Amelia Earhart Update of the Day: Scientists Believe They May Have Discovered the Pilot's Body
Call off the search party, we might have found her.
That's right, scientists believe that they may have found the body of Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic ocean and the woman at the heart of one of aviation's greatest mysteries. Missing for nearly 80 years, Earhart has long been thought to have died in a plane crash in 1937, but new evidence has revealed that she may have landed safetly and died as a castaway on the island of Kiribati.
The development in the case came when re-analyzed a partial skeleton found on the Kiribati in 1940. While these bones had been ruled out in the 40s, scientists now say that these bones were “consistent with a female of Earhart’s height and ethnic origin.” More recently, anthropologist Richard Jantz noticed that the skeleton's forearms were larger than average. Of course, without Earhart around to measure, determining the size of the pilot's forearms would be difficult.
Analysists at TIGHAR (The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery) used photograpic analysis to determine the size of Earhart's forearms. What'd they discover? The estimated size of Earhart's forearms and the size of the skeleton's were nearly identical.
Case closed? Well, not exactly. It doesn't definitively prove what happened to Earhart, but it's definitely something.
Read TIGHAR's full report here.