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NARRATOR: It's not every day one gets a chance to make the find of a century,
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
let alone two.
CREW (off-screen): Ok, you ready?
NARRATOR: But that's exactly what National Geographic's
Bob Ballard, is setting off to do.
The man who discovered the Titanic has now set sights on another of the world's
most renowned mysteries.
BALLARD: This is a good story that needs to be told, I mean, it's a sad story,
but it's a good sad story.
NARRATOR: The story takes us back to July 2, 1937.
Coast Guard cutter Itasca is anchored off of Howland Island,
a tiny dot in the Pacific, about halfway between New Guinea and Hawaii.
Any moment now, the world's most adored aviator, having flown more than halfway around
the world, is expected to emerge from the clouds and land on an airstrip specially
built for the occasion.
The sailors are here to guide her in and witness history in the making.
But so far, she's nowhere to be seen.
Throughout the long night, they have caught snippets of her radio transmissions.
EARHART (over radio): Go ahead on 7500 with a long count.
NARRATOR: But there's no indication she has heard their responses.
CANDACE: They were sweating blood.
They were horrified of the fact that they could hear her,
but she couldn't hear them,
that they just could not communicate.
EARHART (over radio): KHAQQ.
NARRATOR: Then, at 7:42 AM.
NARRATOR: The signal is so strong, the radiomen run out on deck,
convinced the plane is directly overhead.
But as another hour passes, the sky remains empty.
8:43 a.m.
The last confirmed word of Amelia Earhart.
And for more than 80 years, the world has waited, waited for an answer about what
really happened to her and her navigator Fred Noonan on that fateful, summer day.
CANDACE: Suddenly, the whole country is completely obsessed.
Where is she?
And are not leaving their radios.
MAN (over radio): She was reported missing.
CANDACE: It's the greatest mystery of the 20th century, right, and into the 21st,
it continues to be.
NARRATOR: The disappearance has spawned countless theories and launched dozens of
expeditions, all seeking to determine the truth of what happened to this intriguing
and inspirational young woman from Kansas.
SAMMIE (off-screen): We've seen the most intimate details of her life that exist,
and we still don't feel that we know Amelia.
There's a lot of interest in her disappearance and what happened to her,
what happened to the plane.
But to me the biggest mystery is who was she really.
TRACEY (off-screen): She was an inspiration in her own lifetime.
But 80 years later she is, in some ways,
more alive than she was before that crash.
BALLARD (off-screen): She was an amazing woman.
She was way ahead of her times and taking on the world as a woman, and she did quite well,
good Kansan.
NARRATOR: Now Ballard, another Kansan, is adding a new chapter to Amelia's story.
BALLARD (off-screen): Wow. Bigger than I thought. That's for sure.
NARRATOR: At an airplane hangar in Amelia's hometown of Atchison,
he sizes up the last surviving Lockheed Electra 10E, the very model Amelia flew.
BALLARD (off-screen): Yeah, this is what I expect to be the biggest surviving pieces
are these two big Pratt Whitney engines
and the question is attaching with my robot are
probably right around here.
NARRATOR: Bob is confident the engines lie at the bottom of the Pacific,
and he thinks he knows where.
CREW (over radio): Roger that. Going in.
NARRATOR: He's setting sail on what may be his most ambitious expedition yet to find them.
CREW (over radio): We are ready to launch.
NARRATOR: In the process, he's shedding new light on one of the world's
most captivating people.
ANNOUNCER (off-screen): In ship number six is the world-famous Amelia Earhart.
CREW (over radio): It's good to go.
BALLARD (off-screen): It exists.
It's not the Lochness monster, it's not Bigfoot.
That plane exists, which means you can find it.
CREW (over radio): Roger that. Goin' in.
NARRATOR: Even before she disappeared in July 1937, Amelia Earhart was already one
of the most famous people in the world.
For years she pushed the boundaries of what was humanly possible,
shattering a dozen records in the air, while breaking barriers for
women on the ground.
EARHART: I hope that men and women may achieve equally in any endeavor they set out.
NARRATOR: Now she is poised to push those limits as far as they can go.
TRACEY (off-screen): She was still a very young person, she was still in her 30s,
right on the cusp of turning 40.
She was really at the peak of her training, her expertise.
She wanted to do the most exciting thing she could think of.
And I think that's why she chose flying around the world.
NARRATOR: World flights had been done before,
but that was in the Northern Hemisphere,
a distance of 15,000 miles.
Amelia has her sights set nearly twice as far.
EARHART (off-screen): The contemplated course covers about 27,000 miles.
It will be the first flight, if successful,
which approximates the equator.
NARRATOR: It would be an astonishing feat for anyone in 1937, man or woman.
CANDACE: I didn't think they'd actually seen a woman that was daring,
that was entirely in a man's world.
I mean, you're talking about mechanics and airplanes and being brave,
doing things that no one else had ever done, not men, you know,
much less women.
NARRATOR: Amelia takes off from California in March 1937.
REPORTER (over radio): Over San Francisco Bay and its famous bridges,
Amelia soars.
NARRATOR: Next stop Hawaii, then around the world into history.
REPORTER (over radio): She expects to make the 27,000-mile world-girdling
flight around the equator just as easy!
NARRATOR: Under auspicious skies, the expedition vessel Nautilus is also setting off,
from Apia Samoa, for what some believe is where Amelia spent her final days.
Bob Ballard has set course for a speck in the vast Pacific.
With a team of engineers, oceanographers, geologists and archaeologists,
they're banking on the theory that Amelia managed to land on a tiny
atoll called Nikumaroro.
BALLARD: There are all sorts of theories.
That she was taken prisoner by the Japanese.
That she turned around and went back.
So you take the ones you can throw away and you're only left with two.
NARRATOR: That she crashed at sea and sank is the official explanation
for Amelia's disappearance.
That's what the Navy concluded when she went missing in 1937.
BALLARD (off-screen): Which is very possible, most of this area is water.
NARRATOR: It's just not a simple theory to search.
BALLARD: This ocean covers a third of the earth, and average depth in this area is
15,000 feet so good luck.
We're not doing that.
NARRATOR: Instead, Bob is following evidence uncovered by The International Group for
Historic Aircraft Recovery, TIGHAR for short,
which challenges the official verdict
while confining the search to a much smaller area, Nikumaroro.
Ric Gillespie is TIGHAR's Executive Director.
GILLESPIE: I accepted what was widely accepted as the official explanation for what
happened to Amelia Earhart.
Until I saw evidence that something else had happened.
And then I said, let's look into this.
NARRATOR: TIGHAR has now been looking into Nikumaroro for the last 30 years.
GILLESPIE: You start on a journey and you never know where it's going to end.
NARRATOR: So far, they've found no definitive proof Amelia landed on the island,
but the clues they've amassed are tantalizing enough to set Bob on his quest.
BALLARD: I like the Nikumaroro theory.
NARRATOR: And he has a pretty good track record of finding the unfindable,
from the Titanic in the Atlantic to JFK's PT-109
here in the Pacific.
BALLARD: This is in my business, a Mt. Everest.
Titanic was a Mt. Everest.
Bismarck was a Mt. Everest.
I like challenges.
And this is probably the toughest one I've ever had, and you know,
I'll give it everything I got.
NARRATOR: Flying westward over the Pacific, Amelia is also giving all she's got.
Accompanied by veteran navigators Fred Noonan and Harry Manning and technical
advisor Paul Mantz, after 16 hours she touches down on Honolulu,
exactly when and where she intends.
“Smooth flying,” Amelia records in her logs.
But the next leg will not be so easy.
Just 10 seconds into takeoff, her world flight is cut short.
REPORTER (over radio): The 16,000 pound machine crashed on its nose and one wing when
taking off, heavily laden with petrol.
NARRATOR: The Electra is badly damaged,
its landing gear left sitting on the runway.
REPORTER (over radio): Now it's to be sent back for extensive repairs.
NARRATOR: It will take three months to repair the plane,
a delay that forces some ominous changes.
The man who understands her newfangled navigational radio, Harry Manning, can't continue.
And when she finally takes off again on May 20, 1937, a seasonal shift in the
prevailing winds means she'll have to go around the world in the other direction.
Rather than heading west, she must head east,
the most hazardous part of the journey,
crossing 2500 miles of ocean and finding Howland Island will now be last.
NARRATOR: Two days into his expedition,
Ballard is nearing the waters where Amelia is
believed to have gone missing and just so happens to be transiting with
a compass heading of 337 degrees Northwest,
the bearing Amelia gave on her last transmission.
BALLARD: Ironically, we're coming up on the same bearing.
