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Wednesday, Feb. 17, 1999

Search on for Amelia Earhart's bones

Fiji to rifle storerooms for remains of aviator who went down in '37

Associated Press

   SUVA, Fiji -- A hunt is about to begin in musty corners of Fiji's medical department buildings for the bones of missing American aviator Amelia Earhart.
   The government on Tuesday said it had authorized a search of storerooms in the Fiji Medical School and Suva's central hospital for remains of the pioneer aviator that might have been found in 1940 but were packed in boxes and forgotten.
   Earhart vanished in 1937 while attempting to become the first woman to fly around the world. Most authorities believe she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, lost their bearings, ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific while flying between Papua New Guinea and Hawaii.
   Some experts think the two were captured by the Japanese as spies and executed.
   The U.S. Navy conducted an elaborate search and picked up signals suggesting Earhart's plane went down somewhere in the region of the Gilbert Islands in the central Pacific.
   In 1940, a Fiji naval officer, Stanley Brown, was sent on a reconnaissance mission to uninhabited Nikumaroro, a desolate Gilbert atoll about 1,000 miles north of Suva, and reported accounts of finding the bones of two people of possible European origin.
   The bones were sent to British headquarters in Tarawa, where a physician concluded they belonged to a man. The bones were ordered crated for storage, but the crate vanished.
   Richard Gillespie, director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, a nonprofit organization that has searched for evidence of Earhart's fate for 10 years, recently found records of the examination in Tarawa and Britain, The Los Angeles Times reported in December.
   Other experts who examined the records said the skeleton was that of a white female of northern European background, about 5 feet 7 inches tall.
   The Fiji Museum said there are records of two wooden boxes arriving in about 1940 and possibly containing the bones of the missing fliers.
   The aircraft recovery group has made several expeditions to Nikumaroro in the past five years and recovered fragments of metal sheeting. Tests indicated the metal could have been from the aircraft flown by Earhart.
   

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  © 1999 Corpus Christi Caller Times, a Scripps Howard newspaper. All rights reserved.