Amelia Earhart's Last Radio Calls Over the Pacific
The four young men on Howland Island had been awake since before dawn. It was the morning of July 2, 1937, and they had been told to expect a visitor — the most famous woman in the world, descending from the sky in a twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10E. Richard Blackburn "Dick" Black, the Department of the Interior representative overseeing the island's colonists, had arranged for fuel drums to be positioned along the largest of the three runways. The USCGC Itasca, a 250-foot Coast Guard cutter, sat offshore with its radio operators hunched over their receivers, tasked with guiding Earhart's aircraft to the island by signal. Everything was in place. The colonists — young Hawaiian-American men who had been living on this barren coral flat for months as part of a sovereignty scheme most Americans had never heard of — scanned the horizon and waited.
At 7:42 a.m. local time, Amelia Earhart's voice crackled through the Itasca's radio room. She was close. "We must be on you but cannot see you," she said. "Gas is running low." The Itasca's radiomen tried to respond, tried to send a homing signal, tried to raise her on every frequency they had. She could not hear them, or would not answer. Her transmissions grew more urgent. At 8:43 a.m., a final burst: she gave a position line, reported running north and south. Then nothing. The frequency went dead. The most famous aviator of the twentieth century had been headed directly for Howland Island, and the Pacific swallowed her whole.
The disappearance of Amelia Earhart is the most famous unsolved mystery in aviation history, a case that has generated decades of theories, expeditions, and obsessive debate. What is often forgotten is the island itself — the destination she never reached. Howland Island is a place defined entirely by an absence. An airstrip built for a landing that never happened. A colony established to claim sovereignty over territory nobody wanted. A dot on the map so insignificant that the United States had to send teenagers to live on it just to prove it was American. Earhart's vanishing made Howland briefly famous, but the island's own story — of imperial ambition, bureaucratic absurdity, and young men abandoned on a rock in the middle of the ocean — is stranger and darker than the mystery that overshadowed it.
The History of Howland Island Before Amelia Earhart
Nineteenth-Century Guano Mining on Howland Island
American interest in Howland Island began not with aviation but with bird excrement. The mid-nineteenth-century guano boom — one of the stranger economic frenzies in modern history — sent prospectors across the Pacific in search of islands thick with seabird droppings, which had become a critical agricultural fertiliser. The United States formalised this scramble with the Guano Islands Act of 1856, a law that allowed any American citizen to claim an uninhabited island containing guano deposits in the name of the United States. Howland, along with neighbouring Baker Island, was claimed under this act in the late 1850s. British interests had staked competing claims, and for a brief period the two empires jostled over a treeless coral platform with no fresh water, no harbour, and no strategic value beyond the nitrogen content of its topsoil.
The guano was stripped within two decades. By the 1870s, the deposits were largely exhausted, the mining operations had packed up, and Howland reverted to what it had always been: a low, flat, sun-blasted island inhabited by seabirds and little else. The American claim lapsed into bureaucratic dormancy. For the next sixty years, Howland Island existed in a legal grey zone — nominally American, functionally abandoned, of interest to no one.
The Hui Panalā'au Colonists and American Sovereignty
The grey zone ended in 1935, when the Roosevelt administration devised a scheme to reassert American sovereignty over Howland and several other equatorial Pacific islands before Japan or Britain could formalise competing claims. The solution was peculiar even by colonial standards: send civilians to live on the islands. The Department of Commerce, working with the Bureau of Air Commerce, recruited young Hawaiian-American men — most of them in their late teens and early twenties, many of them recent high school graduates — to occupy Howland, Baker, and Jarvis Island as "colonists." The program was called Hui Panalā'au, Hawaiian for "group of spread-out islands."