We're here heading on 337, and she was coming down on the reciprocal.
CAPTAIN: Yeah, 157.
BALLARD (off-screen): 157.
CAPTAIN (off-screen): Yeah.
BALLARD (off-screen): It all plays out right there.
CAPTAIN (off-screen): Yep.
NARRATOR: The Nautilus team uses satellites to chart its course.
In 1937, Amelia's navigator Fred Noonan doesn't have the luxury.
When crossing large swaths of ocean with no visible landmarks,
he's forced to rely on what's called “dead reckoning,”
constantly keeping track of air speed
and compass headings to find his way.
During the night, he can then adjust with the help of the stars,
getting a fix on position and pointing the way for Amelia.
If, that is, conditions allow.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): There's good evidence that during the night,
there was an overcast that prevented Fred from getting celestial
observations from stars.
NARRATOR: Without stars, Fred would presumably await the next available sighting,
just as navigators do today.
He'd measure the angle of the sun with a modified mariner's sextant,
note the time and calculate a line of position.
In this case, an estimate of longitude, not latitude.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): Noonan knows that he is somewhere on this line and that line is
90 degrees to the rising sun,
the sun rises at 67 degrees, the line goes 337 degrees this way,
157 degrees this way.
I don't know if I'm up here or down here or right here on course, but I'm on this line.
NARRATOR: Fred can then use airspeed to determine when that North-South line will
cross through Howland and radio an ETA, but as the plane wings its way eastward,
without latitude, he still can't know where he is on that line.
As Itasca waits and waits for their arrival that morning, it becomes clear they are not
where they should be.
NARRATOR: They are supposed to home in on Howland using a new radio direction finder,
when close enough, but neither Fred nor Amelia are very familiar with it,
and the man who is, Harry Manning, dropped out after the Hawaii disaster.
GILLESPIE: They're not gettin' any help from the direction finder, now it's up to Fred.
And Fred says,
"Ok. It's either that way or this way."
NARRATOR: Their transmissions indicate they
try both ways.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): As Earhart said,
“We are running on the line north and south.”
There's nothin' this way till you get to Siberia.
NARRATOR: But if you follow the 337-157 line a few hundred miles the other way,
southeast from Howland, there is something, a 4.7- mile-long,
1.6-mile wide atoll, which at low tide, just happens to have an expansive,
exposed coral reef.
Not a bad place to land a plane.
GILLESPIE: And by this time they're getting really worried about the fuel.
And they look around and they see,
well the best place to land is this flat area near this,
this old shipwreck.
NARRATOR: The SS Norwich City,
a British freighter that ran aground eight years earlier.
GILLESPIE: And so, they set up and she bump-bump-bump, lands.
NARRATOR: It was called Gardner Island in 1937; today it's Nikumaroro.
And 52 hours after leaving Samoa, that's exactly where Nautilus is approaching now.
CREW: Yeah, I can see it from here.
BALLARD (off-screen): Alright.
NARRATOR: The island offers Bob and Expedition Leader Allison Fundis a narrow search
area relative to the vast Pacific.
But with just two weeks to find small pieces of a metal plane,
scattered among the metal debris of the Norwich City,
they waste no time getting started.
ALLISON (off-screen): So, we're standing right off Nikumaroro Island.
We're at the entrance to the lagoon where we think that is the general area
where Amelia Earhart would've taken her final approach.
NARRATOR: Previous attempts here, including modest imaging work and rudimentary mapping,
have come up short.
But they don't compare to Bob's multi-layered, battery of testing:
Multi-beam sonar that can produce detailed
3D maps of the deep-water terrain.
An Autonomous Surface Vessel, or ASV, to scan along the shallows.
High flying drones to image and map the reef where Amelia would have landed.
And finally, the jewels in the crown,
a pair of state of the art ROVs that can
image the seafloor down to 13,000 feet.
ALLISON: We've brought a lot of toys to the game, so we're really trying to cover
everything from, from the beach to, to the depths.
NARRATOR: And the search won't stop at the water's edge.
The Nautilus team will soon be joined by archaeologists to discover whether Amelia really
could have lived out her final days here.
Intriguing evidence found on the island just three years after she went missing
suggests she may have.
By 1940, the British, in their last gasp attempts to expand their empire,
try to start a colony here.
The officer in charge, Gerald Gallagher, reports a startling discovery.
On the Southeast corner, under a “ren” tree, colonists had uncovered bones with what
appeared to be a woman's shoe.
He cables headquarters with a fascinating conjecture.
GILLESPIE: Oh, my God.
September 23rd, 1940, “just might be Amelia Earhart.” And he misspells Earhart,
you know, you know, with a "d" in it, Earhardt.
NARRATOR: Thirteen bones are found in all, including some long bones,
part of a pelvis, ribs, vertebra, mandible and a skull.
GILLESPIE: This was a whole episode in the Earhart story that nobody knew about.
NARRATOR: Nobody knew about because the bones were packed up and sent to the colonial
capitol in Fiji, where a doctor named DW Hoodless analyzes them,
disputes Gallagher's assertion,
and dismisses the bones as male.
They're eventually lost and forgotten.
GILLESPIE: Like the Ark of the Covenant in the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
NARRATOR: Until recently.
National Geographic archaeologist Fred Hiebert, along with forensic
anthropologist Erin Kimmerle, and cultural anthropologist Jaime Bach have followed
Gallagher's paper trail to the capitol of Kiribati, Tarawa, which won independence from
Britain in 1979, and inherited all of the related Colonial archives.
HIEBERT: I had no idea they had such comprehensive documents.
NARRATOR: The teams here based on a recent reevaluation of the written description of the
bones that suggests Dr. Hoodless got it wrong.
KIMMERLE (off-screen): Dr. Hoodless made some errors.
He didn't take a long bone measurement of the femur.
That is really the absolute best bone that we could measure for an accurate
stature estimate.
He says that he can't estimate ancestry, but then goes on to say it's probably a mixed
ancestry of European and Polynesian.
Where I think he really got it off was the sex estimation.
He takes a couple of measurements that he doesn't provide those metrics and says
that based on this ratio um it's more likely male.
NARRATOR: By entering Hoodless' measurements of the bones into a
modern forensic database,
the new study found that the castaway wasn't male, but female,
about 5 feet 6 inches tall, right around Amelia's height.
KIMMERLE (off-screen): What it means is that those remains should not have been excluded.
At a minimum, they should have been analyzed further.
NARRATOR: The question now is, if the paper archives wound up here on Tarawa,
might the bones be here as well, and could they be Amelia's?
NARRATOR: Tarawa is the capital of Kirbati, which spreads across more than
30 islands in the central Pacific, including Nikumaroro.
The National Geographic team believes if the British telegrams ended up here,
then the associated 13 bones discovered on Nikumaroro should be here too.
JAMIE (off-screen): The people of Kiribati have a high respect for
Human life if they didn't know whose bones
they were or what they should do with them;
they would still hold on to them, they wouldn't be discarded.
NARRATOR: The challenge is they've been holding on to many unidentified
remains on Tarawa.
It witnessed one of the bloodiest battles of World War II.
HIEBERT: Thousands of servicemen from the Japanese side and the US side perished.
NARRATOR: Many of those remains are now housed in Tarawa's archives,
and there's no obvious box of 13 lying around.
If the team has any chance of finding the Nikumaroro bones,
they will have to comb through
hundreds of fragments for bones that match Hoodless' descriptions or match Amelia.
KIMMERLE: Amelia had a couple of really unique characteristics on her skull,
and with her dentition.
One of those features is called a diastema.
It's a small space between your teeth.
NARRATOR: She also had repeated surgeries throughout her life due to crippling
sinus pain.
KIMMERLE (off-screen): They drilled a puncture hole to relieve the sinuses.
So, seeing that evidence of surgery and the diastema would be great indicators
that this could be her.
NARRATOR: The team meticulously studies each bone,
eliminating them one by one.
KIMMERLE (off-screen): This box has three skulls.
HIEBERT (off-screen): Wow.
KIMMERLE: This is a male individual.
HIEBERT: So, this one also checked off the list.
NARRATOR: They search through more than 600 bone fragments,
including 7 skulls.
They're all male.
HIEBERT: This is pretty much it.
NARRATOR: Until, at the end of the last day, in the very last box.
KIMMERLE: Here.
Look at, this is the frontal bone.
HIEBERT: Yeah.
KIMMERLE: So, see how slight?
That's a female, and you can see a huge difference.
HIEBERT: This one is really special.
We're looking at a female all of a sudden, that's a game-changer.
