Finding Amelia Earhart

Some people may be onto her last stop -- from CBS News/AP:

Group Hopes To End Amelia Earhart Mystery
Search Team To Scour South Pacific Island With Modern Technology

Hoping modern technology can help them solve a 70-year-old mystery, a group of investigators will search a South Pacific island to try to determine if famed aviator Amelia Earhart crash-landed and died there.

The expedition of 15 members of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR, was set to depart Thursday. The trip would mark the group's ninth to Nikumaroro, an uninhabited atoll about 1,800 miles south of Hawaii.

Once at the 2-mile-long island, the group was to spend 17 days searching for human bones, aircraft parts and any other evidence to try to show that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, reached the island on July 2, 1937, crashed on a reef at low tide and made it to shore, where they possibly lived for months as castaways, written off by the world as lost at sea.

The conditions during the search will be punishing, with the explorers forced to contend with dense jungle vegetation, 100-degree heat, sharks that reside in a lagoon in the middle of the island and voracious crabs that make it necessary to wear shoes at all times.

"The public wants it solved. That's why everybody on the street today, 70 years later, knows the name Amelia Earhart," said TIGHAR founder and executive director Ric Gillespie. "She is America's favorite missing person."

Cool -- they have already visited the Atoll and found Plexiglas that matches the thickness and shape of the Electra Earhart was flying as well as some bones. This trip is to bring metal detectors and forensic cameras. Interesting to have this mystery solved. There is also the thought that she was working as a spy against the Japanese in the run-up to WW2. Lots of rumors, it would be good to have some facts for a change...