The colonists rotated in groups of four, spending three to four months at a time on Howland. Their official task was to maintain a weather station, collect scientific observations, and, by their mere physical presence, establish continuous American habitation. The unofficial reality was grimmer. Howland Island had no trees, no shade structures beyond what the colonists built themselves, no natural fresh water supply, and summer surface temperatures that could exceed 35°C on the exposed coral. Rainfall was erratic. Supply ships arrived roughly every three months. The young men passed their time fishing, observing bird colonies, playing cards, and writing letters that would not be collected for weeks.
Carl Kahalewai, one of the early colonists, later described the experience as months of enforced stillness punctuated by the anxiety of waiting for a supply vessel that sometimes arrived late. The colonists were not soldiers. They had no weapons, no training for the role they were playing, and little understanding of the geopolitical chess game their presence was meant to serve. They were teenagers on a 450-acre island in the middle of the Pacific, claiming it for a country that had forgotten it existed.
Amelia Earhart's 1937 Round-the-World Flight and the Howland Island Airstrip
Amelia Earhart's Round-the-World Flight Plan
By 1936, Amelia Earhart was already the most celebrated aviator in the United States and arguably the world. She had been the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932, the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the US mainland in 1935, and had broken multiple speed and distance records. She was 39 years old, famous, restless, and planning what she called "one more flight" — a circumnavigation of the globe at the equator, the longest possible route, roughly 29,000 miles.
The route Earhart and her husband and manager George Putnam planned was audacious. Flying east from Oakland, California, the Lockheed Electra 10E would cross the continental United States, the Caribbean, South America, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australia before beginning the most dangerous segment: a 2,556-mile overwater crossing from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island. There would be no alternative landing sites. No ships stationed along the route except the Itasca at the destination. No GPS, no radar, no satellite communication. The entire navigation would depend on dead reckoning, celestial observation, and the skill of her navigator, Fred Noonan — a former Pan American Airways navigator who was brilliant, experienced, and, by several accounts, struggling with alcohol.
The Lae-to-Howland leg was the crux of the entire flight. Miss the island and there was nothing but open ocean for hundreds of miles in every direction. Earhart knew this. Putnam knew this. The question was whether the technology and the human beings involved were equal to the precision the Pacific demanded.
How the Howland Island Airstrip Was Built
The answer to the navigation problem, at least in part, was supposed to be Howland Island itself. In early 1937, the Works Progress Administration — Roosevelt's Depression-era public works agency, better known for building dams and post offices — dispatched workers to construct three rudimentary runways on Howland's coral surface. The longest ran roughly 1,200 metres along the island's north-south axis. The construction was basic: levelling coral rubble, compacting the surface, and marking the strips. There was no control tower, no lighting system, and no paved surface. The runways were scratched into a coral flat that rose barely two metres above sea level.
The entire logistical operation was built around a single event: Earhart's landing. Fuel drums were shipped to the island. The colonists were briefed. The Itasca was positioned offshore with orders to serve as a radio homing beacon, pumping out signals on designated frequencies so Earhart could follow them in. The plan had the kind of ambitious simplicity that characterises projects where failure is not seriously contemplated. A flat island, a radio ship, a world-class pilot, a clear morning. What could go wrong was everything — and everything did.
July 2, 1937 — The Morning Amelia Earhart Disappeared
The Radio Failure Between the USCGC Itasca and Earhart
The Itasca arrived off Howland Island on July 1, 1937, commanded by Commander Warner K. Thompson. The ship's mission was straightforward: transmit a radio signal on a pre-arranged frequency so Earhart could home in on the island. The execution was anything but straightforward. A series of miscommunications before the flight had left the Itasca's radio operators and Earhart's team operating from different assumptions about which frequencies would be used, when transmissions would occur, and how long each party should listen before responding.
Earhart's Electra was equipped with a Bendix receiver and a Western Electric transmitter. She planned to transmit voice on 3105 kilocycles and receive on 7500 kilocycles. The Itasca planned to transmit on 7500 kilocycles — but also attempted to reach her on 3105, 6210, and 500 kilocycles (the international distress frequency). The result was a cascading series of missed connections. The Itasca transmitted signals Earhart apparently could not hear or chose not to acknowledge. Earhart transmitted messages the Itasca received but could not respond to in a way she could pick up. Two parties separated by fewer than a hundred miles, shouting past each other on different wavelengths.