NARRATOR: A female that may even bear some of Amelia's telltale markings.
KIMMERLE: We can see a little bit of remodeling and something was going on with
the nasal area.
If we reconstruct this, we'll be able to just to visualize it a little bit better.
NARRATOR: The team now arranges to get the skull back to Erin's lab in Florida,
reconstruct it in 3D and see how it compares to Amelia.
They'll then try to extract some DNA.
HIEBERT: The ultimate 100% for this project is comparing the DNA from these bones to
relatives of Amelia Earhart.
Now, honestly, that is a long shot, but I love long shots.
NARRATOR: In another long shot, Fred and Jaime will join Ballard in Nikumaroro to dig
where the 13 bones may have originated.
HIEBERT (off-screen): It's hard to imagine Amelia Earhart on Nikumaroro,
but this is where the evidence is leading us.
NARRATOR: If Amelia did end up here, it's a world away from where she started.
Amelia Mary Earhart was born overlooking the Missouri River in
Atchison, Kansas in 1897 right here in her Grandma Otis' house.
And from her earliest days, her rebellious spirit was on full display.
CANDACE (off-screen): Grandma Otis was big on deportment, lady-like deportment,
and so she was always constantly catching Amelia doing things
that were not lady-like,
hopping over the fence and wanting to learn to play basketball or using a
boy's sled instead of a girl's sled to slide down, you know, the hill, the Second Avenue,
which is just out here.
NARRATOR: Whether joyriding down Second Avenue, headfirst like the boys did,
building a roller coaster in the backyard to thrill the neighborhood kids,
or leading her friends on pretend expeditions through Asia and Africa from the
carriage in the barn, Amelia was always up for adventure.
That she was a girl never entered the equation.
CANDACE (off-screen): She was always being caught and always being scolded.
It didn't, obviously didn't change Amelia's behavior at all,
but what it did was force Amelia to think about the rules between
girls and boys and why do girls have to act certain ways and why do boys
get all the freedom and they get all the fun?
NARRATOR: Amelia's parents don't exactly discourage the Tomboyishness.
Mom outfits her and her sister Muriel with bloomers.
ANN (off-screen): Every dress she was in she would rip to pieces so her mother had
play clothes made for, both her and Muriel.
NARRATOR: Dad buys her footballs, even a rifle.
ANN (off-screen): She got a 22-rifle for her 12th or 14th birthday.
She got to shoot the rats in the barn.
She was an adventurer even then.
NARRATOR: Amelia paints a rosy picture of this time, but her privileged life in Atchison
turns challenging when her father begins drinking and can't hold down
a job as a lawyer.
CANDACE: Dad's sickness as they refer to it, Mm-hm.
NARRATOR: They struggle financially and are forced to move around the country.
CANDACE: She told us herself how it shaped her.
She said that one had to depend on oneself, even the person that you thought was
most dependable, your father, could change.
She learned that early on.
NARRATOR: Those difficult lessons would influence Amelia her entire life.
Back on Nautilus, the search for Amelia's Lockheed Electra is in full swing.
The ship completed a circumnavigation of the island overnight,
scanning the seafloor with its multi-beam sonar and generating a detailed 3D
picture of the island's deep-water terrain.
With some daylight, it's now safer to edge closer to the jagged reef where
Amelia would have landed.
To do it, they launch this contraption, the ASV, a self-driving powerboat tricked
out with sensors and cameras that can scan back and forth along the breakers.
ALLISON (off-screen): We're pretty much getting to the reef break, which is excellent.
That means between the ship system and this system we'll be able to map up and
to the reef.
CREW: Begin logging. Logging data.
ERIN: It's got too high a frequency in too deep of water.
NARRATOR: Navigator Erin Heffron can then crunch the data and home in on the most
likely spots to hide a plane.
ERIN: We've been focusing our energies up here in the northwest.
So, the colored stuff you're seeing here is the ASV bathymetry.
So, I'm gonna just turn it into 3D.
So that we can get perspective.
NARRATOR: The slope beneath the waves turns out to be steeper than anyone predicted.
ERIN: We're not making it look more dramatic than it is,
this is actually what it looks like.
NARRATOR: Bob thinks that the plane, if here,
would have sat precariously just yards from the edge,
before rising tides and rougher seas dragged it over the cliff,
likely shattering it into pieces.
If so, the pieces should be waiting for him at the bottom.
BALLARD (off-screen): There's no sense of searching a vertical wall.
It's not gonna be there.
So, what'll probably happen is either it's here, slight possibility it's something on
a bench, but more than likely we'll have to go and do the deeper region and search down
here where things would finally come to rest.
NARRATOR: However deep the plane ended up, there's reason to believe
it did not sink immediately.
On July 2, 1937, hours after Amelia went missing, mysterious radio signals were
detected across the Pacific, signals that could only have come from Amelia's plane.
NARRATOR: Throughout her record-breaking flight around the world,
Amelia Earhart would transmit radio messages on just a couple of frequencies,
62-10 during the day and 31-05 at night, frequencies that no one else in the
Central Pacific was supposed to be using.
GILLESPIE: So, for somebody to hear a signal, it's like "khhhh," on 31-05,
there's only one airplane that can be coming from.
NARRATOR: And on Friday, July 2, just hours after Amelia went missing en route
to Howland Island, those frequencies were detected by an unlikely source.
MAN (over radio): Pan Pacific express planes are built...
NARRATOR: Pan American Airways, which had just begun flying passengers across the Northern
Pacific, hopping from one island to the next.
GILLESPIE: And at each of these stops along the way, they had radio-direction
finding stations that would guide the planes in.
NARRATOR: The Pan Am stations tune their direction finders to Amelia's frequency,
and they detect signals.
Assuming the plane could no longer be flying, the signals have to be coming from land.
GILLESPIE: It's on land, and it's on its wheels, cause they've gotta run an engine to
recharge the battery that the radio depends on.
NARRATOR: Pan Am reports the signals to the Navy which plots the bearings on this map
acquired by Ric Gillespie.
GILLESPIE: So, you can see that there was a bearing taken from Makapuu there on Hawaii,
that went down this way.
There's another one taken from Wake Island, comes down this way.
And there was another one taken from Midway that came down through here and a fourth
one taken by the Coast Guard on Howland Island that came down through there.
NARRATOR: If you extend all the lines down and plot where they cross.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): They all converge in this area, and they had to be coming from
a signal transmitted from land
and the only land there is Gardner Island.
NARRATOR: It's those signals that are keeping Bob going out here.
BALLARD (off-screen): The radio evidence is so compelling that she was
sitting on or near that island transmitting without moving.
You can't take that off the table.
NARRATOR: Not just the Pan Am signals, which could only take bearings,
but dozens of distressing accounts of Amelia's verbal cries for help,
reported by people much farther away.
None more provocatively perhaps than 15-year-old Betty Klenck,
who recorded the calls in her notebook.
BALLARD (off-screen): A young lady in St. Petersburg, Florida,
sittin' there with a souped-up HAM set that her father built a very large antenna for.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): She would sit at the radio and cruise the dial
and she would jot down the lyrics of her favorite songs.
Make sketches of cowboys, glamorous women.
And suddenly she hears a woman's voice saying, “This is Amelia Earhart.
Please help me.” And she starts transcribing what, what she hears.
NARRATOR: She writes the word Howland and describes a man who sounds injured.
GILLESPIE: And the man is trying to get out of wherever they are and she's trying to
talk him out of that and keep him calm.
NARRATOR: Ric thinks it's Fred Noonan.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): It reads like the transcript from a modern 9-1-1 call.
NARRATOR: Throughout, she continually jots down the letters “NY, NY.”
GILLESPIE (off-screen): And I asked her about that, I said, "Betty, what's NY, NY."
She says, "Well, that's New York City, that's how I write New York City."
Well the shipwreck that's on the island that British shipwreck was the SS Norwich City.
Norwich City. New York City. Norwich City.
NARRATOR: 80 years ago, the Norwich City would have still been largely intact.
GILLESPIE: It still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
And Betty wasn't the only one who heard this kind of thing.
NARRATOR: TIGHAR uncovered 57 credible transmissions, officially reported to local
police stations or newspapers across the country.
It then took the reports a step further, correlating when they were received with the
tides on the island at the time.
All of the calls came in during low tide, the only time Amelia could spin the
propellers and transmit.
BALLARD (off-screen): When they match the tide that's actually on the
island to those messages, wow, that's pretty convincing.
NARRATOR: As the sun sets on day two of his search,
Bob is getting ready to see if her plane
was washed over the edge of the reef, just north of the Norwich City,
where TIGHAR says would have been the best place to land.
