Rebecca Pollock

LOST OR FOUND

The Disappearance of Amelia Earhart During Her Around-the-World Flight, July 2, 1937

On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan left Lae, New Guinea for Howland Island, a tiny speck of land in the South Pacific. This was to be the longest and most dangerous leg of her trip. After Howland, she was one stop away from arriving back in Oakland, California and setting the record as the first woman to fly around the globe. Somewhere in the vicinity of the island, Earhart radioed in to her support crew aboard the U.S.S. Itasca to announce that she was lost. She sent a series of frantic messages requesting bearing before finally losing contact completely.

Several hours later, after welcome parties suspected that she had run out of fuel, Earhart was presumed missing, and a massive search was organized. Years after the fact, historians continue to search for conclusive proof of her plane’s wreckage. Many theories have captured the public’s imagination. Did she run out of fuel and crash in the ocean? Did she crash-land on an island and die of hunger? Was she hired by the government to spy on the Japanese and thus abandoned when lost?