The fascination with pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart, who disappeared on an around the world flight in 1937, just doesn’t go away. A web search of “Earhart” turns up more than a million references. It’s a mystery that has spawned dozens of theories, and after 80 years, it begs for a definitive answer.
Ric Gillespie, the 72-year-old founder of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) in Oxford, Pa., believes that modern science has the answers to this decades-old enigma. His work over the past 30 years has debunked many of the Earhart theories, and he explains his research has uncovered the most plausible answer to what happened to Earhart, navigator Fred Noonan and the Lockheed Electra she was flying. Says Mr. Gillespie, “I believe there will be absolute proof of what happened [to Earhart] in our lifetime but only after the development of new search technology equipment that will help find what I believe are the small pieces of the Electra aircraft that are off the atoll where the science of the search has taken us.”
Mr. Gillespie and wife, Pat, founded TIGHAR in 1985 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. The Earhart aircraft search has been a roller coaster ride they joined reluctantly more than 30 years ago but have since wholeheartedly embraced. It has taken them to the Equatorial Pacific multiple times in the past three decades as they apply proven scientific principles to the search.
A unique interest
An upstate New York native, Mr. Gillespie learned to fly as a teenager. It helped pay his college tuition as he flew charter flights in the northeastern U.S. Mr. Gillespie’s dad was a decorated B-17 bomber pilot over Europe in World War II and a role model for the young flyer.
TIGHAR’s executive director spent three years in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam era as a staff officer with the 1st Cavalry Division. After several friends died in a multi-plane crash in Cape May, N.J., in 1971, Mr. Gillespie says, “I came away from the accident investigation changed and it moved me closer to a career in aviation insurance and accident investigation business.”
After his military service, Mr. Gillespie joined a Philadelphia-based aviation insurance company, which gave him business in New York and New England and afforded an opportunity to pilot a company plane, allowing him to continue to fly. He investigated a number of accidents during his 12 years in the field and developed a special knack for the work. Maybe he was destined to branch out on his own to study unresolved air crashes that included well-known flyers and passengers like Earhart, Glenn Miller and the lost French flyers — on The White Bird — who attempted the first east to west flight over the Atlantic Ocean.
While living in a suburb north of Philadelphia in the early 1980s, Mr. Gillespie’s brother Robert sent him an article from Yankee Magazine that detailed the flight of French aviators Charles Nungesser and Francois Coli and their powerful biplane, the White Bird. The pair left Paris two weeks before Charles Lindbergh’s successful west to east Atlantic flight. They were attempting an east to west crossing to capture, like Lindbergh, the $25,000 Orteig Prize for the first successful trans-Atlantic flight. Well financed, with two experienced aviators, The White Bird was expected to be successful. But the aircraft disappeared somewhere between Newfoundland and New York. The magazine article suggested a Maine hermit thought he had heard the plane go down near the town of Machias.
Mr. Gillespie found a sponsor and, with his brother, spent a few days looking for wreckage of the White Bird in the Maine woods. Although the search wasn’t successful (and The White Bird mystery, like the Earhart puzzle, persists), it fueled Mr. Gillespie’s interest in finding lost aircraft. With the help of a grant from a member of Delaware’s du Pont family, he formed TIGHAR and set up his operation at the airport in Middletown, Del. With his wife, Mr. Gillespie has built the group to now include about 1,000 members.
New methods, new leads
In its early years, TIGHAR focused on The White Bird as well as a B-17 bomber lost in New Guinea. Although Mr. Gillespie was asked by many aviation enthusiasts to look for the Earhart Electra, he felt the plane — after so many years — was probably undiscoverable. The disappearance had also already fostered a number of wild theories. “I just didn’t want to get involved in the media circus,” he says. “I wanted our group to be respected as a serious, science-based operation.”
Tom Gannon, a TIGHAR member from Florida, showed Mr. Gillespie there was a way to apply scientific research principles to the Earhart search by taking a closer look into the celestial bearing flight path she was following and that had been confirmed by radio transmissions picked up by the Coast Guard and three Pan American Airways direction-finding stations in the Pacific Ocean.
“It turns out the Navy ... felt the Earhart Electra might be found somewhere in the Phoenix Islands along the 157.337 bearing line she was flying,” explains Mr. Gillespie. “Nikumaroro Island is about 300 miles from Earhart’s Howland Island destination and was on the bearing line. It had been flown over in the 1937 search by rescue aircraft but never searched.”
Mr. Gillespie, with the help of a sponsor in the late 1980s, made his first expedition to Nikumaroro. “There was then and still is interest from the public in seeing mysteries solved and it was possible to fund that and further expeditions,” says Mr. Gillespie.
There have been several unsuccessful searches by entrepreneurs for the Earhart Electra, and unfortunately, explains Mr. Gillespie, some of these searches have not relied on solid evidence. In 2017, the History Channel television network produced a documentary focused on a photo showing a man and woman on a Japanese-held island in the area. It was later determined that the photo had been taken two years before the Earhart flight.
Mr. Gillespie is interested only in concrete evidence and, on a three-week trip to Nikumaroro in 1991, he found an artifact that has kept him returning to the site, believing it to be a real indicator that the island is where Earhart and Noonan most likely landed.
That artifact is a piece of Alcoa aluminum, manufactured in the United States, with drilled holes and a rivet. It is the size of a patch that had been fitted to the Electra along the route to replace a damaged window. On subsequent Nikumaroro visits, around a campsite where female human bones were located, Mr. Gillespie uncovered pieces of a broken bottle and jar from the Earhart era that a scientific analysis determined to have held skin cream manufactured for women.
These are significant pieces of physical evidence that point strongly to the South Pacific atoll. But it is not a piece of Earhart’s plane, the definitive piece of proof everyone is searching for.
Mystery to history
Mr. Gillespie truly believes he has found the site where Amelia Earhart landed and subsequently died. He also believes the Electra was washed off the reef into deep water where it probably was broken up and spread over time in small pieces throughout the area.
“When the technology takes another step, it will help us to locate some of the small pieces of the aircraft that I feel are there to be found,” says Mr. Gillespie. “I believe within the next decade, maybe sooner, we’ll have the final piece of definitive evidence so we can all agree that Earhart and Noonan died on Nikumaroro.”
Mr. Gillespie, who has now spent a significant chunk of his career on the Earhart search, is looking for a source of long-term funding to keep TIGHAR active into the future. The group enjoys voluntary help and analysis from many in the scientific community who share the organization’s passion to solve the Earhart mystery. “Our research and expeditions would not have been so successful without their help,” says Mr. Gillespie. He remains committed to making any of his findings available to TIGHAR members and the media.
But he also hopes to endow a center for applied science to support historic aviation investigations, like the Earhart Electra search and the current fascination with Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared in 2014 on a flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing.
Mr. Gillespie believes that “science can change this mystery to history,” and keeping TIGHAR alive will ensure that the truth is eventually uncovered.
Art Petrosemolo (apetrose@icloud.com) is a freelance writer and photographer.
First Published: March 1, 2020, 9:30 a.m.
