Will researchers solve the mystery of Amelia Earhart's disappearance? (+video)

A team of researchers hopes to locate Amelia Earhart's plane off the coast of an island called?Nikumaroro. Promising pieces of 1930's clothing and cosmetic products have been found there before.?

By Malia Mattoch McManus,?Reuters / July 2, 2012

Ric Gillespie, right, founder of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, watches equipment testing alongside Wolfgang Burnside from aboard a ship at port in Honolulu. Gillespie is leading a month-long voyage to find plane wreckage from Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra, which disappeared over the South Pacific 75 years ago.

AP Photo/Oskar Garcia

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Seeking to chronicle Amelia Earhart's fate 75 years after she disappeared over the Pacific, researchers prepared on Monday to look for wreckage of her airplane near a remote island where they believe the famed U.S. aviator died as a castaway.

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Organizers hope the expedition will conclusively solve one of the most enduring mysteries of the 20th century - what became of Earhart after she vanished during an attempt to become the first pilot, man or woman, to circle the globe around the equator.

A recent flurry of clues point to the possibility that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, ended up marooned on the tiny uninhabited island of Nikumaroro, part of the Pacific archipelago Republic of Kiribati."

The public wants evidence, a smoking gun, that this is the place where Amelia Earhart's journey ended," said Richard Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). "That smoking gun is Earhart's plane.

"The group's research team had planned to set off by boat on Monday from Hawaii on a 1,800-mile voyage to Nikumaroro accompanied by the technicians from a U.S. Navy contractor called Phoenix International who recovered "black-box" flight-data recorders from an Air France crash from the floor of the Atlantic last year.

But the departure was postponed for a day, until Tuesday, because of a delay in the arrival of a Kiribati customs official who is to accompany the expedition, said Stephanie Buttrill, a spokeswoman for the group. The team will spend 10 days at the search site, plus 16 days at sea traveling to and from the island.

Previous missions to Nikumaroro have unearthed tantalizing evidence that Earhart was there, including a cosmetic bottle from the 1930s that appeared to be jar of a once-popular brand of anti-freckle cream.

Also found were a clothing zipper from the '30s, pieces of a woman's compact, a bottle of hand lotion, parts of a woman's shoe and a man's shoe, a bone-handled pocket knife of the type Earhart carried and human bone fragments.

"We've found artifacts of an American woman castaway from the 1930s, but we haven't found anything with her name on it," said Gillespie. "We've tried to get contact DNA from things that were touched, and it didn't work. The environment was too destructive. The recovered bone samples were too small. The logical thing is the airplane."

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/47eh7GrUt6s/Will-researchers-solve-the-mystery-of-Amelia-Earhart-s-disappearance-video

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