CREW (over radio): Ready to launch.
NARRATOR: If so, it's battered and broken in pieces on the bottom and there's only one
set of tools in Bob's arsenal capable of reaching it.
CREW (over radio): Roger that, going in.
Okay, you see the can, you can start driving.
NARRATOR: The crew first deploys ROV Hercules, a small but sophisticated robot that
will serve as their main set of eyes on the seafloor.
CREW (over radio): Ok, tether is in the water, everything looks good back here.
CREW 2 (off-screen): Okay, let him out.
NARRATOR: The larger Argus ROV will keep an eye on Herc,
while buffering the motion of the ship.
CREW (over radio): Ok, Argus is going down.
BALLARD: We're at 309 meters right now.
CREW: Can you put camera? BALLARD: Yeah. Ok, I see it.
NARRATOR: In the control van,
Bob and the team can then watch the live feeds from both ROVs,
their first up-close-and-personal look at the bottom.
BALLARD: So this is Hercules going up slope,
sliding along in the area where we think she landed.
NARRATOR: They position Herc around 1,000 feet down, where the slope levels off,
and is most likely to catch falling debris from above.
They then start sweeping in long parallel lines back and forth from about the
Norwich City to the Northwest tip of the island,
gradually climbing up slope as they go.
BALLARD: Every one of those could be a piece of a plane.
NARRATOR: In years of searching,
no one has ever been able to find a single piece of Amelia's Electra.
But Bob will be looking deeper than anyone has ever gone before.
BALLARD (off-screen): So, this is just the way you do it,
pop some popcorn and go to the movies.
Yeah, I think we're binge this for the next couple of weeks, whaddya think?
NARRATOR: As Bob goes in search of Amelia's plane, in the early part of the
twentieth century, Amelia is finding herself.
And there is no lack of inspiration.
TRACEY (off-screen): Amelia Earhart was very much a person of her generation.
NARRATOR: She's 6 years old when the Wright Brothers defy gravity at Kitty Hawk in 1903.
She's 16 during the Suffrage March on Washington in 1913.
MAN (over radio): Susan B. Anthony and
her followers have won for women the right to vote.
NARRATOR: And 23 when women are granted the vote.
TRACEY: Which means she was in the first cohort of women able to vote in this country.
NARRATOR: In her twenties, Amelia explores all kinds of roles, as a telephone clerk,
a truck driver, a stenographer, a photographer.
It was while working as a nurse's aide to World War I vets in Toronto when she
finally discovers her one true passion.
CANDACE (off-screen): She would go out to the Canadian airfield, which was nearby,
and she would watch those World War I pilots, out there flying their airplanes,
and she was fascinated by them.
NARRATOR: One day, a pilot gives Amelia and her friend a thrill,
buzzing them on the airfield.
CANDACE (off-screen): And her girlfriend screams and runs away,
and Amelia stands there and
everything flies back and she's in love, you know, she's in love with flying.
NARRATOR: A few years later, in Long Beach California,
she finally gets a chance to fly herself,
10 minutes that would set the course for the rest of her life.
On Nikumaroro, Fred Hiebert and a team of archaeologists, with guidance from an eager
pair of forensic advisors, are hunting for her remains on land.
The discovery of the female skeletal fragments on Tarawa has them more
optimistic than ever.
HIEBERT: What we want to do is link them here to Nikumaroro and that's what we're going to
do with the forensic dogs.
NARRATOR: The telegrams sent by Gallagher indicate only 13 bones were unearthed
from the island in 1940.
The scientists are hoping that Berkeley and Ruby will lead them to more.
And thanks to Gallagher, they already have some good leads on where to look.
On the far side of the island from where Amelia is thought to have landed.
TOM (off-screen): She's a smart woman.
She lands, she knows she's got a problem.
She knows water is one of the problems.
So, go explore the island.
NARRATOR: Archaeologist Tom King has been exploring the island himself since 1989 and,
inspired by the telegrams, has been focusing his team on one particular tree.
GALLAGHER (off-screen): Body had obviously been lying
under a ‘ren' tree and remains of fire,
turtle and dead birds appear to indicate life.
NARRATOR: Over five excavations TIGHAR has uncovered many of the
items Gallagher described, the campfire,
cooked bird and turtle remains.
There's just been one piece evading them, the human bones.
That's where the dogs come in.
They've been trained to zero in specifically on human remains.
TOM: The dogs are employing a very sophisticated instrument in their nose.
They not only find bones, but they find decomposition.
NARRATOR: In a 2017 expedition, four different dogs, including Berkeley,
alerted right near the scientists' chosen ren tree, a good sign that someone did
in fact die here.
ANDREW (off-screen): Of all the millions of trees in the South Pacific
they alerted under this one.
It confirmed, certainly for me, that this in fact is the tree where that castaway died.
NARRATOR: Unfortunately, that expedition didn't yield any bones.
They may have dissolved into the island's acidic soil.
But they're banking on another possibility, that the bones were carried off by some of
the island's insidious inhabitants.
If so, the dogs may be able to lead the way right to them.
NARRATOR: If Amelia did survive on this island, there would be no avoiding this
formidable creature.
Up to three feet across and weighing in at over nine pounds,
coconut crabs are the largest on earth, and many thousands of them team
over tiny Nikumaroro.
HIEBERT (off-screen): They're just amazing.
Their pinchers are so strong that they can climb trees and grab a bird and,
you know, kill it.
NARRATOR: They're also voracious scavengers, as demonstrated by TIGHAR in 2007
with half a pig carcass.
TOM (off-screen): This creature that was laid out.
And they set up time lapse cameras in the trees.
And the results are about the most disgusting thing you've ever seen.
But it is very enlightening.
NARRATOR: With help from their smaller strawberry hermit crab cousins,
they devour the carcass within a week,
carrying the bones every which way into their lairs.
The scientists are now thinking something similar would have happened to whoever
died at the ren.
HIEBERT (off-screen): So right now,
the biggest hypothesis is to see if we can find a crab burrow
with the remains of some human, right at the site.
That would be like, unbelievable.
NARRATOR: As they unleash the dogs to sniff out remains, they've already found some
tantalizing clues here over the decades suggesting that person was Amelia.
Most are now under the care of Ric Gillespie at TIGHAR headquarters,
in Oxford, Pennsylvania.
There's a zipper pull.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): A tab and a slider, that because of the markings on it,
we know was made in the United States between 1933 and 1936.
Perfect time period.
NARRATOR: There's a small, glass cosmetic jar.
GILLESPIE: The technical name for it is an ointment pot.
And we're able to determine that that particular style of ointment pot contained
Dr. Berry's freckle cream.
NARRATOR: An ointment women used to fade their freckles.
GILLESPIE: It made the freckles fade because it was 11% mercury, I mean,
it's horrible stuff.
NARRATOR: Amelia was famous for her freckles, and it's widely accepted that she
didn't like them.
GILLESPIE: We don't know whether she used freckle cream.
But we do know, we have a jar of freckle cream on the island.
What's it doing there?
NARRATOR: And then there are two pieces of plate glass from what appears to be a woman's
compact, found near flecks of dried make-up.
GILLESPIE: Little wafers of red stuff that tests out to be early 20th century makeup,
it's rouge.
NARRATOR: From her first flying lessons with another pioneering aviatrix,
Neta Snook, we know Amelia was always conscious of her appearance,
even after a plane crash.
CANDACE: They climb out of this plane and Amelia pulls out her compact and begins
powdering her nose and Neta wants to know, what is she doing.
And Amelia says, you never know when the newspaper guys might turn up.
So you gotta look good, even if you've crashed your plane, you know?
NARRATOR: Yet another added pressure for female aviators.
There's no way of knowing whether the compact was Amelia's but Ric hasn't found
a better explanation either.
GILLESPIE: So yeah, these things start to add up.
REPORTER (over radio): Just regular girls after all, but now they're ready to
do or die.
TOM (off-screen): Add all that up and the evidence suggests
in total is that there was an American woman who camped at
the southeast end of the island in the late 1930s and died there.
NARRATOR: Beyond the personal items at the campsite, in 1991,
during one of TIGHAR's earliest expeditions, Ric found a scrap of aluminum
closer to the spot where he thinks Amelia landed.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): That is clearly a section of skin,
aluminum exterior covering of an airplane.
It's the right kind of aluminum, it's the right kind of rivet for
a Lockheed Electra.
NARRATOR: Problem was he could never match it to any of the few
surviving Lockheed Electras.
