Expedition Amelia (2019) - full transcript
Deep-sea explorer Dr. Robert Ballard attempts to solve the mystery of Amelia Earhart's disappearance in an effort to end speculation about what actually happened to her.
NARRATOR: It's not every day one gets
a chance to make the find of a century,
Let alone two.
CREW (off-screen):
Ok, you ready?
NARRATOR: But that's exactly
what National Geographic's
Bob Ballard, is
setting off to do.
The man who discovered the Titanic has
now set sights on another of the world's
most renowned mysteries.
BALLARD: This is a good story that
needs to be told, I mean, it's a sad story,
but it's a good sad story.
NARRATOR: The story takes
us back to July 2, 1937.
Coast Guard cutter Itasca is
anchored off of Howland Island,
a tiny dot in the Pacific, about halfway
between New Guinea and Hawaii.
Any moment now, the world's most adored
aviator, having flown more than halfway around
the world, is expected to emerge from the
clouds and land on an airstrip specially
built for the occasion.
The sailors are here to guide her
in and witness history in the making.
But so far, she's
nowhere to be seen.
Throughout the long night, they have
caught snippets of her radio transmissions.
EARHART (over radio): Go ahead
on 7500 with a long count.
NARRATOR: But there's no
indication she has heard their responses.
CANDACE: They were
sweating blood.
They were horrified of the
fact that they could hear her,
but she couldn't hear them,
that they just could
not communicate.
EARHART (over radio): KHAQQ.
NARRATOR: Then, at 7:42 AM.
NARRATOR: The signal is so
strong, the radiomen run out on deck,
convinced the plane
is directly overhead.
But as another hour passes,
the sky remains empty.
8:43 a.m.
The last confirmed
word of Amelia Earhart.
And for more than 80 years, the world
has waited, waited for an answer about what
really happened to her and her navigator
Fred Noonan on that fateful, summer day.
CANDACE: Suddenly, the whole
country is completely obsessed.
Where is she?
And are not leaving
their radios.
MAN (over radio): She
was reported missing.
CANDACE: It's the greatest mystery of
the 20th century, right, and into the 21st,
it continues to be.
NARRATOR: The disappearance has spawned
countless theories and launched dozens of
expeditions, all seeking to determine the
truth of what happened to this intriguing
and inspirational young
woman from Kansas.
SAMMIE (off-screen): We've seen the most
intimate details of her life that exist,
and we still don't feel
that we know Amelia.
There's a lot of interest in her
disappearance and what happened to her,
what happened to the plane.
But to me the biggest mystery
is who was she really.
TRACEY (off-screen): She was an
inspiration in her own lifetime.
But 80 years later she is,
in some ways,
more alive than
she was before that crash.
BALLARD (off-screen):
She was an amazing woman.
She was way ahead of her times and taking on
the world as a woman, and she did quite well,
good Kansan.
NARRATOR: Now Ballard, another Kansan,
is adding a new chapter to Amelia's story.
BALLARD (off-screen): Wow.
Bigger than I thought. That's for sure.
NARRATOR: At an airplane hangar
in Amelia's hometown of Atchison,
he sizes up the last surviving Lockheed
Electra 10E, the very model Amelia flew.
BALLARD (off-screen): Yeah, this is what
I expect to be the biggest surviving pieces
are these two big
Pratt Whitney engines
and the question is
attaching with my robot are
probably right around here.
NARRATOR: Bob is confident the
engines lie at the bottom of the Pacific,
and he thinks he knows where.
CREW (over radio): Roger that.
Going in.
NARRATOR: He's setting sail on what may be his
most ambitious expedition yet to find them.
CREW (over radio):
We are ready to launch.
NARRATOR: In the process, he's
shedding new light on one of the world's
most captivating people.
ANNOUNCER (off-screen): In ship number
six is the world-famous Amelia Earhart.
CREW (over radio):
It's good to go.
BALLARD (off-screen): It exists.
It's not the Lochness monster,
it's not Bigfoot.
That plane exists, which
means you can find it.
CREW (over radio): Roger that.
Goin' in.
NARRATOR: Even before she disappeared in
July 1937, Amelia Earhart was already one
of the most famous
people in the world.
For years she pushed the boundaries
of what was humanly possible,
shattering a dozen records in
the air, while breaking barriers for
women on the ground.
EARHART: I hope that men and women may
achieve equally in any endeavor they set out.
NARRATOR: Now she is poised to
push those limits as far as they can go.
TRACEY (off-screen): She was still a very
young person, she was still in her 30s,
right on the cusp of turning 40.
She was really at the peak
of her training, her expertise.
She wanted to do the most
exciting thing she could think of.
And I think that's why she
chose flying around the world.