The deeper problem was the homing signal. The Itasca had been told Earhart would use her radio direction finder to home in on their transmissions. Her Electra was equipped with a loop antenna designed for this purpose. Whether Earhart used it — or knew how to use it effectively — remains one of the enduring technical disputes of the case. Some investigators believe she had removed a trailing wire antenna before the Lae departure to save weight, severely limiting her ability to receive lower-frequency signals. Others dispute this. The truth vanished with the aircraft.
The radio failure was compounded by a navigational problem that no frequency could solve: Howland Island was nearly invisible from the air. The island's highest point rises barely six metres above sea level. It has no trees, no hills, no vertical features of any kind — just a flat coral surface fringed by white beaches that, from altitude, are indistinguishable from breaking waves on a reef. On an overcast morning, with low cloud and scattered squalls — conditions Earhart reported during her approach — the island would have blended into the grey Pacific almost completely. The Electra's effective visual range in poor weather was only a few miles. Pacific trade winds and ocean currents could also have pushed the aircraft dozens of miles off its calculated course without the pilots realising it, turning a near-miss into a total miss. Earhart was not searching for an island. She was searching for a shadow on water, in weather that erased shadows.
Amelia Earhart's Final Transmissions from the Electra
The Itasca's radio log preserves the last known words of Amelia Earhart in bureaucratic shorthand, each entry time-stamped and annotated by the radio operators on watch. The transmissions began in the early hours of July 2.
At 2:45 a.m., Earhart's voice came through — faint, partly obscured by static — reporting overcast skies. At 3:45 a.m., another transmission: she reported her position but the signal was too weak for the Itasca to take a bearing. The ship tried to respond. No acknowledgment. At 6:14 a.m., her voice was stronger. She asked the Itasca to take a bearing on her signal and requested them to transmit on 7500 kilocycles. The operators tried. She did not respond. At 6:45 a.m., she reported approximately 200 miles out and requested a bearing. Still no two-way contact.
At 7:42 a.m., the transmission that would become the most quoted radio call in aviation history: "We must be on you but cannot see you — but gas is running low — been unable to reach you by radio — we are flying at 1,000 feet." The Itasca immediately began generating heavy black smoke from its boiler stacks to create a visual marker. The colonists on shore scanned the sky. One hour later, at 7:58 a.m., Earhart reported receiving the Itasca's signals but said she was unable to determine their direction. Her final confirmed transmission came at 8:43 a.m.: "We are on the line 157 337... We are running on line north and south." The position line she described would have passed through Howland Island — or within a few degrees of it. The signal was strong, suggesting she was close. Then silence.
The Itasca's radio operators continued calling for hours. Chief Radioman Leo Bellarts kept the watch long past the point where anyone believed there would be an answer. He later described the morning as the worst of his life — the frustration of hearing a woman's voice growing more urgent, knowing exactly where he was, and being unable to tell her.
The silence was not quite total. In the hours and days after 8:43 a.m., the Itasca and several other radio stations across the Pacific reported receiving weak, garbled signals on Earhart's frequency — fragments of voice, broken phrases, carrier waves that cut in and out. Some operators logged what they believed were distress calls. The signals were too faint and too distorted to confirm as Earhart's, and their authenticity has been debated ever since. If genuine, they raised a possibility the official search never fully reckoned with: that the Electra had not crashed into the ocean but had come down on land — a reef flat, a sandbar, an atoll — somewhere within transmission range, with Earhart alive and calling for help that never came.
