Today, on what would have been Amelia Earhart’s 115th birthday, news reports are trending about a recent expedition to discover what truly happened to the famed aviator on July 2, 1937, when she and Fred Noonan mysteriously disappeared over the Pacific Ocean.
Amelia Earhart / Prints and Photographs Division
A $2.2 million expedition that hoped to find wreckage from the famed aviator’s final flight is on its way back to Hawaii without the dramatic, conclusive plane images searchers were hoping to attain.
The group leading the search, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), believed that Earhart and Noonan landed on a reef near the Kiribati atoll of Nikumaroro, then survived a short time. Previous visits to the island recovered artifacts, and the group speculated a 1937 photo of the shoreline could include what appeared to be portions of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra plane. They set off earlier this month from Honolulu for a week-long expedition.
No big shiny silver airplane, obvious to all, but the data on the various storage devices may hold treasures, the group’s blog said.
While TIGHAR’s expedition didn’t uncover concrete evidence, the group still believes Lady Lindy and her navigator crashed off a remote island in the Pacific and is planning another voyage for next year, which would be its 10th effort towards discovering the truth of the disappearance.
The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of material associated with Amelia Earhart, including manuscripts, photographs and books. This handy guide compiles all the available resources pooled from several Library divisions and collections.