What Really Happened to Amelia Earhart

One May 20, 1937, Amelia Earhart set out from Oakland, California on what would be the last flight of her life. Although airplanes flown by Amelia Earhart had already crossed oceans and set records, she was determined to top them all with a trip around the world at its widest point. Wiley Post and others had already circled the globe by air, but the route chosen by Amelia would take her farther, since it would follow the equator.

Amelia and navigator Fred Noonan traveled from Oakland, across the United States, down through Puerto Rico to Brazil and across the Atlantic to Africa in a series of several hops. After crossing Africa and India they landed in New Guinea. Their next stop would be a tiny dot out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean -- Howland Island. Although Fred was an experienced sea captain and skilled navigator, finding the island, which was a mere 20 feet above the waves, would be a difficult. In fact, they never found it.

Although it might seem that they obviously just went down in the ocean, what really happened to Amelia Earhart has been a matter of debate ever since. Several theories emerge. The idea that they went down in the ocean, while seemingly likely, has yet to be verified by finding the remains of the plane on the ocean floor. Nauticos has used deep-sea sonar to search 630 square miles of sea floor in the vicinity of the supposed crash site and come up with nothing. However the ocean is more than three miles deep at that point, so this is somewhat understandable.

Another idea is that because of the impending war between Japan and the US, Amelia's missing to circle the globe was really a secret spy mission. However, she was captured by the Japanese before returning. Related to this idea is the theory that although she was not on a spy mission for the US, her disappearance was staged by the government so that they would have a good excuse to go poking around in the Pacific.

Because of Amelia's adventurous nature, the idea that she and Fred Noonan absconded together has always had more than a few followers. Alternatively, they might have crash landed on some remote island to live out the rest of their days as castaways.