NARRATOR: World flights
had been done before,
but that was in
the Northern Hemisphere,
a distance of 15,000 miles.
Amelia has her sights
set nearly twice as far.
EARHART (off-screen): The contemplated
course covers about 27,000 miles.
It will be the first
flight, if successful,
which approximates the equator.
NARRATOR: It would be an astonishing
feat for anyone in 1937, man or woman.
CANDACE: I didn't think they'd
actually seen a woman that was daring,
that was entirely
in a man's world.
I mean, you're talking about
mechanics and airplanes and being brave,
doing things that no one else
had ever done, not men, you know,
much less women.
NARRATOR: Amelia takes off
from California in March 1937.
REPORTER (over radio): Over San
Francisco Bay and its famous bridges,
Amelia soars.
NARRATOR: Next stop Hawaii,
then around the world into history.
REPORTER (over radio): She expects
to make the 27,000-mile world-girdling
flight around the
equator just as easy!
NARRATOR: Under auspicious skies, the
expedition vessel Nautilus is also setting off,
from Apia Samoa, for what some believe
is where Amelia spent her final days.
Bob Ballard has set course for
a speck in the vast Pacific.
With a team of engineers, oceanographers,
geologists and archaeologists,
they're banking on the theory that
Amelia managed to land on a tiny
atoll called Nikumaroro.
BALLARD: There are
all sorts of theories.
That she was taken
prisoner by the Japanese.
That she turned
around and went back.
So you take the ones you can throw
away and you're only left with two.
NARRATOR: That she crashed at
sea and sank is the official explanation
for Amelia's disappearance.
That's what the Navy concluded
when she went missing in 1937.
BALLARD (off-screen): Which is
very possible, most of this area is water.
NARRATOR: It's just not a
simple theory to search.
BALLARD: This ocean covers a third of the
earth, and average depth in this area is
15,000 feet so good luck.
We're not doing that.
NARRATOR: Instead, Bob is following evidence
uncovered by The International Group for
Historic Aircraft Recovery,
TIGHAR for short,
which challenges
the official verdict
while confining the search to a
much smaller area, Nikumaroro.
Ric Gillespie is TIGHAR's
Executive Director.
GILLESPIE: I accepted what was widely
accepted as the official explanation for what
happened to Amelia Earhart.
Until I saw evidence that
something else had happened.
And then I said,
let's look into this.
NARRATOR: TIGHAR has now been looking
into Nikumaroro for the last 30 years.
GILLESPIE: You start on a journey and
you never know where it's going to end.
NARRATOR: So far, they've found no
definitive proof Amelia landed on the island,
but the clues they've amassed are
tantalizing enough to set Bob on his quest.
BALLARD: I like
the Nikumaroro theory.
NARRATOR: And he has a pretty good
track record of finding the unfindable,
from the Titanic in the
Atlantic to JFK's PT-109
here in the Pacific.
BALLARD: This is in my
business, a Mt. Everest.
Titanic was a Mt. Everest.
Bismarck was a Mt. Everest.
I like challenges.
And this is probably the toughest
one I've ever had, and you know,
I'll give it everything I got.
NARRATOR: Flying westward over the Pacific,
Amelia is also giving all she's got.
Accompanied by veteran navigators Fred
Noonan and Harry Manning and technical
advisor Paul Mantz, after 16 hours
she touches down on Honolulu,
exactly when and
where she intends.
“Smooth flying,” Amelia
records in her logs.
But the next leg
will not be so easy.
Just 10 seconds into takeoff,
her world flight is cut short.
REPORTER (over radio): The 16,000 pound
machine crashed on its nose and one wing when
taking off, heavily
laden with petrol.
NARRATOR: The Electra
is badly damaged,
its landing gear
left sitting on the runway.
REPORTER (over radio): Now it's
to be sent back for extensive repairs.
NARRATOR: It will take three
months to repair the plane,
a delay that forces
some ominous changes.
The man who understands her newfangled
navigational radio, Harry Manning, can't continue.
And when she finally takes off again
on May 20, 1937, a seasonal shift in the
prevailing winds means she'll have to
go around the world in the other direction.
Rather than heading west,
she must head east,
the most hazardous
part of the journey,
crossing 2500 miles of ocean and
finding Howland Island will now be last.
NARRATOR: Two days
into his expedition,
Ballard is nearing the
waters where Amelia is
believed to have gone missing and
just so happens to be transiting with
a compass heading of
337 degrees Northwest,
the bearing Amelia gave
on her last transmission.
BALLARD: Ironically, we're
coming up on the same bearing.
We're here heading on 337, and she
was coming down on the reciprocal.
CAPTAIN: Yeah, 157.
BALLARD (off-screen): 157.
CAPTAIN (off-screen): Yeah.