GILLESPIE: So, we said, it must be from some other kind of airplane.
NARRATOR: But it didn't fit any other planes either.
GILLESPIE: I've been living with this piece of metal since 1991,
and it has driven me nuts!
NARRATOR: Ric has been exploring a new theory.
On the third leg of her World Flight, Amelia made a particularly hard landing in
Miami, cracking the Electra's rear, passenger window.
GILLESPIE: They took the window out and they just put up this aluminum patch.
NARRATOR: Ric now thinks that the patch they put on,
the only piece of aluminum not part of Amelia's Electra,
may be the one piece of her plane he's been holding onto all
these years, convenient as it sounds.
GILLESPIE: C'mon, yeah.
But there's a way that that could've happened.
She's on the reef, it's un-Godly hot in the airplane
so maybe Earhart and Noonan
knock this piece of the patch out of the airplane to get more ventilation.
NARRATOR: The patch gets washed ashore, while the rest of the plane gets carried by
the surf and tides into the abyss.
GILLESPIE: That's why the only piece that survived on the island is the patch.
NARRATOR: It's a nice story, but like all of the other evidence obtained here over
the decades, there's no provable link to Amelia or her plane,
something this team is looking to change.
The dogs are troopers.
Hot, humid islands are not exactly their ideal working conditions.
LYNNE (off-screen): Check it out.
NARRATOR: Ruby shows some interest and doesn't commit to an alert, but Berkeley.
LYNNE (off-screen): He keeps going back to it.
So, he smells something down there.
Good job.
HIEBERT: Berkeley alerted right at the center of our proposed “X marks the spot.”
NARRATOR: Right in the center of the ren tree, where they've been digging for years.
They don't know whether he's detecting trace remains that seeped into the
soil long ago, or actual bones dragged deep into a burrow by a coconut crab.
But they're confident something must be here.
TOM (off-screen): The dogs right now are telling us that
right under the big ren is where to look.
So, we're putting our eggs in that basket.
NARRATOR: As often happens out here, while they search, the reality of what they're
searching for sets in, that this is where Amelia may have spent her final days.
TOM (off-screen): I think she probably started out thinking,
“I'll get rescued and fly out.
The Itasca will get here, we'll fix the wheel.” And then as days pass,
and it looks like that's not happening, she begins to lose hope for that possibility.
And she's got to figure out how to live.
NARRATOR: It's a fate almost impossible to imagine,
especially for a figure so full of life.
After a few flying lessons in 1920, Amelia buys a plane,
gets her pilot's license, only the 16th woman in the country ever to do so,
and works any job she can to pay for flights and fuel.
Within two years she sets her first record.
TRACEY (off-screen): She said that she believes women are bred for timidity.
You know, bred to be afraid and that was the one thing she did not want to be.
She was determined that she would not be afraid to do the scariest thing you could do
which is really to take these pretty rickety primitive machines
as high as she could possibly go.
So, her very first record that she breaks is an altitude record.
She goes to 14,000 feet.
And no woman had done that before.
NARRATOR: When Amelia wasn't flying, she'd watch as others did.
CANDACE (off-screen): One day she goes out and um,
a female pilot is out there doing demonstrations and has an accident.
Doesn't kill herself but crashes the plane and people are saying, do you see?
This is the perfect example.
Women cannot fly airplanes.
And what does Amelia Earhart do?
She races into one of the hangars and basically jumps into a plane.
NARRATOR: She wows the crowd with stunts and a beautiful landing, then meets the press.
CANDACE (off-screen): "Why did you do it?"
"I did this to show you that women are as good as pilots as men."
And not long afterwards, someone's looking for a female pilot on the East Coast and lo
and behold the name that they know, Amelia Earhart.
NARRATOR: That one bold move is about to put Amelia on the map.
CREW (off-screen): Are you wide on Argus?
MAN (off-screen): Yeah, I'm wide.
NARRATOR: On Nikumaroro, Bob is following Amelia's lead and making a rather
risky move of his own.
BALLARD: Yeah.
Alright let's step in with the ship.
CREW: Bridge, Nav.
Ten meters, due east.
NARRATOR: For the last six days, he has been slowly
maneuvering the Nautilus back and forth along the island's Northwest corner,
guiding the ROVs up the island's steep slope,
and in towards the reef break, near the Norwich City and where
Amelia may have landed.
BALLARD (off-screen): We're trying to get as shallow as we dare.
This is the diciest part.
‘Cause we don't wanna be sitting next to this wreck.
WOMAN: Starting to sweat?
MAN: A little bit.
NARRATOR: Bob doesn't want to risk missing an inch of this area.
Beyond it being one of the most likely spots to land a plane it's also the
exact site of another tantalizing clue.
Where on October 13, 1937, just months after the Electra disappeared,
this picture was taken by a British colonial officer named Eric Bevington.
The Norwich City still dominates the background.
Ric Gillespie first came across the photo in 1992, but he was so focused on the ship,
he cropped out the rest of the print until nearly 20 years later he got a call from
TIGHAR's forensic imaging analyst, Jeff Glickman.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): Jeff calls me up and he says, um,
"You know, the picture of the western end of the island with the shipwreck?
What's the thing sticking up out of the water on the reef?"
I said, "There's nothin' sticking up out of the water." I get the full frame which I
hadn't seen in years.
And yeah, it's obvious, there's something stickin' up out of the water.
I had cropped it out when I blew it up.
I said, "Well what the heck is that?"
NARRATOR: The pair headed to Oxford University, where Bevington's archives are
housed, to analyze the original print.
Sure enough something was there.
And by scaling it against the Norwich City, they could estimate its size.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): The black thing is 36 inches and I can scale the other stuff and
it's like this fork-shaped thing and I said, "Whoa.
This is starting to sound like landing gear components" and it just happens to be the same
size and shape of a Lockheed Electra landing gear.
NARRATOR: Acknowledging the image is nebulous enough to evoke comparisons to the
Lochness Monster,
they enlisted specialists at the US State Department who concurred,
it appeared to be a match.
BALLARD (off-screen): They had that image enhanced and it was a landing gear;
that's what got me to come here.
That was so compelling.
NARRATOR: So why would the landing gear survive on the reef and not the
rest of the plane?
Ric believes it may have been knocked loose during the rough landing,
similar to what happened on takeoff in Hawaii.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): In Hawaii, the right main landing gear separated from the airplane
and it came apart just like we see in the Bevington photo.
NARRATOR: By the time Bevington took his picture,
Ric says the plane would have washed off the reef
with only the landing gear left peeking above the surface.
If so, it could still be here.
With Nautilus' stern now a little too close to the reef,
to find the alleged landing gear,
Bob is going to need some different tools.
BALLARD: We're not gonna go any further.
So we have a 100-meter gap to fill.
Probably half of it will be solved by drones.
NARRATOR: The drones' high-resolution cameras can image from the reef to several
feet into the shallows.
BALLARD (off-screen): And then we've got divers taking it deeper to where they meet up
with our ROVs.
NARRATOR: But though Nikumaroro's reef is protected and teeming with life,
there's no trace of the Bevington object.
ALLISON: A lot of great coral and great fish.
But, nothing shiny or metal or nothing manmade.
SAMANTHA: Really interesting kind of near the surge.
Lot of, lot of wave action.
So, if, if there was anything there.
It's probably been blasted to smithereens.
NARRATOR: It's another blow,
but as Amelia liked to say, adventure is worthwhile in itself.
No doubt she'd be pleased by the attempt.
By Spring, 1928, Amelia is a social worker for immigrant families when her legacy of
adventure is about to take off.
One year has passed since Charles Lindberg flew his Spirit of St. Louis
from New York to Paris.
REPORTER (over radio): He had completed his historic 3600-mile flight in 34 hours.
NARRATOR: He became an instant celebrity, and now,
the man who published Lindbergh's
blockbuster biography, George Putnam, is leading a new search to find
his female equivalent.
CANDACE (off-screen): She needs to be attractive, college educated, female
and a good pilot.
And the first name that comes up is Amelia Earhart.
TRACEY (off-screen): She looked middle class enough, wholesome enough,
she had the right kind of background.
She was the image of the modern woman that they wanted to project.
NARRATOR: Putnam arranges the flight for June 1928, one year after Lindbergh.
But as her plane readies for takeoff, there's one small catch.
SAMMIE: What no one told Amelia was that she wasn't going to be flying the plane.
NARRATOR: The pilot would be Wilmer Stoltz.
Amelia would be relegated to commander, or to use her words,
“A sack of potatoes.”
No matter.