The Largest Air-and-Sea Search in History
The US Navy launched the most extensive air and sea search in history to that date. Within hours of the last transmission, the Itasca began searching the waters northwest of Howland along the 157-337 line Earhart had reported. The battleship USS Colorado was diverted from operations near Hawaii, carrying three catapult-launched float planes. The aircraft carrier USS Lexington — one of the most powerful warships in the Pacific Fleet — was pulled from exercises and sent south with its full complement of aircraft. The Japanese Navy, which controlled the nearby Marshall Islands under a League of Nations mandate, conducted its own search.
Over the following sixteen days, the search covered approximately 250,000 square miles of open Pacific — an area the size of Texas. Sixty-six aircraft and nine ships participated. The Lexington's pilots alone flew hundreds of sorties over the scattered atolls and empty ocean north and west of Howland. They found nothing. No wreckage. No oil slick. No emergency raft. No signal mirror. The Lockheed Electra 10E, its 1,100 gallons of fuel, and its two occupants had vanished as completely as if the Pacific had opened and closed its surface without a mark.
On July 18, 1937, the official search was called off. Earhart and Noonan were declared lost at sea. The airstrip on Howland Island, built at considerable expense and logistical effort for the sole purpose of receiving a single aircraft, had served its purpose exactly zero times.
The Japanese Bombing of Howland Island in World War II
The December 1941 Attack on Howland Island
The colonists remained on Howland after Earhart's disappearance. The sovereignty mission continued, though the island's brief moment of global attention had passed. For the next four years, rotating groups of young Hawaiian-American men kept their vigil on the coral flat — maintaining the weather station, recording observations, watching the seabird colonies cycle through their seasons. The runways that had been built for Earhart sat unused, their coral surfaces slowly deteriorating under sun and rain.
The morning of December 8, 1941, ended the colony. Japanese aircraft — likely launched from bases in the Marshall Islands — struck Howland in a coordinated attack timed to coincide with the assault on Pearl Harbor on the other side of the International Date Line. The four colonists on the island that morning had no warning, no weapons, and no shelter beyond their wooden camp structures. Two of them were killed: Joseph Keli'ihananui and Richard "Dicky" Kanani Whaley, both in their early twenties. The surviving colonists — George K. Aiana and Alexander A. Akau — took cover in a crude shelter during the strafing and bombing runs. They survived the initial attack but were stranded on a bombed-out island with damaged supplies, no radio contact, and no knowledge of whether rescue would come or whether Japan would return to finish the job.
A US Navy vessel evacuated the two survivors several weeks later. The Hui Panalā'au colonisation program was terminated. Howland Island was abandoned for the last time. Keli'ihananui and Whaley became two of the first American civilian casualties of the Pacific War — killed on a remote island most of their countrymen could not find on a map, defending a sovereignty claim that had been established by their own unarmed presence. Their deaths received almost no attention in a nation suddenly consumed by total war.
Howland Island Today: The Earhart Light and the Wildlife Refuge
Howland Island as a National Wildlife Refuge
The United States never returned to Howland in any permanent capacity. The island was designated the Howland Island National Wildlife Refuge in 1974, administered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service as part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. The old runways are gone — reclaimed by coral growth, wave action, and eight decades of tropical erosion. The wooden camp structures rotted away within years of the colonists' evacuation. What remains on the island today is almost entirely non-human: large colonies of seabirds, including masked boobies, brown noddies, and sooty terns, along with green sea turtles that nest on the narrow beaches. The vegetation is sparse — low scrub and beach grass clinging to coral rubble.
The one human-made structure still standing is the Earhart Light, a squat concrete day beacon erected on the island's western shore in Amelia Earhart's memory. The original beacon was built shortly after the war but was damaged — accounts vary as to whether the damage was from Japanese bombing, post-war neglect, or both. It was rebuilt and rededicated. The structure is not a functioning lighthouse; it carries no light, serves no navigational purpose. It is a monument in the purest and most desolate sense — a marker placed where almost no one will ever see it, commemorating a person who never reached the place it stands.