BALLARD (off-screen): It
all plays out right there.
CAPTAIN (off-screen): Yep.
NARRATOR: The Nautilus team
uses satellites to chart its course.
In 1937, Amelia's navigator Fred
Noonan doesn't have the luxury.
When crossing large swaths of
ocean with no visible landmarks,
he's forced to rely on what's
called “dead reckoning,”
constantly keeping
track of air speed
and compass headings
to find his way.
During the night, he can then
adjust with the help of the stars,
getting a fix on position and
pointing the way for Amelia.
If, that is, conditions allow.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): There's
good evidence that during the night,
there was an overcast that
prevented Fred from getting celestial
observations from stars.
NARRATOR: Without stars, Fred would
presumably await the next available sighting,
just as navigators do today.
He'd measure the angle of the
sun with a modified mariner's sextant,
note the time and calculate
a line of position.
In this case, an estimate
of longitude, not latitude.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): Noonan knows that he
is somewhere on this line and that line is
90 degrees to the rising sun,
the sun rises at 67 degrees, the
line goes 337 degrees this way,
157 degrees this way.
I don't know if I'm up here or down here or
right here on course, but I'm on this line.
NARRATOR: Fred can then use airspeed to
determine when that North-South line will
cross through Howland and radio an ETA,
but as the plane wings its way eastward,
without latitude, he still can't
know where he is on that line.
As Itasca waits and waits for their arrival
that morning, it becomes clear they are not
where they should be.
NARRATOR: They are supposed to home in on
Howland using a new radio direction finder,
when close enough, but neither
Fred nor Amelia are very familiar with it,
and the man who is, Harry Manning,
dropped out after the Hawaii disaster.
GILLESPIE: They're not gettin' any help from
the direction finder, now it's up to Fred.
And Fred says,
"Ok. It's either that
way or this way."
NARRATOR: Their
transmissions indicate they
try both ways.
GILLESPIE (off-screen):
As Earhart said,
“We are running on the
line north and south.”
There's nothin' this way till
you get to Siberia.
NARRATOR: But if you follow the 337-157
line a few hundred miles the other way,
southeast from Howland, there
is something, a 4.7-mile-long,
1.6-mile wide atoll, which at low tide,
just happens to have an expansive,
exposed coral reef.
Not a bad place to land a plane.
GILLESPIE: And by this time they're
getting really worried about the fuel.
And they look
around and they see,
well the best place to land
is this flat area near this,
this old shipwreck.
NARRATOR: The SS Norwich City,
a British freighter that ran
aground eight years earlier.
GILLESPIE: And so, they set up
and she bump-bump-bump, lands.
NARRATOR: It was called Gardner
Island in 1937; today it's Nikumaroro.
And 52 hours after leaving Samoa, that's
exactly where Nautilus is approaching now.
CREW: Yeah, I can
see it from here.
BALLARD (off-screen): Alright.
NARRATOR: The island offers Bob and Expedition
Leader Allison Fundis a narrow search
area relative to
the vast Pacific.
But with just two weeks to find
small pieces of a metal plane,
scattered among the metal
debris of the Norwich City,
they waste no
time getting started.
ALLISON (off-screen): So, we're
standing right off Nikumaroro Island.
We're at the entrance to the lagoon
where we think that is the general area
where Amelia Earhart would've
taken her final approach.
NARRATOR: Previous attempts here, including
modest imaging work and rudimentary mapping,
have come up short.
But they don't compare to Bob's
multi-layered, battery of testing:
Multi-beam sonar
that can produce detailed
3D maps of
the deep-water terrain.
An Autonomous Surface Vessel,
or ASV, to scan along the shallows.
High flying drones to image and map
the reef where Amelia would have landed.
And finally,
the jewels in the crown,
a pair of state of
the art ROVs that can
image the seafloor
down to 13,000 feet.
ALLISON: We've brought a lot of toys to
the game, so we're really trying to cover
everything from, from the
beach to, to the depths.
NARRATOR: And the search won't
stop at the water's edge.
The Nautilus team will soon be joined by
archaeologists to discover whether Amelia really
could have lived out
her final days here.
Intriguing evidence found on the island
just three years after she went missing
suggests she may have.
By 1940, the British, in their last
gasp attempts to expand their empire,
try to start a colony here.
The officer in charge, Gerald
Gallagher, reports a startling discovery.
On the Southeast corner, under a “ren” tree,
colonists had uncovered bones with what
appeared to be a woman's shoe.
He cables headquarters with
a fascinating conjecture.
GILLESPIE: Oh, my God.
September 23rd, 1940, “just might be
Amelia Earhart.” And he misspells Earhart,
you know, you know, with
a "d" in it, Earhardt.
