he thought that he would be able to see her, but so she must have been, she was certainly had come close enough to be able to send a clear signal. Certainly improved from where she had been, say, in the middle of the night when they were just hearing static. But they also realized that she had never responded directly to their signals. It sounded like she couldn't hear them, they could hear her. But there were, there were so many things that got mixed up. And part of it is, you know, some of it was just, it was like a game of telephone. She's telegraph, sending telegrams to the guy who's arranging it all, but it's getting mixed up in a way with the previous plans. They're on different time zones, and the atasca is on a time zone that changes on the half hour, and they're on one that's changing on the hour, which doesn't happen anymore. And there were just different perceptions of how she would operate and how, you know, a room full of radio operators would operate on a on a Coast Guard ship. I mean, they were, they had their headphones on all the time. If they said they were going to talk, the person they were talking to would also have his headphones on the time and they they would be able to go back and forth. But she couldn't do that because she was juggling, she was flying the plane, she was managing the radio, she was communicating not just with the Itasca, but with other ships. So she had set up a schedule that she could follow so she could manage all the things that she was supposed to be doing. And I mean, there's a schedule. This is her schedule, and you can see why it would have been confusing. So 10 minutes after the hour, she would be listening for the Ontario when she was getting close to the halfway mark. 15 minutes after the hour, she'd be transmitting to the Atasca just to tell them where she was. 18 minutes after the hour, she'd transmit to lay. That's in New Guinea. 20 minutes, she'd listen to hear what they said in Lay, you know, with weather, they were updating with weather reports. 30 minutes, she'd listen for the Atasca, and then 45 minutes after the hour, she'd messaged the Atasca. If you get those messed up, she's not, she's speaking when she's supposed to be listening, right? Or listening when she expects people. So it just got really messed up. So I think that's part of it. She also, the plane was so heavy when it was taking off that I mean, it in lay the runway ended in sort of a bluff over the bay, and the plane took off, but it almost sunk below eye level and splashed the water when it took off. And you know, some witnesses said it looked like a radio antenna that had a trailing antenna, and that got damaged. So there was that. And the direction finder, it was new at that point.

Michele McAloon 25:52

Okay, it was, yeah. Okay, so it was a big equipment.

Rachel Hartigan 25:56

She had never used it and she hadn't used it in her flight across the Atlantic, she hadn't used it a direction finder in her flight from Hawaii to California. So she was used to making these big flights without it. So when it didn't work, she was just like, ah, it doesn't work. And it's not like she had a manual to that.

Michele McAloon 26:16

But she had uh Fred Noonan on board, and Fred Noonan, he was doing celestial navigation, right? He was shooting, he was shooting the stars or shooting sun, which that's not easy to do in any circumstance. So really interesting. So she goes down, and there are three theories, and I want you to talk about your trip to the island of Nikamororo. Is that the one you went to? Oh, yes. Yeah, okay. I because you actually went there. What was that like? Tell us about that trip and what you guys were looking for.

