The assertion that Earhart’s bones have been found fits in with a long pattern of TIGHAR claiming that some new artifact or lead was about to solve the mystery for good. The Disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan If there were just these bones and nothing else, the argument would be much weaker.” “So that’s as much evidence as there is that the bones point to female. “It’s pretty clear on bone length alone that Earhart would have looked like a male, because she’s so tall,” he says. “It was TIGHAR that got the measurements from Purdue University archives on her clothes…I know there are criticisms of TIGHAR, but TIGHAR has invested heavily in the Nikumaroro hypothesis, and there was evidence she was there.”īut what if Gillespie’s contention that Earhart crashed on Nikumaroro is wrong? Jantz acknowledges that there’s nothing about the bones in and of themselves that establish them as being Earhart’s. “TIGHAR had a lot of resources that enabled me to get what I got,” says Jantz, reached at his home in Tennessee. Jantz himself calls his relationship with Gillespie “collaborative.”
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Though Jantz is not a member of TIGHAR, Gillespie helped facilitate the cooperation of a Purdue University archive that provided measurements from a pair of Earhart’s trousers. But this notion remains the unlikely and unproven theory of a single organization: the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which is run by a Pennsylvania-based aviation enthusiast named Ric Gillespie. Jantz’s argument depends on accepting the claim that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, crashed on Nikumaroro’s reef and survived there for a while as castaways. Except there’s no “documented” evidence that Earhart was anywhere near Nikumaroro. She was known to have been in the area of Nikumaroro Island, she went missing, and human remains were discovered which are entirely consistent with her and inconsistent with most other people.” “In the case of the Nikumaroro bones,” he continued, “the only documented person to whom they may belong is…Earhart. “This analysis reveals that Earhart is more similar to the Nikumaroro bones than 99 percent of individuals in a large reference sample,” Jantz wrote. He decided that given Earhart’s likely skeletal structure and height (about 5’7″), they were consistent with a body type very similar to hers.
Revisiting the info, Jantz scrutinized the remains relative to old photographs of Earhart and to clothing that once belonged to her. Hoodless, who concluded that their size indicated that they came from a male. Although the bones in question have long since vanished, they were examined at the time by a Fiji-based forensic anthropologist named D.W. Jantz compared old data from about 13 human bones found in 1940 on the remote Pacific island of Nikumaroro with what’s known about Earhart’s physique. The blitz came after the journal Forensic Anthropology released a paper by Richard Jantz, professor emeritus and director emeritus of the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center. “Great for Science, But Sad News for Mystery Buffs.” “Amelia Earhart Found!” said the Los Angeles Times. “Bones Discovered on a Pacific Island Belong to Amelia Earhart, a New Forensic Analysis Claims,” reported the Washington Post. “Bones from Pacific Island Likely Those of Amelia Earhart, Researchers Say,” said CNN. The headlines were written at a fever pitch. If you were paying any attention to the news over the past few weeks, you’d be forgiven for thinking that pioneering American aviator Amelia Earhart had, at last, been found.