NARRATOR: Thirteen bones are
found in all, including some long bones,
part of a pelvis, ribs,
vertebra, mandible and a skull.
GILLESPIE: This was a whole episode in
the Earhart story that nobody knew about.
NARRATOR: Nobody knew about because the
bones were packed up and sent to the colonial
capitol in Fiji, where a doctor
named DW Hoodless analyzes them,
disputes Gallagher's assertion,
and dismisses the bones as male.
They're eventually
lost and forgotten.
GILLESPIE: Like the Ark of the Covenant in
the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
NARRATOR: Until recently.
National Geographic archaeologist
Fred Hiebert, along with forensic
anthropologist Erin Kimmerle, and cultural
anthropologist Jaime Bach have followed
Gallagher's paper trail to the capitol of
Kiribati, Tarawa, which won independence from
Britain in 1979, and inherited all
of the related Colonial archives.
HIEBERT: I had no idea they had
such comprehensive documents.
NARRATOR: The teams here based on a recent
reevaluation of the written description of the
bones that suggests
Dr. Hoodless got it wrong.
KIMMERLE (off-screen):
Dr. Hoodless made some errors.
He didn't take a long bone
measurement of the femur.
That is really the absolute best bone
that we could measure for an accurate
stature estimate.
He says that he can't estimate ancestry, but
then goes on to say it's probably a mixed
ancestry of European
and Polynesian.
Where I think he really got
it off was the sex estimation.
He takes a couple of measurements that
he doesn't provide those metrics and says
that based on this ratio
um it's more likely male.
NARRATOR: By entering Hoodless'
measurements of the bones into a
modern forensic database,
the new study found that the
castaway wasn't male, but female,
about 5 feet 6 inches tall,
right around Amelia's height.
KIMMERLE (off-screen): What it means is that
those remains should not have been excluded.
At a minimum, they should
have been analyzed further.
NARRATOR: The question now is, if the
paper archives wound up here on Tarawa,
might the bones be here as
well, and could they be Amelia's?
NARRATOR: Tarawa is the capital of
Kirbati, which spreads across more than
30 islands in the central
Pacific, including Nikumaroro.
The National Geographic team believes
if the British telegrams ended up here,
then the associated 13 bones discovered
on Nikumaroro should be here too.
JAMIE (off-screen): The people
of Kiribati have a high respect for
Human life if
they didn't know whose bones
they were or what they
should do with them;
They would still hold on to
them, they wouldn't be discarded.
NARRATOR: The challenge is they've
been holding on to many unidentified
remains on Tarawa.
It witnessed one of the
bloodiest battles of World War II.
HIEBERT: Thousands of servicemen from
the Japanese side and the US side perished.
NARRATOR: Many of those remains
are now housed in Tarawa's archives,
and there's no obvious
box of 13 lying around.
If the team has any chance of
finding the Nikumaroro bones,
they will have to comb through
hundreds of fragments for bones that match
Hoodless' descriptions or match Amelia.
KIMMERLE: Amelia had a couple of
really unique characteristics on her skull,
and with her dentition.
One of those features
is called a diastema.
It's a small space
between your teeth.
NARRATOR: She also had repeated surgeries
throughout her life due to crippling
sinus pain.
KIMMERLE (off-screen): They drilled
a puncture hole to relieve the sinuses.
So, seeing that evidence of surgery
and the diastema would be great indicators
that this could be her.
NARRATOR: The team
meticulously studies each bone,
eliminating them one by one.
KIMMERLE (off-screen):
This box has three skulls.
HIEBERT (off-screen): Wow.
KIMMERLE: This is
a male individual.
HIEBERT: So, this one also
checked off the list.
NARRATOR: They search through
more than 600 bone fragments,
including 7 skulls.
They're all male.
HIEBERT: This is
pretty much it.
NARRATOR: Until, at the end of
the last day, in the very last box.
KIMMERLE: Here.
Look at, this is
the frontal bone.
HIEBERT: Yeah.
KIMMERLE: So, see how slight?
That's a female, and you
can see a huge difference.
HIEBERT: This one
is really special.
We're looking at a female all of
a sudden, that's a game-changer.
NARRATOR: A female that may even
bear some of Amelia's telltale markings.
KIMMERLE: We can see a little bit of
remodeling and something was going on with
the nasal area.
If we reconstruct this, we'll be able to
just to visualize it a little bit better.
NARRATOR: The team now arranges to get
the skull back to Erin's lab in Florida,
reconstruct it in 3D and see
how it compares to Amelia.
They'll then try to
extract some DNA.
HIEBERT: The ultimate 100% for this project
is comparing the DNA from these bones to
relatives of Amelia Earhart.
Now, honestly, that is a long
shot, but I love long shots.