Radio Confusion And Missed Signals

Nikumaroro Expeditions And Clues

Rachel Hartigan 26:56

Sure. So this was the trip I talked about earlier. It was a trip that was organized by some members of this organization called Tigar or the International Group for, I always get this number, the International Group for the Recovery of Historic Aircraft, something like that. And they had they've been to this island many times, and their theory is that when Earhart and Noonan did not find Howland Island, they flew south because they knew there were Phoenix, the Phoenix Islands were to the south. And they landed on Nicomerara, which is a you know coral atoll, and if the tide was low, they would have been able to land on the relatively flat coral reef around the island. It probably would have busted up their landing ear because it's actually not flat. But it was their best option. So that's their theory. They've been there probably more than 10 times. They have not found the plane, they found other suggestive things, including burn features, which are, you know, archaeological speak for signs of a campfire, including jars put in the campfire, presumably to boil water. They found clamshells that indicate somebody had broken the shells open kind of clumsily to get the meat inside. They found 1930s era things like a zipper pull, cosmetic case, a pocket knife. Okay. But none of these things have been tied directly to Earhart. The other very interesting thing is that after Earhart disappeared, just coincidentally not related to Earhart, the British colonized that island. I mean it's to grow coconuts, and they moved a bunch of people from what is now Curibus, which was getting overcrowded, they said, and they brought them over to work on these coconut, not really fields, but coconut plants. And some of them found some bones at this site and like 13 bones. The bones were shipped off to Fiji, where the colonial office was, and they were examined by a doctor there who wasn't a forensic doctor, who said it was probably, you know, somebody, a local man of some kind, you know, a Micronesian, Micronesian man. And then the bones have been lost. Nobody knows what happens to those 13 bones. But there are many, many more bones in the human body than just 13. So though the rest of the bones must be somewhere. Tiger hasn't found them anywhere, but they had the bright idea of bringing human remains detection dogs. And these are dogs that have been used a lot, this group, especially in California, to identify Native American burial sites. And dogs have been able to detect burials from thousands of years ago. So they brought these dogs on these four very cute border collies to the site where they found the burn site. And the dogs sniffed around and they all alerted, which means they all said, yes, we smell human remains. But the complicating thing is there's also these coconut crabs, these very large dinner plate-sized crabs, and also lots of little hermit crabs. Those crabs will eat carrion, basically. And they sometimes apparently drag what they're eating into their burrows. So the thought was, and this is kind of morbid, is that the person who died, who possibly could be Amelia Earhart, the crabs ate him or her and dragged some of the bones into their burrows. Okay. Unfortunately. Okay. Wow. Like it's wild. So, and it was very exciting. You know, everybody got so excited when the dogs, you know, sat and looked expectantly at their trainers. But then everybody's, we all started looking. Well, I've I watched and talked to people, but everybody was going through the soil on this at this site. The trouble is that it's a coralatole, so everything is based on coral. That's basically what this soil is. And coral and bones look a lot alike. Yeah, I bet. And there were experts there, you know, there were several archaeologists, osteologists. People kept saying, is this a bone? And they would look at it. And nope, not a bone. It was just coral after coral after coral. So no bones were found on this expedition. So what they ended up deciding to do, and this was the idea of Fred Heber, who was the National Geographic archaeologist archaeologist in resident at the time, he had seen some research that people had been able to take soil out of cave in Europe and identify DNA. Actually, no, I think it was mitochondrial RNA from Neanderthal people in the soil. So I think the thinking was, well, I mean, that Neanderthal, long time ago, 1930s, not so long ago. Maybe we can collect some soil where the dog's alerted and see if we can identify any DNA. But unfortunately, the tests on that were not. I think what happened is they found sort of there was something, but it was just too tenuous. Yeah. Yeah. To identify.

Michele McAloon 32:54

And then there's stories that they were caught by the Japanese and Saipan. And that one doesn't make a lot of sense. I mean, it doesn't, but it it seems to like rear its head every now and then, doesn't it?

Rachel Hartigan 33:06

Yeah, yeah. People, people really like that one. Yeah, the theory, that one has a lot of branches, that theory, but the idea is that somehow they got really off course and ended up either in Saipan or the Marshall Islands. And there are people who say they saw her on Saipan or they saw a white woman on Saipan. And the main woman who sort of sparked all this theory was this woman named Josephine Blanco, who grew up on Saipan. And when she was around 11, she was bringing lunch to her brother-in-law who worked at a harbor or a seaplane base that the Japanese had built on Saipan. And when she brought her lunch to her brother-in-law, there were two white pilots at the harbor. And she didn't realize that one of the white pilots was a woman because she'd never seen a woman with short hair wearing pants before. But then she heard later on that the two people were killed. But there's there's lots of different versions of this story with her dying in lots of different ways. She and Noonan were executed. He died from a head wound, and she was later executed. They died of dysentery. They actually ended up in the Marshall Islands instead, and then were brought to Saipan. Even she was brought to Hirohito's palace in Japan and was used to prevent the US from killing him during World War II. And then somehow she was involved in planning Pearl Harbor, which no, I probably didn't.

Michele McAloon 34:55

That one somehow Yeti's involved in that one too. I don't know that. Yeah. A little far-fetched. I don't know.

Bones, Dogs, And Coconut Crabs

Rachel Hartigan 35:03

It is, it really comes out of just what was going on at the time, though, because in the 30s, Japan had the South Seas mandate. So all these more than a thousand islands, and they didn't let a lot of foreigners in. So people didn't know what was going on, but they knew that Japan was it was already acting aggressively towards China and had taken Manchuria. And actually, I think five days after Earhart disappeared, they there basically a war started between Japan and China. So people just didn't know what was going on there. So of course, rumors were rife. And then Pearl Harbor happens, and then there's all these, you know, troops going from island to island fighting the Japanese. And you know, there's a bunch of people who, because they were fighting the Japanese and it was terrible fights, they had paranoid views of what the Japanese, or maybe even not paranoid at the time, but their views of the Japanese were not, they were not nuanced, I would say. Pictures, photos, a photo album that another Marine gave to his commanding officer, never to be seen again. So I I don't know. I just think it was also just an atmosphere where rumors were probably part of the flying. Right. Yeah. You know, fog of war kind of situation.