20 hours, 40 minutes after taking off from Newfoundland, despite missing their mark by
nearly 200 miles, she's greeted as if she'd landed on the moon.
REPORTER (over radio): Her reception is overwhelming.
SAMMIE (off-screen): There was some embarrassment on her part that she suddenly was the first
woman to fly across the Atlantic but she didn't pilot it.
REPORTER (over radio): Two months before she had been saving her money for
brief weekend joyrides.
Today she is hailed Queen of the Air.
NARRATOR: The year after Amelia's first Atlantic crossing,
the Norwich City ran aground on Nikumaroro.
BALLARD: Now wait a minute.
That looks like a propeller.
WOMAN (off-screen): That looks like a propeller.
BALLARD: Doesn't that look like a propeller?
WOMAN (off-screen): That looks like a propeller.
NARRATOR: And so far, Bob has been doing his best to avoid its disintegrating remains.
BALLARD (off-screen): Doesn't look like the propeller off an airplane, does it?
MAN (off-screen): No. BALLARD (off-screen): Rats.
NARRATOR: By day eight he's found plenty of iron from the ship but not a single
piece of aluminum from Amelia's plane.
CREW (off-screen): I've got samples here at 0-9.
That looks hard.
BALLARD (off-screen): Yeah, it's from the Norwich City.
NARRATOR: Now he's trying a new strategy, following the river of debris down slope in
the hope that debris from the Electra will have followed a similar trail.
BALLARD (off-screen): We can see the drainage pattern of all the debris coming off the
Norwich City and you have rivers of that material flowing downslope.
NARRATOR: They trace the iron debris down to about 1,300 feet,
to where the trail finally peters out.
Now Bob can start looking for lighter, aluminum fragments from Amelia's plane farther
from the shipwreck.
BALLARD: If that's from the Norwich City, it tells us she's more than likely
upslope, so, that was very useful.
All we need is one piece.
We get one piece, we get all of it.
NARRATOR: Halfway up the wall.
CREW (off-screen): Uh, look left for a second.
Roger, look left.
See that black?
BALLARD: Alright, can we come in and take a peek at that?
CREW (off-screen): Zoom in please. Comin' in.
NARRATOR: Bob may get his wish.
BALLARD (off-screen): That looks interesting.
NARRATOR: A piece of metal not from the Norwich City.
NARRATOR: After her Transatlantic crossing in 1928, Amelia is unstoppable.
And practically before the last ticker tape falls, she sets out to prove
that she's much more than “a sack of potatoes.”
She sets speed records.
And yet another altitude record.
She's the first woman ever to fly solo across the country.
EARHART (off-screen): It took me about 19 hours and a few minutes.
I wish I could have done it faster.
NARRATOR: And the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the mainland.
ANN (off-screen): You have to remember, women didn't even drive cars back then,
much less fly airplanes, so this was a big deal.
NARRATOR: Along the way,
George Putnam works behind the scenes to keep her in the spotlight.
And in 1931, Amelia agrees to marry him.
CANDACE: He asked her numerous times to marry him and she said, no, no-no, no-no.
Because she always saw marriage as this cage,
once a woman got married you were stuck,
you were in the house, you were having kids,
that was it, your life was over.
NARRATOR: But even in marriage,
Amelia wasn't about to conform to social norms.
On the morning of their wedding, draped in brown, not white,
she hands George a letter,
now at Purdue University along with many of her other belongings,
laying down her terms.
SAMMIE: According to George,
she handed him this letter silently and waited for him to read it.
EARHART: Dear GPP, You must know again my reluctance to marry.
I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness
to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly.
I must exact a cruel promise and that is you will let me go in a year if
we find no happiness together.
NARRATOR: George accepts her terms and they vow to love, honor,
and omit the word “obey.”
TRACEY: It is absolute proof that Amelia Earhart did not
intend either in her personal life or her professional life to concede to conventions that
would limit women in any way.
NARRATOR: The following year, on May 20, 1932,
Amelia climbs into her red Lockheed Vega and proves
she knows no limits.
REPORTER (over radio): Blazing a trail of feminine glory,
the dauntless courage of an indomitable soul
was not to be denied.
NARRATOR: She becomes the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic
not as passenger, but as pilot.
REPORTER (over radio): 14 hours later she brought her Lockheed monoplane safely down
on the barren fields of Londonderry, Ireland, hailed as the first woman to fly the
ocean alone.
NARRATOR: She may have planned on landing in Paris as Lindbergh had but nothing
could dampen her reception.
REPORTER (over radio): As they have Lindbergh, New Yorkers took
Lady Lindy to their hearts.
NARRATOR: Eighty plus years later, Lady Lindy has outshined Lindbergh himself.
And her mystique continues to entice explorers like Bob Ballard.
BALLARD (off-screen): Pick it up.
CREW (off-screen): My go.
NARRATOR: The round-the-clock search on Nautilus goes on and the ROV cameras
focus in on something unusual.
BALLARD (off-screen): Zoom in on it.
NARRATOR: They can't tell if it's a plane part.
But it's a welcome sign.
CREW (off-screen): Doesn't have a ton of growth.
Does it look like aluminum?
BALLARD (off-screen): It's got some holes at the end.
CREW (off-screen): Yeah.
BALLARD (off-screen): Yep, guys. Put in the box.
NARRATOR: For now, they tuck it away and keep on searching.
CREW (off-screen): Yeah. BALLARD (off-screen): Looks like aluminum.
NARRATOR: As the hours pass and the watches change.
CREW: Go ahead and zoom in a little bit there, video.
Zooming in.
NARRATOR: More interesting bits of metal.
CREW: That's good.
NARRATOR: Even a piece of aluminum, their first.
CREW (off-screen): Try grabbing it by the lip here.
NARRATOR: Then, just before sun-up, Herc's lights spy something that clearly doesn't
belong down here.
CREW (off-screen): What is that? What is that?
It looks kinda weird, huh?
It looks freshly, oh my Gosh, it's your hat! Lindsey!
LINDSEY: Oh, my hat! CREW: It's your hat.
NARRATOR: All of the specimens, and navigator Lindsay Gee's hat,
are stowed away and will be examined once Hercules surfaces,
on the hope that one of them happens to be a piece of Lockheed Electra.
BALLARD (off-screen): It's just hours and hours and hours and hours,
searching at night with a flashlight.
You never know.
NARRATOR: If the ROV's spot-lights has found no sign of Amelia,
there was no escaping the spotlight
after her solo transatlantic flight.
Mixing it up with the likes of Cary Grant,
Marlene Dietrich, Harpo Marx,
even First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, her star shines ever brighter.
And she takes full advantage of the fame.
TRACEY (off-screen): She wanted to be a symbol of what women
could do when they were not being held back.
NARRATOR: She pens stories for Cosmopolitan Magazine.
Produces her own brand of luggage.
She even comes out with her own fashion line,
designed to give women a greater sense of
mobility and freedom.
EARHART: I carried a sandwich in case, I didn't eat it though.
NARRATOR: Empowering as she tries to be, she also knows how to play the charming
feminine role as well.
REPORTER: What kind of sandwich was it?
EARHART: A chicken sandwich.
CANDACE (off-screen): She would act like she was kind of demure and not particularly,
opinionated when we know that she had very, very definite opinions.
She would tell people that that tousled hairdo is just, she'd just let it go,
and in fact she took a curling iron to it to make it a little more tousled.
EARHART: I christen thee Resolute.
MAN: It gets better every time!
TRACEY: She knows that she's got a lot riding on this public persona
that she's crafting.
And that there's a purpose that is a bit bigger than selling luggage
or setting records.
NARRATOR: In 1935, Amelia finds the perfect place to combine her love of flying
with her goal of championing women, as a live-in faculty mentor at Purdue University,
a role Gender Studies Professor TJ Boisseau recently revived.
TRACEY: Oh, she is one upping you!
She was here to inspire women, give them a sense of confidence that you were gonna
be allowed to have careers after college and to even instill that confidence in
students was a revolutionary act at that moment.
SAMMIE (off-screen): There's a rumor that some of the fraternities were
very concerned the women wouldn't want to marry them
after hearing Amelia talk that she was giving them
all these radical ideas like, maybe you don't have to be a wife and mother.
REPORTER (over radio): It's the world-famous Amelia Earhart,
first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.
NARRATOR: Through it all Amelia continues flying.
And in 1936, Purdue, helps raise the $80,000 for her to build the
plane of her dreams.
Whether or not that plane,
or Amelia, ever made it to Nikumaroro remains to be seen.
Day 10 and the archaeology team continues to dig at the base of the big
ren where the forensic dogs first alerted.