NARRATOR: In another long shot, Fred and
Jaime will join Ballard in Nikumaroro to dig
where the 13 bones
may have originated.
HIEBERT (off-screen): It's hard to
imagine Amelia Earhart on Nikumaroro,
but this is where the
evidence is leading us.
NARRATOR: If Amelia did end up here,
it's a world away from where she started.
Amelia Mary Earhart was born
overlooking the Missouri River in
Atchison, Kansas in 1897 right
here in her Grandma Otis' house.
And from her earliest days, her
rebellious spirit was on full display.
CANDACE (off-screen): Grandma Otis was
big on deportment, lady-like deportment,
and so she was always constantly
catching Amelia doing things
that were not lady-like,
hopping over the fence and wanting
to learn to play basketball or using a
boy's sled instead of a girl's sled to slide
down, you know, the hill, the Second Avenue,
which is just out here.
NARRATOR: Whether joyriding down
Second Avenue, headfirst like the boys did,
building a roller coaster in the
backyard to thrill the neighborhood kids,
or leading her friends on pretend
expeditions through Asia and Africa from the
carriage in the barn, Amelia
was always up for adventure.
That she was a girl never
entered the equation.
CANDACE (off-screen): She was always
being caught and always being scolded.
It didn't, obviously didn't
change Amelia's behavior at all,
but what it did was force Amelia
to think about the rules between
girls and boys and why do girls have
to act certain ways and why do boys
get all the freedom and they
get all the fun?
NARRATOR: Amelia's parents don't
exactly discourage the Tomboyishness.
Mom outfits her and her
sister Muriel with bloomers.
ANN (off-screen): Every dress she was in
she would rip to pieces so her mother had
play clothes made for,
both her and Muriel.
NARRATOR: Dad buys
her footballs, even a rifle.
ANN (off-screen): She got a
22-rifle for her 12th or 14th birthday.
She got to shoot the
rats in the barn.
She was an adventurer even then.
NARRATOR: Amelia paints a rosy picture of
this time, but her privileged life in Atchison
turns challenging when her father
begins drinking and can't hold down
a job as a lawyer.
CANDACE: Dad's sickness as
they refer to it, Mm-hm.
NARRATOR: They struggle financially
and are forced to move around the country.
CANDACE: She told us
herself how it shaped her.
She said that one had to depend on oneself,
even the person that you thought was
most dependable, your
father, could change.
She learned that early on.
NARRATOR: Those difficult lessons
would influence Amelia her entire life.
Back on Nautilus, the search for
Amelia's Lockheed Electra is in full swing.
The ship completed a
circumnavigation of the island overnight,
scanning the seafloor with its multi-beam
sonar and generating a detailed 3D
picture of the island's
deep-water terrain.
With some daylight, it's now safer to
edge closer to the jagged reef where
Amelia would have landed.
To do it, they launch this contraption,
the ASV, a self-driving powerboat tricked
out with sensors and cameras that can
scan back and forth along the breakers.
ALLISON (off-screen): We're pretty much
getting to the reef break, which is excellent.
That means between the ship system
and this system we'll be able to map up and
to the reef.
CREW: Begin logging.
Logging data.
ERIN: It's got too high a
frequency in too deep of water.
NARRATOR: Navigator Erin Heffron can then
crunch the data and home in on the most
likely spots to hide a plane.
ERIN: We've been focusing our
energies up here in the northwest.
So, the colored stuff you're
seeing here is the ASV bathymetry.
So, I'm gonna just
turn it into 3D.
So that we can get perspective.
NARRATOR: The slope beneath the waves turns
out to be steeper than anyone predicted.
ERIN: We're not making it
look more dramatic than it is,
this is actually
what it looks like.
NARRATOR: Bob thinks
that the plane, if here,
would have sat precariously
just yards from the edge,
before rising tides and rougher
seas dragged it over the cliff,
likely shattering
it into pieces.
If so, the pieces should be
waiting for him at the bottom.
BALLARD (off-screen): There's
no sense of searching a vertical wall.
It's not gonna be there.
So, what'll probably happen is either it's
here, slight possibility it's something on
a bench, but more than likely we'll have to
go and do the deeper region and search down
here where things would
finally come to rest.
NARRATOR: However deep the
plane ended up, there's reason to believe
it did not sink immediately.
On July 2, 1937, hours after Amelia
went missing, mysterious radio signals were
detected across the Pacific, signals that
could only have come from Amelia's plane.
NARRATOR: Throughout her
record-breaking flight around the world,
Amelia Earhart would transmit radio
messages on just a couple of frequencies,
62-10 during the day and 31-05 at
night, frequencies that no one else in the
Central Pacific was
supposed to be using.
GILLESPIE: So, for somebody to
hear a signal, it's like "khhhh," on 31-05,
there's only one airplane
that can be coming from.