The island's isolation is almost total. There is no harbour, no dock, no anchorage safe enough for regular vessel access. The surrounding reef makes boat landings dangerous in all but the calmest conditions. The airstrip that was built for Earhart no longer exists as a usable surface. Howland lies outside all commercial shipping and aviation routes. The closest permanently inhabited land is Baker Island — which is also uninhabited. The nearest populated islands are in Kiribati, roughly 600 kilometres to the northwest.
Why Howland Island Is Nearly Impossible to Visit
Howland Island is technically US territory, but visiting it requires a special-use permit from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which is granted only for scientific research or wildlife management purposes. No tourism infrastructure exists or has ever existed. There is no scheduled transportation of any kind. The few research expeditions that have landed on Howland in recent decades have done so by chartered vessel, often waiting days offshore for sea conditions calm enough to permit a beach landing through the reef.
The practical reality is that Howland Island is one of the least visited places on Earth. Fewer people have set foot on it in the twenty-first century than have summited K2. The island that was supposed to be the triumphant midpoint of Amelia Earhart's global circumnavigation — the refuelling stop that would prove a woman could fly anywhere — remains what it has always been: a flat, empty, sun-scorched coral platform in the middle of the largest ocean on the planet, significant only because of what failed to happen there.
What Happened to Amelia Earhart: Theories and Searches
The Crash-and-Sink Hypothesis
The simplest and most widely accepted explanation for Earhart's disappearance is also the least dramatic. The crash-and-sink theory, endorsed by the US government's official position and most mainstream aviation historians, holds that the Electra ran out of fuel somewhere in the vicinity of Howland Island, ditched in the Pacific, and sank. The aircraft's fuel capacity and known consumption rates, combined with the elapsed time since departure from Lae, support the conclusion that Earhart was at or very near the end of her fuel supply during those final transmissions. The Pacific Ocean in that region is between 3,000 and 5,000 metres deep. A ditched aircraft would sink rapidly and leave minimal surface debris — consistent with the search fleet's failure to find any wreckage.
Multiple deep-sea expeditions have attempted to locate the Electra on the ocean floor near Howland, using sonar, remotely operated vehicles, and AI-assisted image analysis. As of early 2025, no confirmed wreckage has been found, though at least one expedition — led by deep-sea explorer Tony Romeo — has identified a sonar anomaly on the seafloor roughly 160 kilometres west of Howland that resembles the profile of a Lockheed Electra. The claim has not been independently verified, and the depth (approximately 5,000 metres) makes physical recovery extraordinarily difficult.
The Nikumaroro Hypothesis and Competing Theories
The principal alternative to the crash-and-sink theory centres on Nikumaroro (formerly Gardner Island), an uninhabited atoll roughly 560 kilometres southeast of Howland along the 157-337 position line Earhart reported in her final transmission. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), led by Ric Gillespie, has conducted multiple expeditions to Nikumaroro since the 1980s, arguing that Earhart and Noonan may have landed or crash-landed on the island's reef flat, survived for a period as castaways, and eventually perished. TIGHAR's evidence includes fragments of aircraft aluminium, the remains of a woman's shoe consistent with 1930s styles, and a collection of bones found on the island in 1940 by a British colonial officer — bones that were measured, recorded, and subsequently lost.
Other theories — Japanese capture, espionage missions, secret survival under assumed identities — have circulated since 1937 and persist in popular culture, though none has produced physical evidence that withstands serious scrutiny. The Japanese capture theory, which holds that Earhart landed or was forced down in the Marshall Islands and was taken prisoner, gained traction from anecdotal eyewitness claims by Marshall Islanders but has never been supported by documentary evidence from Japanese military or government archives.
The mystery endures because the Pacific kept all its evidence. No wreckage, no remains, no definitive artefact has ever been recovered and confirmed. Howland Island, the place that was supposed to provide the answer — the destination, the endpoint, the proof that the flight was possible — instead became the place where the question began.
