Finding Amelia - The True Story Of The Earhart Disappearance

Amelia Earhart disappeared in 1937, leaving behind an unfinished flight, an enduring mystery and enough theories to keep investigators, historians and unusually determined people with maps occupied for generations. In Finding Amelia, Ric Gillespie returns to the evidence surrounding Earhart’s final journey and attempts to separate documented fact from the great fog bank of speculation that has gathered around it.

Rather than simply selecting the most dramatic theory and declaring the case closed before lunch, Gillespie reconstructs the flight through radio messages, navigation records, official reports and the decisions made by Earhart, navigator Fred Noonan and those attempting to guide them to Howland Island. The result is a detailed examination of what was known, what was misunderstood and what may have happened when one of the world’s most famous aviators failed to arrive at one of the world’s least accommodating specks of land.

Published by Naval Institute Press, this is a serious, carefully argued investigation into a mystery that has attracted everything from scholarly research to stories involving Japanese capture, secret identities and miscellaneous Pacific islands apparently waiting to reveal a misplaced aeroplane. Gillespie’s account favours evidence, although the evidence itself proves quite capable of being tantalising, contradictory and thoroughly uncooperative.

A compelling book for readers interested in aviation history, navigation, unexplained disappearances and the peculiar human refusal to leave a mystery alone simply because nearly seventy years have passed. This copy is in Good condition: a sound and readable survivor of its own journey, although fortunately its present whereabouts are known.

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