NARRATOR: And on Friday, July 2, just
hours after Amelia went missing en route
to Howland Island, those frequencies
were detected by an unlikely source.
MAN (over radio): Pan Pacific
express planes are built...
NARRATOR: Pan American Airways, which had just
begun flying passengers across the Northern
Pacific, hopping from
one island to the next.
GILLESPIE: And at each of these stops
along the way, they had radio-direction
finding stations that
would guide the planes in.
NARRATOR: The Pan Am stations tune their
direction finders to Amelia's frequency,
and they detect signals.
Assuming the plane could no longer be flying,
the signals have to be coming from land.
GILLESPIE: It's on land, and it's on its
wheels, cause they've gotta run an engine to
recharge the battery that
the radio depends on.
NARRATOR: Pan Am reports the signals to the
Navy which plots the bearings on this map
acquired by Ric Gillespie.
GILLESPIE: So, you can see that there was a
bearing taken from Makapuu there on Hawaii,
that went down this way.
There's another one taken from
Wake Island, comes down this way.
And there was another one taken from Midway
that came down through here and a fourth
one taken by the Coast Guard on Howland
Island that came down through there.
NARRATOR: If you extend all the
lines down and plot where they cross.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): They all converge
in this area, and they had to be coming from
a signal transmitted from land
and the only land there
is Gardner Island.
NARRATOR: It's those signals
that are keeping Bob going out here.
BALLARD (off-screen): The radio
evidence is so compelling that she was
sitting on or near that island
transmitting without moving.
You can't take
that off the table.
NARRATOR: Not just the Pan Am
signals, which could only take bearings,
but dozens of distressing accounts
of Amelia's verbal cries for help,
reported by people
much farther away.
None more provocatively perhaps
than 15-year-old Betty Klenck,
who recorded the
calls in her notebook.
BALLARD (off-screen): A young
lady in St. Petersburg, Florida,
sittin' there with a souped-up HAM set that
her father built a very large antenna for.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): She would
sit at the radio and cruise the dial
and she would jot down the
lyrics of her favorite songs.
Make sketches of
cowboys, glamorous women.
And suddenly she hears a woman's
voice saying, “This is Amelia Earhart.
Please help me.” And she starts
transcribing what, what she hears.
NARRATOR: She writes the word Howland
and describes a man who sounds injured.
GILLESPIE: And the man is trying to get out
of wherever they are and she's trying to
talk him out of that
and keep him calm.
NARRATOR: Ric thinks
it's Fred Noonan.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): It reads like
the transcript from a modern 9-1-1 call.
NARRATOR: Throughout, she
continually jots down the letters “NY, NY.”
GILLESPIE (off-screen): And I asked her
about that, I said, "Betty, what's NY, NY."
She says, "Well, that's New York
City, that's how I write New York City."
Well the shipwreck that's on the island that
British shipwreck was the SS Norwich City.
Norwich City. New
York City. Norwich City.
NARRATOR: 80 years ago, the Norwich
City would have still been largely intact.
GILLESPIE: It still makes the hair
on the back of my neck stand up.
And Betty wasn't the only one
who heard this kind of thing.
NARRATOR: TIGHAR uncovered 57 credible
transmissions, officially reported to local
police stations or newspapers
across the country.
It then took the reports a step further,
correlating when they were received with the
tides on the island at the time.
All of the calls came in during low
tide, the only time Amelia could spin the
propellers and transmit.
BALLARD (off-screen): When they
match the tide that's actually on the
island to those messages,
wow, that's pretty convincing.
NARRATOR: As the sun sets
on day two of his search,
Bob is getting ready
to see if her plane
was washed over the edge of the
reef, just north of the Norwich City,
where TIGHAR says would have
been the best place to land.
CREW (over radio):
Ready to launch.
NARRATOR: If so, it's battered and broken
in pieces on the bottom and there's only one
set of tools in Bob's arsenal
capable of reaching it.
CREW (over radio):
Roger that, going in.
Okay, you see the can,
you can start driving.
NARRATOR: The crew first deploys ROV
Hercules, a small but sophisticated robot that
will serve as their main
set of eyes on the seafloor.
CREW (over radio): Ok, tether is in the
water, everything looks good back here.
CREW 2 (off-screen):
Okay, let him out.
NARRATOR: The larger Argus
ROV will keep an eye on Herc,
while buffering the
motion of the ship.
CREW (over radio):
Ok, Argus is going down.
BALLARD: We're at
309 meters right now.
CREW: Can you put camera?
BALLARD: Yeah. Ok, I see it.
NARRATOR: In the control van,
Bob and the team can then watch
the live feeds from both ROVs,
their first up-close-and-personal
look at the bottom.
