14 DAY TRIAL // In May 2013, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) announced the discovery of an anomaly on the ocean floor off the coast of a remote and uninhabited atoll in the Pacific.
This anomaly, revealed by sonar images, lies hidden at a depth of nearly 600 feet (roughly 183 meters) and measures about 22 feet (almost 7 meters) in length. Folks at TIGHAR are pretty convinced that it is not some odd-shaped rock.
Instead, they think is to be the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's plane. This coming June, they plan to launch a $500,000 (€456,000) search operation and send an unmanned underwater robotic explorer to have a better look at it.
They hope that this expedition will elucidate the mystery surrounding the death of aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart's death, who vanished without a trace in July 1937 while attempting a flight around the globe.
“There is a sonar image in the data collected during last summer’s Niku VII expedition that could be the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra,” TIGHAR said in a statement when announcing the discovery of the anomaly.
“It looks unlike anything else in the sonar data, it’s the right size, it’s the right shape, and it’s in the right place,” the research organization went on to say.
There's no way that is Amelia's plane, high school teacher insists
TIGHAR researchers might be almost sure that the anomaly they detected on the ocean floor off the coast of the Nikumaroro atoll in the Pacific is the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's plane, but high school teacher Dick Spink has serious doubts about it.
He says Amelia Earhart crashed on an atoll named Mili in the Marshall Islands near the equator in the Pacific Ocean and that the moment her plane came tumbling down from the sky was witnessed by local islanders.
Further, Dick Spink claims he's interviewed a few of these islanders who in July 1937 saw Amelia Earhart crashing, and that their stories are too detailed and similar to simply be dismissed as fiction.
Mind you, this high school teacher even says it was last year that bits and pieces of the aviator's plane were found on the Mili atoll, DM reports. A small aluminum cover plate and a fragment of a landing-gear wheel assembly, to be more precise.
True, these parts haven't yet been proven to undoubtedly belong to Amelia Earhart's plane, but Dick Spink expects a series of tests that are now underway will very soon confirm their origin.
Meanwhile, US-based research group Parker Aerospace is gearing up to explore the Mili atoll and try to track down other scraps that might come from Amelia Earhart's craft.
