ARUN RATH, HOST:
Here's a story that breeds some new life into an old mystery. Amelia Earhart disappeared on the second-to-last leg of her attempt to fly around the world in 1937. Theories about what happened are as wide-ranging and hotly debated as the conspiracy theories around the Kennedy assassination.
When you sweep aside the more far-fetched scenarios that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were, say, captured by the Japanese or by space aliens, there are two leading theories of what happened to Earhart. The first is that they were killed when their plane, a Lockheed Electra, crashed into the ocean. Here's aviation researcher Ric Gillespie.
RIC GILLESPIE: There have been multi-million-dollar deep-sea searches in the area where people think that that occurred. They haven't found anything. But that's still a prevalent, and maybe the most prevalent, theory about what happened to her.
RATH: Ric Gillespie is in fact an advocate for the other leading theory that Earhart managed to land on a deserted island where she and Noonan initially survived before starving to death. In 1985, he established the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR, to search for evidence to prove that theory. They think Earhart landed on a tiny island called Nikumaroro.
TIGHAR has been there 10 times and collected what they believe is physical evidence that Earhart and Noonan lived briefly on the island, but nothing definitive. In a 1991 visit, they found a sheet of aluminum that appeared to come from an aircraft.
GILLESPIE: We thought it might be from Earhart's airplane, but we couldn't match it to any part of a Lockheed Electra. We went to museums and measured Electras. We looked at the engineering drawings. It was close but no cigar.
RATH: Then, out of the blue this summer, 23 years after that aluminum patch was found, one of Gillespie's researchers remembered that right before that historic takeoff an aluminum patch had been attached to Earhart's plane. The Miami Herald was able to dig up an archival photo.
GILLESPIE: And lo and behold, suddenly it's, OK, it's the right dimensions. It's the right proportions. That rivet pattern matches. The lines of rivets are very distinctive, something we'd never been able to match to anything else, suddenly we've got something that matches it.
RATH: Gillespie insists that the match is as specific as a fingerprint, but TIGHAR's findings, published online this week, have not been peer-reviewed or independently confirmed. Richard LaPook, an advocate of the water crash theory and vocal critic of Gillespie, told the Miami Herald this week that the piece of aluminum definitely could not have come from Earhart's plane. He says it was stamped with letters indicating it was made after the Electra disappeared.
While we can't say who's right, there is money at stake here, as well as reputations. Gillespie is trying to raise funds for an expedition that he says will prove the plane came to rest in the ocean right off the island. He even knows exactly where he's going to look thanks to a sonar image from 2012.
GILLESPIE: There's an object down there, which is in 600 feet of water at the base of a cliff underwater, is about 37 feet long, and it's about four to five feet tall based on the sonar shadow we see. And we say, yeah, well, that's about right for the fuselage of a Lockheed Electra.
RATH: I asked him if he was thrilled after all these decades at the prospect of finally having real proof for his theory. He said, actually, he's terrified.
GILLESPIE: You know, I'm not looking forward to the time when we put in a remote-operated vehicle down there and the camera's going to show whatever that thing is because it's going to be yes or no.
RATH: That no would mean Earhart's disappearance remains as much of a mystery as ever. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.