BALLARD: So this is
Hercules going up slope,
sliding along in the area
where we think she landed.
NARRATOR: They position Herc around 1,000
feet down, where the slope levels off,
and is most likely to catch
falling debris from above.
They then start sweeping in long parallel
lines back and forth from about the
Norwich City to the
Northwest tip of the island,
gradually climbing
up slope as they go.
BALLARD: Every one of those
could be a piece of a plane.
NARRATOR: In years of searching,
no one has ever been able to find
a single piece of Amelia's Electra.
But Bob will be looking deeper
than anyone has ever gone before.
BALLARD (off-screen): So,
this is just the way you do it,
pop some popcorn
and go to the movies.
Yeah, I think we're binge this for the
next couple of weeks, whaddya think?
NARRATOR: As Bob goes in search
of Amelia's plane, in the early part of the
twentieth century, Amelia
is finding herself.
And there is no
lack of inspiration.
TRACEY (off-screen): Amelia Earhart
was very much a person of her generation.
NARRATOR: She's 6 years old when the Wright
Brothers defy gravity at Kitty Hawk in 1903.
She's 16 during the Suffrage
March on Washington in 1913.
MAN (over radio):
Susan B. Anthony and
her followers have won
for women the right to vote.
NARRATOR: And 23 when
women are granted the vote.
TRACEY: Which means she was in the first
cohort of women able to vote in this country.
NARRATOR: In her twenties, Amelia explores
all kinds of roles, as a telephone clerk,
a truck driver, a stenographer,
a photographer.
It was while working as a nurse's aide
to World War I vets in Toronto when she
finally discovers
her one true passion.
CANDACE (off-screen): She would go out
to the Canadian airfield, which was nearby,
and she would watch those World War
I pilots, out there flying their airplanes,
and she was fascinated by them.
NARRATOR: One day, a pilot
gives Amelia and her friend a thrill,
buzzing them on the airfield.
CANDACE (off-screen): And her
girlfriend screams and runs away,
and Amelia stands there and
everything flies back and she's in
love, you know, she's in love with flying.
NARRATOR: A few years later,
in Long Beach California,
she finally gets a
chance to fly herself,
10 minutes that would set the
course for the rest of her life.
On Nikumaroro, Fred Hiebert and a team of
archaeologists, with guidance from an eager
pair of forensic advisors, are
hunting for her remains on land.
The discovery of the female skeletal
fragments on Tarawa has them more
optimistic than ever.
HIEBERT: What we want to do is link them here
to Nikumaroro and that's what we're going to
do with the forensic dogs.
NARRATOR: The telegrams sent by Gallagher
indicate only 13 bones were unearthed
from the island in 1940.
The scientists are hoping that
Berkeley and Ruby will lead them to more.
And thanks to Gallagher, they already
have some good leads on where to look.
On the far side of the island from
where Amelia is thought to have landed.
TOM (off-screen):
She's a smart woman.
She lands, she knows
she's got a problem.
She knows water is
one of the problems.
So, go explore the island.
NARRATOR: Archaeologist Tom King has been
exploring the island himself since 1989 and,
inspired by the telegrams, has been
focusing his team on one particular tree.
GALLAGHER (off-screen):
Body had obviously been lying
under a 'ren' tree and
remains of fire,
turtle and dead birds
appear to indicate life.
NARRATOR: Over five excavations
TIGHAR has uncovered many of the
items Gallagher
described, the campfire,
cooked bird and turtle remains.
There's just been one piece
evading them, the human bones.
That's where the dogs come in.
They've been trained to zero in
specifically on human remains.
TOM: The dogs are employing a very
sophisticated instrument in their nose.
They not only find bones,
but they find decomposition.
NARRATOR: In a 2017 expedition,
four different dogs, including Berkeley,
alerted right near the scientists' chosen
ren tree, a good sign that someone did
in fact die here.
ANDREW (off-screen): Of all the
millions of trees in the South Pacific
they alerted under this one.
It confirmed, certainly for me, that this in
fact is the tree where that castaway died.
NARRATOR: Unfortunately, that
expedition didn't yield any bones.
They may have dissolved into
the island's acidic soil.
But they're banking on another possibility,
that the bones were carried off by some of
the island's
insidious inhabitants.
If so, the dogs may be able
to lead the way right to them.
NARRATOR: If Amelia did survive on this
island, there would be no avoiding this
formidable creature.
Up to three feet across and
weighing in at over nine pounds,
coconut crabs are the largest on
earth, and many thousands of them team
over tiny Nikumaroro.
HIEBERT (off-screen):
They're just amazing.
Their pinchers are so strong that
they can climb trees and grab a bird and,
you know, kill it.
NARRATOR: They're also voracious scavengers,
as demonstrated by TIGHAR in 2007
with half a pig carcass.
