TIGHAR

From Pat:

The first day in the archives has gone well. The last visit there by TIGHAR folks was ten years ago; we’ve learned a lot since then, know a lot more about what to look for. Also, the archive has added a lot of material that was scattered around the world. So new avenues of research are opening up and it’s promising to be a very fruitful trip.

Some materials are very delicate; the climate in the Pacific doesn’t do paper any favors. They are photographing items that are too fragile to scan or photocopy, but that should work out fine.

A meeting has been scheduled with some of the government folks and that side of the trip also looks promising.

The satellite telephone link is uncertain at best, so we are exchanging the bare minimum of information in between “Are you there” queries. More tomorrow.

From Pat:

Ric called me yesterday. It was about 5 a.m. local time in Tarawa. After traveling from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to Fiji to Tarawa, he wasn’t exactly sure what time it was for his brain but he was quite coherent. Bill was still asleep, dawn was just breaking, and all was quiet.

All the travel went very smoothly until the very end, when they went through Customs at the airport there at Tarawa. Turns out that e-tickets have one drawback: they don’t provide you with a printout of your official return or onward leg, which Kiribati Customs requires. To get a printout, they had to get to the hotel. To get to the hotel, they had to clear Customs. To clear Customs.... hmmmmm. Anyway, Customs let them through but kept their passports until they could bring back the printouts of their itinerary.

So they went to get their rental car, an old beat-up Toyota something-or-other. Seemed to run fine, but it had almost no gas. And, of course, they had no local money (Kiribati is on the Australian dollar). Problem is, to get money changed, you have to have ..... a passport. It seemed likely that they would run out of gas by the side of the road before getting to the hotel to get the printouts done to return to the airport to retrieve their passports to ... anyway, they were able to change a U.S. twenty into Aussie dollars at another hotel where Ric has stayed before, get some gas, and get to their hotel in Betio. As soon as the world was up they were going to head back out to the airport, ransom the passports, and then head for the Archives.

All in all, a normal start to a trip to the Pacific.

This is a busy summer for Earhart Project research. A TIGHAR team recently returned from several weeks in Fiji searching for the castaway's bones that were sent there from Nikumaroro and last seen in 1941. (See "Bones, bones, and more bones" below)

On Sunday, June 19, TIGHAR Executive Director Ric Gillespie and TIGHAR board member/researcher/expedition veteran Bill Carter will head for Tarawa, the capital of the Republic of Kiribati - the island nation that owns Nikumaroro.  Ric and Bill will arrive on Tuesday, June 21 (it's a long way to Tarawa) and be there for the next week, returning to the U.S. on June 28.  They'll be doing archival research in the Kiribati National Archive, delivering a report on last year's expedition to the Phoenix Islands Protected Area Management Committee, and meeting with government officials regarding future work at Nikumaroro.

The archival work is important to our efforts to accurately interpret th e artifacts, faunal materials, and other data collected during TIGHAR's ten (to date) expeditions to Nikumaroro.  Of particular interest would be records detailing activities at the Seven Site - the remote spot on the southeastern end of the atoll that matches the description of where the partial skeleton of a castaway was found in 1940. Like most archaeological sites, there are relics from several periods and types of occupation.  Many of the items discovered during TIGHAR's archaeological excavations are consistent with the presence of an American woman of the 1930s trying to survive by catching and cooking local wildlife and devising ways to collect and boil water for drinking. Other items are clearly from visits to the site by target-shooting WWII Coast Guardsmen from the Loran station at the island's tip.  There is also evidence of some kind of construction activity - nails, asphalt roofing, corrugated metal sheeting, etc - most likely associated with the Gilbertese colonists who lived on the island from 1939 to 1963.  Ric and Bill are hoping to find documents that shed some light on what was going on.

When the colony was abandoned in 1963 the residents were resettled in the Solomon Islands . A TIGHAR team plans to travel to the Solomons in mid-August  to do archival research in the capital Honiara and interview surviving immigrants from Nikumaroro in outlying villages.  Perhaps there is someone still alive who remembers what the colonists were doing at the Seven Site.

We'll, of course, be reporting on the results of all of these research efforts.

TIGHAR’s  Fiji Bone Search team has returned to the U.S. In terms of results — as is so often the case with expeditions — the jury is still out.

This was TIGHAR’s third effort to locate the castaway’s bones found on Gardner Island (now Nikumaroro) in 1940 and sent to British colonial headquarters in Fiji for examination. Suspected at the time of being the remains of lost American aviator Amelia Earhart, the thirteen bones were measured and evaluated by the then head of the Colonial Medical School, Dr. David Hoodless. Hoodless noted that the poor condition of the bones, especially the ends chewed by crabs, made identification of the sex and ethnicity of the individual difficult. Applying the criteria available in the 1940s, he judged the remains to be those of a European or possibly mixed-race male. Satisfied that the partial skeleton was not that of Amelia Earhart, the British High Commissioner rejected suggestions that the bones be sent to Australia for more sophisticated evaluation and decided not to inform American authorities of the discovery. On April 12, 1941, Dr. Hoodless was instructed to “retain the remains until further notice.” What happened to the bones after that is a mystery.

In 1998 we found Hoodless’ notes and the measurements upon which he based his identification of the bones as male. Re-evaluation of the measurements by two independent forensic anthropologists using currently available computer databases found the measurements to be consistent with a female of northern European ancestry who stood roughly Earhart’s height. If we can locate the bones — assuming they still exist — we should be able retrieve DNA and confirm or deny that they are Earhart’s.

TIGHAR teams in 1999 and 2003 reviewed official records of burials and cremations, inspected collections of bones in museums and medical schools and conducted dozens of interviews, but there were a number of places, in particular the giant Colonial War Memorial Hospital, that our teams had never been able to search. The 2011 search was organized by Dr. Jon Overholt who initiated a fruitful physician-to-physician dialog with the hospital’s chief medical officer and with the American embassy in Suva, Fiji. With expectations of access to previously unsearched areas, Jon recruited a largely self-funded team of veteran TIGHAR researchers: Gary Quigg, Lonnie Schorer and Karl Kern. On the ground in Suva, Jon transferred operational leadership to Gary. Building on the excellent work of the 1999 and 2003 teams, the 2011 team cultivated and enjoyed an unprecedented level of cooperation from the hospital staff and Fiji government officials which enabled them to performed a detailed search of the hospital and a number of other likely but previously prohibited or unknown venues.

And they found bones — lots of bones — forgotten bones — old bones — damaged bones — bones that nobody knew were there. They did not, however, find a group of bones that matches the selection sent to Fiji in 1940. There is, of course, the possibility that the collection was dispersed at some time and that “our” bones got mixed in with other bones. The excellent connections and cooperation the team established in Suva will enable us to explore that possibility as well as several other leads that the team didn’t have time to follow up on. The search goes on.