Michele McAloon 36:49

Now the the craziest one is with Irene, what was it, Irene Bolum? Bolum. They think that she made it back in the States and because she had looks, she does look a little bit like an older Amelia Earhart, but that one, that one, ooh, that was that one's a little far out there.

Rachel Hartigan 37:07

Yeah, it is really far because I mean this she had a well-documented life. She worked in business. This was Irene Bolum. Yeah. I mean Irene Bullum did.

Michele McAloon 37:17

Yeah, she was a normal person. She was married. She was, you know, yeah. I mean, that one is crazy. The one that seems this Elgin Long, is that his name? Yeah. That one seems the most plausible, where he he was a navigator himself. And really looking at it, and that she probably took a drink in the ocean. And what do you I don't know, what are your thoughts? What do you think happened to old Amelia?

Rachel Hartigan 37:44

Well, I mean, I don't know. And nobody knows, even if they say they do. But I think just going by Occam's razor and having opting for the one where I have to make the fewest leaps of faith or suspend my disbelief the least, I think she probably ran out of gas and ended up in the ocean. When I first went out to Nick Moraro, I was really impressed by all the things they'd found, but I still have some, there's still some big gaps in that. Like why, why wouldn't she have radioed that she was flying south and looking for the Phoenix Islands? So I don't know. I mean, I I don't know. I mean, I think we do have the technology if somebody's willing to spend the money and go out there and, you know, basically go back and forth across large swaths of the Pacific seabed. You know, we have the technology to find things. Now, and I did go out on a second expedition with Bob Ballard, who found the Titanic, and he was looking for the plane around Nicomoraro. He's obviously very good at finding things, and he does he had state-of-the-art equipment. No plane was found right around the island.

Michele McAloon 39:01

Huh. I, you know, I think it'll eventually be found. One of the I had a guy named Jim Bellingham on an earlier show who was with MIT and does this the deep sea robotics. He was telling me that only like one to two percent of the whole ocean is actually mapped. And I yeah, and I can't imagine the Pacific is a well-mapped ocean. Uh that part of the world. So who knows? Maybe one day she'll be found. What does this say about us, do you think, Rachel? That we have just had this fascination with this woman and her disappearance for so long.

Saipan Stories And Wartime Rumors

Rachel Hartigan 39:40

Yeah, I mean, it it says a lot of things and kind of depends on what people focus on. In terms of our fascination with her, she just strikes me as somebody who would seem modern to us now, even if she was, if she was plopped down in 2026, she would just be so curious about everything that was going on and up to date. She probably could use AI better than I can. She just was a very curious, eyes wide open kind of person. Right. And I think that is really attractive. And she also figured out how to do things that women are still struggling to figure out how to do. And I don't mean flying. I mean, obviously women can fly, you know how to fly. I mean just deciding to do something and not letting things, anything stop you from doing it. And not in a like an aggressive, forceful way, just in a why shouldn't I do it? Just a very practical, like, well, of course I can do it. If I want to do it, I'm gonna try to do it.

Michele McAloon 40:41

Just wow. She was really grab the bulls by the horn or you know, grab the bull by the girl. And I I do I I'm I'm with you. I have a lot of admiration for her, someone that was willing to go against the grain to say, hey, I and her curiosity was actually, I think, her main driver of uh, hey, can we do this? Can I do this? Can I challenge myself? I I really do. I have a lot of admiration for her. I have a lot of gratitude for her because I'm I was an army pilot and she was one of the engineers for aviation for women. And of course, my granddaughter's name Amelia. So really well, you know what? I want to congratulate you on this book. It's a it's actually, folks, it's a quick read, but it's really interesting. Whatever you've read about Amelia Earhart, whatever you think you know about Amelia Earhart, read this book because Rachel really brings out some some new details. And especially you have to read about, you know, kind of the the crazy theories, the serious theories, the the work that has been done to find Amelia Earhart and to solve one of the one of you know the 20th century's great mystery. Rachel, when is the book due out? It's due out March 3rd, correct? Yeah, March 3rd. Okay, and you have a website?

Rachel Hartigan 42:03

I do. It's rachelhardiganauthor.com.

Michele McAloon 42:07

Okay, great. Any projects up in the future? Any more adventurers out there?

Rachel Hartigan 42:11

Well, I may be starting a monthly column with National Geographic on other lost explorers. So do I have to figure out which ones to write about, but I think that's a good idea.

Michele McAloon 42:23

Oh, that'll be good. You know what? We'll we'll definitely have you back on, okay? Great, that'll be fun. Okay, great. Rachel, I really want to thank you and take thank you for your time to talk to us today. Thanks. It's been fun. Okay, fly safe.