Can You Visit Howland Island?
Access, Permits, and Practical Realities
Howland Island is closed to the general public. Access requires a Special Use Permit issued by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Pacific Remote Islands National Wildlife Refuge Complex, and is restricted to approved scientific research. There are no commercial flights, no charter services, and no regular vessel routes serving the island. Researchers who have visited in recent decades typically depart from Honolulu on multi-week chartered vessel expeditions that also visit Baker Island and Jarvis Island. Landing on the island requires a rubber boat or inflatable through a reef pass, and is feasible only in calm sea conditions — which are not guaranteed.
The island lies at approximately 0°48'N, 176°38'W, almost exactly on the equator and just west of the International Date Line. The nearest airport is on Tarawa in Kiribati, roughly 600 kilometres northwest. The climate is equatorial — hot, humid, and relentlessly sunny, with occasional squalls. There is no fresh water, no shelter, no communications infrastructure, and no emergency services.
The Weight of an Empty Island
Howland Island does not look like a place where history happened. It looks like a place where history tried to happen and failed. The coral is flat and white. The scrub is low and colourless. The Earhart Light stands on the western shore, a concrete marker weathering slowly in the salt air, bearing a plaque that most human beings will never read. The seabirds are indifferent to it.
The emotional resonance of Howland is entirely about absence. Earhart is not here. The colonists are not here. The runways are not here. The fuel drums, the radio equipment, the wooden barracks — all gone. What remains is the geography itself: a speck of coral in the central Pacific, exactly where it was on July 2, 1937, when a twin-engine Lockheed Electra flew toward it and never arrived. Standing on Howland Island, if you are among the vanishingly few people who ever will, is standing at the site of a meeting that never took place — between a woman, an island, and a flight plan that the Pacific refused to honour.
For those drawn to the mystery of Earhart's disappearance, the companion site is Nikumaroro — the uninhabited atoll 560 kilometres to the southeast where some investigators believe Earhart and Noonan may have landed as castaways.
Howland Island asks a question that has no comfortable answer: what happens to a place built for a purpose that was never fulfilled? The airstrip was never used. The colony was never permanent. The landing never happened. The island endures, as coral islands do — flat, hot, white, and empty — holding its silence at the edge of the world.
FAQ
What were Amelia Earhart's last words before she disappeared?
Amelia Earhart's last confirmed radio transmission was received by the USCGC Itasca at 8:43 a.m. local time on July 2, 1937. She said: "We are on the line 157 337... We are running on line north and south." The 157-337 reference is believed to be a celestial line of position that passed through or near Howland Island, suggesting she was close but unable to visually locate the island. Her previous transmission at 7:42 a.m. included the more widely quoted phrase: "We must be on you but cannot see you — but gas is running low." After the 8:43 transmission, no further confirmed contact was made, though several Pacific radio stations reported receiving weak, unverified signals on her frequency in the hours and days that followed.
Where is Howland Island and why is it important?
Howland Island is a small, uninhabited coral island in the central Pacific Ocean, located almost exactly on the equator at approximately 0°48'N, 176°38'W, roughly 3,000 kilometres southwest of Honolulu. It measures just 1.6 kilometres long and 0.5 kilometres wide, with a maximum elevation of about six metres. The island is significant because it was the intended refuelling stop for Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan during the most dangerous leg of their 1937 round-the-world flight — a 2,556-mile overwater crossing from Lae, New Guinea. Three rudimentary runways were built on the island specifically for Earhart's landing, but she never arrived. Today Howland is a National Wildlife Refuge administered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Can you visit Howland Island?
Howland Island is effectively closed to the public. It is designated as a National Wildlife Refuge and is part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. Visiting requires a Special Use Permit from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which is granted only for approved scientific research or wildlife management purposes. There is no harbour, no functioning airstrip, no scheduled transportation, and no tourism infrastructure of any kind. The few research expeditions that have landed on Howland in recent decades have done so by chartered vessel, often waiting days for sea conditions calm enough to permit a beach landing through the surrounding reef. It is one of the least visited places on Earth.
