Amelia Earhart's Shoes

Can modern science tell us what happened to Amelia Earhart? The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has spent fifteen years searching for the famous lost pilot using everything from archival research and archaeological survey to side-scan sonar and the analysis of radio wave propagation. In this spellbinding book, four of TIGHAR's scholars offer tantalizing evidence that the First Lady of the Air and her navigator Fred Noonan landed on an uninhabited tropical island but perished before they could be rescued. Do they have Amelia's shoe? Parts of her airplane? Are her bones tucked away in a hospital in Fiji? Come join their fascinating expedition and examine the evidence for yourself! The new paperback edition brings the search up to the present, including tantalizing evidence of campfires and charred bones found on remote Nikumaroro. Visit the Authors' Web page for more information.

Can modern science tell us what happened to Amelia Earhart? The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has spent fifteen years searching for the famous lost pilot using everything from archival research and archaeological survey to side-scan sonar and the analysis of radio wave propagation. In this spellbinding book, four of TIGHAR's scholars offer tantalizing evidence that the First Lady of the Air and her navigator Fred Noonan landed on an uninhabited tropical island but perished before they could be rescued. Do they have Amelia's shoe? Parts of her airplane? Are her bones tucked away in a hospital in Fiji? Come join their fascinating expedition and examine the evidence for yourself!

Publishers Weekly

"Whatever happened to Amelia Earhart?" has been an enduring question since she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared somewhere in the Pacific on July 2, 1937. Since then, the mystery has been "solved" by people who claim, among other things, that she was flying as a U.S. agent against the Japanese, that she died in a prisoner-of-war camp and that she was abducted by aliens. This book posits that due to bad weather, Earhart and Noonan missed their refueling stop on Howland Island in the mid-Pacific and landed on Nikumaroro, a small island south of their target. While most Earhart quests are based on imaginative, usually untested hypotheses, this volume is scrupulous in not making any unevidenced assertions. Working from a wide range of fields its authors are an archeological consultant, a geophysicist, a forensic anthropologist and an army engineer this book claims that human bones and a shoe found on Nikumaroro indicate that Earhart possibly landed and died there. Unlike other Earhart detectives, the authors repeatedly emphasize that their conclusions are tentative and conjectural. While their judgments are tantalizing and plausible, the fun of the book is being in on the excitement of the discoveries and the scientific testing of the hypothesis. Written in a colloquial, good-humored style that takes itself seriously but is not above cracking a joke to make a point, this is a must for "what happened to Amelia" fanatics, and also those who are interested in how science can be used to test the veracity of theories about historical mysteries. (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Thomas F. King is a well known archaeological consultant specializing in the protection of cultural resources, author of five books, and archaeologist on the Amelia Earhart Project. Randall S. Jacobson is a geophysicist with the U.S. Navy, an expert on oceanic seismic activity and naval mine-hunting technology, and author of over 40 professional articles. Karen Ramey Burns is a consulting forensic anthropologist specializing in human identification based at the University of Georgia, has worked at crime scenes, mass murder sites, cemeteries, and disaster scenes on five continents, and is author of a major textbook on forensics. Kenton Spading is an engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers specializing in computers and remote sensing technology.