What if she’d not clicked that mouse? If her finger had merely hovered over that little device while she read the name?
But the name! Amelia Earhart.
Click! The famed aviatrix’s tousled head filled Lauren Palmer’s screen. Palmer forgot about the topic for which she’d been searching and started reading.
That’s how a life can change. Someone who’d never given a vanished flier a second thought suddenly discovered she cared, very much, about what happened decades earlier.
That was three years ago. Now, the Flowery Branch grandmother wants to raise enough money to travel with others to a remote little speck of land that may hold the answer to one of the world's enduring mysteries. It's called Nikumaroro, and it's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean's vast forever. She wants to go there next June.
After reading about the search for clues for the lost flier on that atoll, she became a member of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, an organization that looks for historically significant aircraft and advocates for their preservation. Once she became a member, Palmer looked to the sky and dreamed: Perhaps she could help answer a question that has baffled and intrigued the world since Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan went missing July 2, 1937.
Palmer thinks the woman who attempted a trans-global flight came to grief on Nikumaroro, its waves washing her plane into the depths. Somewhere on that spit, she said, may be the remains of two castaways.
“All we need is to find the fuselage, or an engine,” Palmer said. “Then we’ll know.”
But the ocean is vast, its secrets, deep. The remains of Earhart's Lockheed Electra Model 10, if any exist, may be hidden in waters off Nikumaroro.
Or they may be somewhere else. Some people believe Earhart and Noonan ran out of gas after missing Howland Island, where they planned to refuel. The ocean, they say, swallowed them.
Still others say the Japanese shot down the airplane and took its occupants prisoner for the duration of World War II, incarcerating them on Saipan. They say Japan executed the duo as the war wound down. One fierce defender of the Saipan theory calls Palmer and other TIGHAR members “Nikumaroro morons.”
Palmer dismisses the critics with a shrug. The truth, she thinks, is on a 5-mile-long island shaped like a dog’s tooth. It is a five-day sail from Fiji. It is a place where temperatures routinely exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It has no fresh water. It is populated by crabs the size of catcher’s mitts. It is no tropical paradise.
In the cool quiet of her Hall County living room, Palmer thinks about it.
A pilot for the ages
Amelia Earhart stirred something in our national psyche. Back then, airplanes were still winged miracles. The people who flew them were miraculous.
She wore a tailored flight jacket; it reminded the world that she was a woman. She liked loose, flowing pants. Her hair, cut short, was a mass of curls atop an angular, patrician face. Even now, nearly eight decades after her disappearance, there’s something about her that stirs your imagination.
Earhart and Noonan left Miami on June 1, 1937, hopping from one land mass to another — South America, Africa, Southeast Asia. On June 29, the Electra reached New Guinea; they’d covered 22,000 miles and had about 7,000 left. On July 2, they headed skyward toward Howland Island, a dot in the Pacific. Reaching it was the equivalent of making a moon shot: The slightest miscalculation would be tragic.
One of Earhart’s last known radio transmissions, picked up by a Coast Guard cutter awaiting the plane’s arrival at Howland, indicates that all was not well.
“We must be on you, but cannot see you — but gas is running low,” she said. “Have been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet. “
The duo sent another message an hour later. The world never heard from them again.
No ‘smoking gun’
Ric Gillespie has a piece of aluminum at TIGHAR’s offices in Oxford, Pa., just west of Philadelphia. Searchers discovered it in the surf at Nikumaroro 13 years ago. It’s about 2 feet long and 18 inches tall, battered with age and dotted with rivet holes. Gillespie believes it’s part of what once was a patch on Earhart’s plane, added just before she left Miami in her attempt to circle the globe.
The founder of TIGHAR, Gillespie has other artifacts Nikumaroro has surrendered: a woman’s frayed shoe, a bottle that appears to have been the sort used to hold makeup seven decades ago, the remains from a campsite on an atoll that’s uninhabited.
But it’s the piece of aluminum that fascinates him. He keeps it on his desk.
“This is the part of the airplane that was not built by Lockheed,” Gillespie said.
Yes, it is intriguing. No, it is not the “smoking gun” he seeks.
“We’ve found all kinds of stuff out there,” he said. “We just haven’t found her credit card with her name on it.”
Offshore solar images, taken by specialists TIGHAR hired, indicate that something rests at the bottom of an underwater cliff, maybe 600 feet down. The shadowy findings are open to interpretation, said Gillespie, but whatever is there appears to be about 37 feet long, maybe 6 feet tall. It could be a coral outcrop, perhaps a rock.
Or maybe it’s an airplane.
A time to dream
Palmer is a radiation safety specialist for the University of Georgia. It’s good work; she enjoys her duties and her co-workers. She’s also learning to play the banjo. A gift from her son, it rests in a case on the floor of her split-level home. “It’s something I always wanted to learn,” she said.
That pales in comparison to her wish to visit Nikumaroro. Gillespie said she’s welcome to come, provided she can come up with about $15,000, and that excludes airfare. A rented research vessel, departing for the island on June 8, will be crowded with scientists, sonar experts and others who specialize in unearthing old mysteries. There will be room, though, for about three extras whose travel fees can defray the trip’s expenses.
Palmer’s not sure she can raise that kind of cash, but she’ll try.
Is this just a pipe dream for someone who's raised three children, put food on the table, paid the bills? Well, yes. But the true measure of life, Palmer knows, is more than what you've done. It's what you want to do, too.
"If I'd been a man in the '30s, I'd have joined the Marines or done something else exciting," said Palmer, her eyes shining. "This is exciting!"