They're searching for bones that may have been left behind eighty years ago,
in a seemingly endless sea of coral.
TOM (off-screen): Millions and millions and millions of pieces of coral.
And coral looks a lot like bone, bone looks a lot like coral,
bone and coral look a lot like other things.
NARRATOR: For the last few days they've been on the trail of what they
think may be a crab burrow.
TOM (off-screen): We know the crabs tend to establish burrows under trees among the roots.
The thought is that perhaps a crab dragged part of the skeleton into his hole.
NARRATOR: Nobody knows how deep they'll need to go.
TOM: That's where the bone would be.
NARRATOR: But they keep on digging.
TOM (off-screen): That's a big if.
ANDREW: Into the hole we go.
DAWN: You know, every now and then you just find a gem and that's enough to feed the
addiction and keep you digging for many, many, many more hours.
BALLARD (off-screen): See that guy there with the holes?
Zoom in on that.
CREW (off-screen): Okay. Standby video.
NARRATOR: On Nautilus, they've also been going for hours.
BALLARD: Whoa, whoa.
It looks like coral but it's got a hole.
NARRATOR: And there's lots of tempting pieces here too.
CREW (off-screen): It's got a perfect hole.
Want to sample it?
BALLARD: Yeah, just flip it over.
CREW: Just a piece of coral.
BALLARD: That's a piece of coral.
NARRATOR: Coral everywhere, but not a plane part in sight.
BALLARD (off-screen): Coral, coral, coral, coral.
That's nothing.
CREW (over radio): Okay, securing deck.
NARRATOR: After 48 straight hours Bob pulls the ROVs.
He can now get his hands on some of those promising bits of metal.
BALLARD: This is stainless steel.
NARRATOR: But one by one, hopes are dashed.
MEAGHAN: It does look like some sort of part or ring.
But when you flip it over it's pretty clearly a Coke can, so.
NARRATOR: This is not the aluminum they're looking for.
MEAGHAN: There's a lot of rocks that look like a lot of other things,
and a lot of other things that look like airplane parts.
LINDSAY: I have a hat.
And it's my hat!
NARRATOR: The dive wasn't a total loss though.
BALLARD: If we can find his hat in over 1000 feet of water,
I think we can find anything.
NARRATOR: With precious few days left, Bob decides to throw a much larger net.
Rather than searching for tiny metal fragments, he's now going to look for one big one.
BALLARD: There are two fundamental options for the plane.
One is that it slipped off the reef and did a very traumatic trip over giant cliffs,
banging on rocks, clearly breaking up.
Which is more than likely what happened.
But then there's the other possibility that the plane floated.
And then was drifting to sea, sank and literally flew down to the bottom of the ocean.
NARRATOR: If so, the plane could have glided miles offshore, likely landing intact.
And over the next two days, far from the falling debris of the island,
Argus' side scan sonar will try to find it.
BALLARD (off-screen): When you get way out away from the island,
all the big objects have dropped out.
So, you get very few targets on them, which is good because then if you see a target,
you have a good chance of seeing her plane.
It just takes patience.
I don't normally have patience on land.
But I learned a long time ago to develop patience out here.
NARRATOR: Patience was never Amelia's strong suit.
By June 1937, with her Lockheed Electra repaired, once again she'll attempt to
fly further than anyone has flown before, around the world.
NARRATOR: Amelia's Electra isn't any off the shelf plane.
It's been retrofitted and reinforced for a one-of-a-kind journey.
CANDACE: She was unbelievably proud of that plane.
You know by the pictures where she stands there in front of the plane.
I mean, well think about this, this is cutting edge technology and they've
given it to her.
Men have basically raised money for her to take it on this,
this trip that no one else has ever done before.
REPORTER (over radio): Always daring and courageous, Amelia never hesitated.
Taking off in her flying laboratory, the last word in planes.
CANDACE (off-screen): It's an unbelievably risky, unbelievably big venture and
I think she thought, this is it, so I'm gonna do it big.
And big is around the world.
NARRATOR: From Oakland to Miami,
down to South America and across to Africa,
Asia and the Pacific,
the pair has nearly two months and more than 2 dozen
remote stopovers ahead of them.
SAMMIE (off-screen): We have the manuscript, the handwritten pages where she's talking
about all of these accounts and we just have hundreds of telegrams that she was sending
back to the newspapers.
NARRATOR: Telegrams, and at least 100 photos,
documenting the entire journey.
NARRATOR: It's not all smooth sailing.
In Africa, she misses her intended landfall by 163 miles,
an ominous sign for upcoming targets with less room for error.
But for Amelia, Africa is a dream come true.
CANDACE (off-screen): She'd dreamed of being in Africa as a child in Atchison
and there she was flying over Africa.
NARRATOR: After 6 straight weeks and 29 stops,
on July 1, Amelia finally touches down in Lae, New Guinea.
Exhausted, she sends a long telegram back home.
SAMMIE (off-screen): She was talking about personnel problems which, you know,
people assume was referring to Fred Noonan's drinking, problems with the plane and
the weather.
But at that point they were so close to finishing and George Putnam wanted them
to come back by Fourth of July.
NARRATOR: Not wanting to get off schedule, at 10 a.m., July 2, 1937,
a camera catches Amelia and Fred Noonan climbing into their Lockheed Electra and
setting off one last time.
EARHART (off-screen): The whole width of the world has passed behind us,
except this broad ocean.
I shall be glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.
NARRATOR: On Nautilus, Bob is still plumbing the depths of that broad ocean to see if
Amelia's plane glided down to the bottom.
They search more than a mile and a half off the coast of Nikumaroro,
but the side-scans come up empty.
BALLARD (off-screen): So, we've pretty well taken in all
the easy space you can do with sonar.
So, check that box.
And now it's back to hand-to-hand combat.
NARRATOR: Back to the primary target area, the idea that the plane broke up into pieces,
and one last visual sweep with Hercules.
CREW: Good, good.
NARRATOR: Putting his geology hat on, Bob's been scanning for places he may have missed,
eyeing the dozens of volcanic chutes and valleys,
channeling rocks and debris down the
slope of the island.
BALLARD: There's the chutes, see them?
Bam, bam, bam, bam.
There they are, can't miss them.
NARRATOR: They may be channeling, and hiding, fragments of plane as well.
CREW (off-screen): Do you want me to keep turning?
BALLARD (off-screen): Yeah.
We should be moving away from the wall, actually.
NARRATOR: With a day and a half to go, Bob's well aware that this is his last chance.
CREW (off-screen): Let's keep an eye on that.
Come up.
BALLARD (off-screen): I now understand my opponent.
I think I know what to do.
NARRATOR: On the island, the archaeologists are also running low on time.
And unfortunately, at the big ren, there's still not a bone in sight.
JOHN (off-screen): There's nothing to get out of here anymore.
NARRATOR: The dig is over.
Whatever the dogs alerted on must have been dispersed by crabs or decomposed.
But Fred Hiebert isn't ready to give up.
If the dogs are alerting on chemical traces, he thinks there must be DNA here as well
and collects several soil samples for later analysis.
HIEBERT (off-screen): An exceptional story,
like the search for Amelia Earhart, deserves exceptional evidence.
If the remnant human DNA is the same as what came over
from Gallagher and the British mandate and matches the family of Amelia Earhart.
That is what we call exceptional data.
NARRATOR: In Florida, Erin Kimmerle has been working up some exceptional data of her
own, analyzing the female skeleton she and Fred collected on Tarawa.
She's reassembled the skull, scanned it in 3D and
is now trying to determine whether it matches
the one found in 1940 and was described by Dr. Hoodless.
KIMMERLE: Hoodless took four measurements.
Two are in the area of the eye orbit and then two are basically the length and
breadth of the skull.
NARRATOR: When Erin took those same measurements on the Tarawa skull,
she found 3 out of 4 were a match.
KIMMERLE: It's interesting because, if we just use the three measurements that are
consistent with Hoodless, then it comes up as a white female.
NARRATOR: But when she added in that fourth measurement plus a few more commonly used
for identification today?
KIMMERLE: We find that this skull classifies most closely with local populations to the
South Pacific and that the European ancestry falls pretty low.
Based on just those measurements, I wouldn't rule this out.
NARRATOR: But does it match Amelia?
The markers she'd hoped would tie to Amelia,
the gap in the teeth and the sinus surgery,
are missing on the skull, so Erin is left to rely on a
technique called superimposition.
KIMMERLE: So, you want to look at the corner of the eyes.
The eyebrow, which you notice on her, are pretty low over the eye.
