The Backstory: Finding Amelia Earhart…maybe

Anybody who took to the sky in the early days of aviation had nerves of steel. Amelia Earhart was pure cast iron, and her disappearance over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 made her legendary. But despite all the wild theories about what happened to her, we may soon discover the truth. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, stop and think about the guts it would
take to hop in a rickety twin engine airplane with
just one wingman an attempt to make an around the
world flight. That was Amelia Earhart back in nineteen thirty seven.
Of course, her plane went down in the Pacific Ocean
after leaving New Guinea and heading toward tiny Howland Island
to refuel. But no trace of her, her navigator, or

(00:22):
the plane has ever been found until now. Maybe I'm
Patty Steele. There've been a gazillion theories, but America's most
fascinating missing person may be missing no longer. That's next
on the backstory. We're back with the backstory. Amelia Earhart

(00:42):
wasn't just a pilot. She was a superstar feminist icon
after becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.
That trip in nineteen thirty two made her a global
icon of courage and determination and a symbol for women
everywhere of being able to chief whatever they dreamed. Where

(01:03):
did it all start? Well, Amelia was born in Kansas
in eighteen ninety seven. Of course, that was a time
when there were no airplanes. She was an unconventional kid
for those days. Briefly going to college, playing basketball taking
classes in car repair, but it was December of nineteen
twenty when she fell in love with airplanes. She was

(01:24):
twenty three years old when she took a ten minute
ride in one in California. She was hooked, and she
started working various jobs in order to afford flying lessons.
Pretty quickly, she bought herself a used open air bright
yellow biplane that she called the Canary. By nineteen twenty eight,
she became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic,

(01:46):
although she shared that flight with some male pilots. Then,
in nineteen thirty two, she made the first female piloted
solo flight across the Atlantic. But Amelia was hyper focused
on attempting and around the world world flight. In nineteen
thirty six, she took delivery of a Lockheed Electra, a
twin engine aluminum plane with a state of the art

(02:09):
radio system and extra fuel tank so she could fly
up to forty five hundred miles without refueling. Now it's
March of nineteen thirty seven and Amelia makes her first
attempt to fly around the world, going east to west,
but after a stopover in Hawaii, she takes off with

(02:30):
her navigator, Fred Noonan on board, and immediately before they
even get into the sky, the plane crashes. They're fine,
but the trip is postponed until May for repairs to
the plane. Finally they're ready May twentieth, nineteen thirty seven.
They take off from Oakland, California, and head southeast to
several countries in South America, then across the Atlantic to

(02:54):
Africa onto Asia. A stop in Australia then came. July second,
nineteen thirty seven. Amelia and Fred took off from Lay,
New Guinea, headed for tiny Howland Island in the Pacific.
But somewhere over all that endless blue water, they simply
vanished without a trace. That was almost eighty seven years ago,

(03:16):
and it's a mystery that has captivated the world ever since.
So what exactly happened? Well, lots of opinions there. First
the crash and sink theory. It was that they simply
ran out of fuel and plunged into the ocean. That's
actually a pretty likely scenario. In fact, it is supported

(03:36):
by some modern searches. In twenty eighteen, a group called
Project Blue Angel began their search, assuming that Amelia might
have turned around when she realized she was low on fuel.
In fact, an elderly man on a small island said
that as a little boy he saw a plane crash
on the shore and burst into flames. It was eventually

(03:57):
pulled into the ocean by the waves without anybody investigating it. First.
Decades later, Project Blue Angel located the plane, but after
raising a little bit of the wreckage, they just couldn't
make a definitive id. There are some ridiculous theories, like
those who believed she'd been captured by aliens, and those
who were convinced Amelia had wanted to escape the Spotlight,

(04:19):
had survived, changed her identity, and was living in New Jersey.
What then, there's the spy theory, the suggestion she was
on a secret mission to gather intelligence for the US
on Japanese military bases in the Pacific and may have
been captured and even executed. Now some believe Amelia and
Fred made an emergency landing on an uninhabited island and

(04:42):
survived there for a while. There were artifacts found on
that island, from makeshift tools to a piece of plexiglass
that could have been from her airplane, and even an
assortment of nineteen thirties cosmetics like a powder compact and
skin care products like a type of freckle fade cream Amelia,
who'd inker freckles, could well have used. And human bones

(05:05):
were found on the island back in nineteen forty and
first believed to be from a male, but the measurements
now show they were definitely female and a ninety nine
percent match to Amelia's frame. Problem is the bones themselves
have been lost. But now there's some fascinating new info.
High text sonar images were captured and recently released. They

(05:27):
seemed to show a plane shaped object resting sixteen thousand
feet down on the ocean floor, less than one hundred
miles from Holland Island, her destination before she disappeared. Next,
the folks who discovered the object hoped to go back
with deep sea cameras to get a better look. If
it looks like Amelia's plane, they hoped to raise it,

(05:48):
but again, sixteen thousand feet that's lower than where the
Titanic is. Amelia Earhart had an ironic quote. She said,
women must pay for everything They do get more glory
than men for comparable feats, but also women get more
notoriety than men when they crash. Wow, If sixteen thousand

(06:09):
feet under the sea is where she wound up after
a twenty two thousand mile journey, less than five thousand
miles short of her goal and not in New Jersey,
we may never know exactly how that happened, but we
know her ambition and tenacity gave us something even more
valuable inspiration. As Amelia said, the most effective way to

(06:31):
do it is to do it. Do you have a
story you'd like me to take a peek into and share?
Just DM me on Facebook at Patty Steele or on
Instagram at Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory

(06:52):
is a production of iHeartMedia, Premier Networks, the Elvis Duran Group,
and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our
writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
Feel free to reach out to me with comments and
even story suggestions on Instagram at Real Patty Steele and
on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the

(07:14):
Backstory with Patty Steele. The pieces of history you didn't
know you needed to know