Amelia Earharts Shoes - Is The Mystery Solved

When Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific in 1937, they left behind no confirmed wreckage, no final explanation and one of the twentieth century’s most industriously argued mysteries. In Amelia Earhart’s Shoes, Thomas F. King and his fellow investigators ask whether the answer might lie not beneath several miles of ocean but on the remote island of Nikumaroro—and whether a few battered artefacts, including fragments of a woman’s shoe, might have something rather important to say.

The book follows the work of TIGHAR, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, whose researchers developed the theory that Earhart did not immediately crash into the sea. Instead, they suggest that she and Noonan may have landed on the reef at Nikumaroro, transmitted distress calls while the aircraft remained accessible and then survived for a time as castaways. It is a considerably grimmer fate than secret employment by the Japanese, but it has the inconvenient advantage of being investigated through archaeology, archival records and physical evidence.

King and his colleagues take the reader through expeditions, historical documents, radio analysis, searches of reefs and lagoons, and the forensic examination of objects recovered from the island. These include shoe parts, pieces of glass and the tangled history of human bones once found on Nikumaroro and subsequently mislaid—which seems rather careless when they might have settled one of aviation’s greatest mysteries. The search becomes a lesson in how historical investigation actually works: slowly, expensively and with every promising discovery immediately producing three further questions.

Refreshingly, the authors do not pretend that every rusty object must have fallen directly from Amelia Earhart’s pocket. Their conclusions remain cautious, and the book is as much about the difficulties of proving a theory as it is about the theory itself. Evidence is examined, challenged and placed in context, allowing readers to decide whether the Nikumaroro hypothesis represents the solution, the best available possibility or simply another particularly well-equipped expedition into uncertainty.

Part aviation history, part archaeological adventure and part detective story conducted in tropical heat, Amelia Earhart’s Shoes offers a fascinating account of serious researchers trying to extract a human story from radio signals, damaged artefacts and an island that has spent decades refusing to give a straightforward answer. It is ideal for readers interested in Earhart, forensic archaeology, lost aircraft and mysteries whose clues include footwear but regrettably no name label sewn inside.

Published by AltaMira Press in 2001, this copy is in Very Good condition. The book has survived rather better than the evidence it describes, and unlike Earhart’s Electra, it has already been successfully located.

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