NARRATOR: Amelia's brow, eye shape and spacing match the skull pretty closely.
Her nasal openings, not so much.
KIMMERLE: And so, it's complicated.
Because there's certain things that are very consistent and then of course,
there's other things that are just less diagnostic.
So, we're not sure.
NARRATOR: There's one way to find out if this was Amelia's.
Just as Fred extracted DNA from the soil,
Erin will now attempt the same for the skull,
to see if it matches one of Amelia's relatives.
BALLARD (off-screen): Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Zoom in a little tighter. I see that edge.
Down below.
CREW: The shell? BALLARD: Those are shells, ok. CREW (off-screen): Yeah.
BALLARD (off-screen): Ok, zoom out and rise up.
And look up.
See if a Pratt-Whitney engine is jamming us.
NARRATOR: As Bob races to find traces of Amelia's plane on this tiny Pacific atoll,
on July 2, 1937, Amelia is flying somewhere over that same vast ocean in search of
Howland Island, which is even tinier.
The 2,500 mile flight from Lae is expected to take about 18 hours.
But as Itasca awaits her arrival that morning, it becomes clear,
that's not to be.
With overcast skies, stronger than expected winds and no luck with the
direction-finding radio, her Electra has veered off course.
CANDACE (off-screen): The most frustrating thing about that last hop to
Howland was that she had her
salvation right at her fingertips, if she'd known how to use that radio.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): The mood on Itasca at first is exciting.
Amelia Earhart is on her way.
That turns into alarm when she says,
"We've been unable to reach you by radio and we must be on you,"
and she's not.
CANDACE (off-screen): They could hear her growing realization that
obviously something was wrong,
that there was something that was keeping them from finding each other and the realization
that she wasn't gonna find them.
NARRATOR: At 8:43 a.m., Itasca receives its final radio message from Amelia.
NARRATOR: They make dozens of transmission attempts over the next several hours,
until finally, at 1:03 issue an all-emergency broadcast.
"All ships, all stations.
Amelia Earhart plane apparently down at sea, position unknown."
So would begin the largest search ever undertaken in Naval history.
For more than two weeks,
as Pan Am takes radio bearings on Amelia's frequencies and
people like Betty Klenck report distress calls,
seven US ships cover more than
250,000 square miles of ocean.
REPORTER (over radio): The battleship, Colorado,
reports planes being catapulted to
scour the South Pacific from dawn to dusk.
NARRATOR: Aircraft carriers launch dozens of search planes.
On July 9, one week after Amelia goes missing,
one even snaps this photo over Gardner Island.
The pilot reports signs of recent habitation, but no plane.
It's perhaps the strongest evidence against the Nikumaroro theory.
But Ric argues by then the Electra was already washed off the reef.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): The tide was high and there was a heavy surf running.
We can see that in the photograph.
NARRATOR: As the Navy searches, the world holds its breath.
REPORTER (over radio): On the chance that she might be safe on some remote island.
CANDACE (off-screen): I think people fully expected her to be found.
They sat by that radio and they waited and they expected her to come
and she didn't come.
She didn't come.
REPORTER (over radio): Some 200,000 square miles of ocean and nearby islands were to be
searched but to no avail.
NARRATOR: 17 days and $4 million later, the Navy declares,
“All search for Earhart, terminated.”
And the theories about what really happened to Amelia arise almost immediately.
REPORTER (over radio): Whether she and her navigator had been lost at sea or had been
captured and executed by the Japanese, no one has been able to prove conclusively.
NARRATOR: From spying for the U.S Government and getting captured by the Japanese,
to assuming a new identity and living out her days as a housewife in New Jersey.
REPORTER (over radio): Her fate still remains a mystery.
CANDACE: We don't want to believe that she's gone,
we don't wanna believe that she died.
She did amazing things and survived, you know, over and over again.
So, it's hard to imagine that she would've just dropped into the ocean and disappeared.
NARRATOR: After 14 days of searching Nikumaroro, Bob is starting to think maybe Amelia
did just drop into the ocean.
BALLARD (off-screen): Oh my God.
Haul me out of here.
NARRATOR: But as so often happens as expeditions wind down,
they find one more promising piece.
CREW: Can you zoom in?
WOMAN (off-screen): Zooming in.
Has holes in it.
Bob.
It doesn't look rusty either.
NARRATOR: It's the last day on Nikumaroro.
And the last chance for Herc to deliver a piece of Amelia's airplane.
CREW: Sure looked like aluminum underwater.
BALLARD: Yeah, it sure did.
It's an interesting thing adhering to it, like wood.
NARRATOR: It's not looking good.
BALLARD: Yeah. Nice holes, but.
No, it's not her plane.
NARRATOR: With five full passes around the island, nearly 150 miles back and
forth with the ASV and ROVs, nearly total aerial drone coverage of the reef-line,
and hundreds of hours of imagery recorded, Bob Ballard's search for Amelia's
plane seems to rival the Navy's.
And after two full weeks, he too is calling it quits.
BALLARD (off-screen): We spent hundreds and hundreds of hours underwater researching
all the primary sites.
And we saw nothing that suggested that her plane landed, went off that reef,
and tumbled down that hill.
NARRATOR: He's not ruling this place out.
There's still a lot of data to pore over and samples to check.
And Bob's still haunted by those radio transmissions that triangulate right around here.
BALLARD: The radio evidence, that's the one piece that's just gnawingly there.
NARRATOR: But for now he's moving on.
As Nautilus bids farewell to Nikumaroro, its next leg just happens to be Howland Island,
Amelia's intended target.
BALLARD (off-screen): We're off to Howland.
We have been tasked by our government to map the area around Howland.
It will come.
Titanic took four expeditions, Bismarck took two expeditions.
That plane is somewhere.
So, stay tuned.
MIGUEL (over phone): 14,766.
FRANKIE (over phone): And you said 766.
NARRATOR: In Florida, Fred Hiebert and Erin Kimmerle aren't losing hope either,
even as their highly anticipated DNA results from the Tarawa skull come in.
FRANKIE (over phone): Actually at this particular locus, I do have a T,
so I would be able to say that that is a possible, a possible match there.
NARRATOR: But while they can identify some key markers.
FRANKIE (over phone): These samples underwent a lot of degradation over the years.
NARRATOR: Much of the sample is unreadable.
FRANKIE (over phone): My suggestion would be to do some targeted re-sequencing.
NARRATOR: For the moment, it's another inconclusive result.
But Fred is forever the optimist.
HIEBERT: There's something there. KIMMERLE: Yeah.
HIEBERT: Well, perfection in science doesn't always happen and it's so rare.
I thought maybe we had that, but that simply isn't going to stop this amazing story of
searching for Amelia Earhart, right?
I think it's worth keep going and going and going.
NARRATOR: There's no doubt Ric Gillespie and TIGHAR, will keep going.
They recently acquired a new piece of film that may help determine whether the rivet
holes on their prized scrap of metal match those on the aluminum
patch put on Amelia's Electra.
They're not about to be dissuaded by DNA results or the lack of a plane.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): Whether the magical smoking gun ever shows up.
Well, that would be nice.
And maybe it can be found and I sure hope it is.
But it's also possible that the best we're gonna get is what we already have,
which ain't half bad.
NARRATOR: Whether the film will add another piece to the Nikumaroro saga,
time will tell.
But already, it holds something special in its final frames.
GILLESPIE: And there's Amelia.
NARRATOR: Another haunting glimpse of Amelia, posing with an airline worker,
just a day before she goes missing.
With a figure this iconic, it's no wonder the search will go on.
BALLARD (off-screen): She was a dreamer and she had the guts to try.
She paid for it, but, boy, people remember her.
TRACEY (off-screen): Fortunately, her getting lost in the Pacific, because it was such
an ambitious undertaking, and because she had already proven herself in so many ways,
her legacy was intact.
Women could do whatever men could do and were willing to take the risk and
enjoy the adventure.
CANDACE: It's not how she died that's important, I think.
It's really how she lived because she showed us through her own example that one
doesn't have to accept what society says you are, that one can follow their dreams,
that one can live big, live bold.
All they have to do is seize it, you know.
That's what Amelia's taught us.
NARRATOR: It's a sentiment best captured by Amelia herself in a letter she left
for her sister Muriel on the chance she didn't return from her
first transatlantic flight.
EARHART (off-screen): "I have tried to play for a large stake and if
I succeed all will be well.
If I don't, I shall be happy to pop off in the midst of such an adventure."
NARRATOR: Adventure did finally claim Amelia Earhart,
but her spirit continues to lift us all.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.