What is the Earhart Light on Howland Island?
The Earhart Light is a concrete day beacon on the western shore of Howland Island, erected in memory of Amelia Earhart. The original structure was built shortly after World War II but was damaged — accounts differ on whether the damage was from Japanese bombing during the war or from post-war neglect. It was subsequently rebuilt and rededicated. Despite its name, the Earhart Light does not function as a lighthouse and carries no navigational light. It is the only human-made structure still standing on Howland Island, bearing a memorial plaque that almost no one will ever see in person due to the island's extreme remoteness and restricted access.
What happened to the colonists on Howland Island?
Between 1935 and 1942, the US government sent rotating groups of young Hawaiian-American men to live on Howland Island as part of the Hui Panalā'au colonisation program, designed to assert American sovereignty over several remote Pacific islands. The colonists lived in basic conditions on the barren coral island, maintaining a weather station and scientific observations. On December 8, 1941 — the same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor, across the International Date Line — Japanese aircraft bombed Howland Island. Two colonists, Joseph Keli'ihananui and Richard "Dicky" Kanani Whaley, were killed in the attack. The two survivors, George K. Aiana and Alexander A. Akau, were evacuated by the US Navy several weeks later. The colonisation program was permanently terminated.
Did Amelia Earhart crash near Howland Island or land somewhere else?
The most widely accepted theory, endorsed by the US government, is that Earhart's Lockheed Electra ran out of fuel near Howland Island, ditched in the Pacific, and sank in waters between 3,000 and 5,000 metres deep. Multiple deep-sea search expeditions have attempted to locate the wreckage, with at least one identifying a sonar anomaly roughly 160 kilometres west of Howland, though this has not been independently confirmed. The principal alternative theory, advanced by TIGHAR (The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery), holds that Earhart and Noonan landed on Nikumaroro atoll, approximately 560 kilometres southeast of Howland, and survived for a period as castaways before perishing. Evidence cited includes aircraft aluminium fragments, a woman's shoe from the 1930s, and bones found on the island in 1940 that were subsequently lost. Neither theory has produced definitive physical proof.
Sources
- [Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance] - Ric Gillespie, Naval Institute Press (2006)
- [Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved] - Elgen M. Long and Marie K. Long, Simon & Schuster (1999)
- [The Sound of Wings: The Life of Amelia Earhart] - Mary S. Lovell, St. Martin's Press (1989)
- [Amelia Earhart's Shoes: Is the Mystery Solved?] - Thomas F. King, Randall S. Jacobson, Karen R. Burns, Kenton Spading, AltaMira Press (2001)
- [USCGC Itasca Radio Logs, July 1937] - US Coast Guard Historical Records, National Archives (1937)
- [Howland Island National Wildlife Refuge: Environmental and Historical Overview] - US Fish and Wildlife Service, Pacific Remote Islands National Wildlife Refuge Complex (2020)
- [The Colonization of the Equatorial Islands: Hui Panalā'au and American Sovereignty in the Pacific] - Kenneth P. Emory and staff reports, Bishop Museum Archives, Honolulu (1935–1942)
- [TIGHAR Howland Island Expedition Reports] - The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (1989–2023)
- [Earhart's Final Flight: Radio Analysis and the Failure of Direction Finding] - Mike Holt, Earhart Lockheed Electra 10E Research Foundation (2012)
- [The Japanese Attack on Howland Island, 8 December 1941] - Naval History and Heritage Command, US Department of the Navy (1942/2015)
- [Deep Sea Vision: Sonar Imaging and the Search for Earhart's Electra] - Tony Romeo / Deep Sea Vision expedition reports (2024)
- [East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart] - Susan Butler, Da Capo Press (1997)