TOM (off-screen): This
creature that was laid out.
And they set up time lapse
cameras in the trees.
And the results are about the most
disgusting thing you've ever seen.
But it is very enlightening.
NARRATOR: With help from their
smaller strawberry hermit crab cousins,
they devour the
carcass within a week,
carrying the bones every
which way into their lairs.
The scientists are now thinking something
similar would have happened to whoever
died at the ren.
HIEBERT (off-screen):
So right now,
the biggest hypothesis is to see
if we can find a crab burrow
with the remains of some human,
right at the site.
That would be
like, unbelievable.
NARRATOR: As they unleash the dogs to sniff
out remains, they've already found some
tantalizing clues here over the decades
suggesting that person was Amelia.
Most are now under the care of Ric
Gillespie at TIGHAR headquarters,
in Oxford, Pennsylvania.
There's a zipper pull.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): A tab and a
slider, that because of the markings on it,
we know was made in the United
States between 1933 and 1936.
Perfect time period.
NARRATOR: There's a
small, glass cosmetic jar.
GILLESPIE: The technical name
for it is an ointment pot.
And we're able to determine that that
particular style of ointment pot contained
Dr. Berry's freckle cream.
NARRATOR: An ointment women
used to fade their freckles.
GILLESPIE: It made the freckles fade
because it was 11% mercury, I mean,
it's horrible stuff.
NARRATOR: Amelia was famous for her
freckles, and it's widely accepted that she
didn't like them.
GILLESPIE: We don't know
whether she used freckle cream.
But we do know, we have a
jar of freckle cream on the island.
What's it doing there?
NARRATOR: And then there are two pieces of
plate glass from what appears to be a woman's
compact, found near
flecks of dried make-up.
GILLESPIE: Little wafers of red stuff that
tests out to be early 20th century makeup,
it's rouge.
NARRATOR: From her first flying
lessons with another pioneering aviatrix,
Neta Snook, we know Amelia was
always conscious of her appearance,
even after a plane crash.
CANDACE: They climb out of this plane
and Amelia pulls out her compact and begins
powdering her nose and Neta
wants to know, what is she doing.
And Amelia says, you never know
when the newspaper guys might turn up.
So you gotta look good, even if
you've crashed your plane, you know?
NARRATOR: Yet another added
pressure for female aviators.
There's no way of knowing whether the
compact was Amelia's but Ric hasn't found
a better explanation either.
GILLESPIE: So yeah, these
things start to add up.
REPORTER (over radio): Just regular
girls after all, but now they're ready to
do or die.
TOM (off-screen): Add all that
up and the evidence suggests
in total is that there was an
American woman who camped at
the southeast end of the island
in the late 1930s and died there.
NARRATOR: Beyond the personal
items at the campsite, in 1991,
during one of TIGHAR's earliest
expeditions, Ric found a scrap of aluminum
closer to the spot where
he thinks Amelia landed.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): That
is clearly a section of skin,
aluminum exterior
covering of an airplane.
It's the right kind of aluminum,
it's the right kind of rivet for
a Lockheed Electra.
NARRATOR: Problem was he
could never match it to any of the few
surviving Lockheed Electras.
GILLESPIE: So, we said, it must
be from some other kind of airplane.
NARRATOR: But it didn't fit
any other planes either.
GILLESPIE: I've been living
with this piece of metal since 1991,
and it has driven me nuts!
NARRATOR: Ric has been
exploring a new theory.
On the third leg of her World Flight,
Amelia made a particularly hard landing in
Miami, cracking the Electra's
rear, passenger window.
GILLESPIE: They took the window out
and they just put up this aluminum patch.
NARRATOR: Ric now thinks
that the patch they put on,
the only piece of aluminum
not part of Amelia's Electra,
may be the one piece of her
plane he's been holding onto all
these years, convenient
as it sounds.
GILLESPIE: C'mon, yeah.
But there's a way that
that could've happened.
She's on the reef, it's
un-Godly hot in the airplane
so maybe Earhart and Noonan
knock this piece of the patch out of
the airplane to get more ventilation.
NARRATOR: The patch gets washed ashore,
while the rest of the plane gets carried by
the surf and tides
into the abyss.
GILLESPIE: That's why the only piece
that survived on the island is the patch.
NARRATOR: It's a nice story, but like all
of the other evidence obtained here over
the decades, there's no provable
link to Amelia or her plane,
something this team
is looking to change.
The dogs are troopers.
Hot, humid islands are not exactly
their ideal working conditions.
LYNNE (off-screen):
Check it out.
NARRATOR: Ruby shows some interest and
doesn't commit to an alert, but Berkeley.
LYNNE (off-screen): He
keeps going back to it.
So, he smells
something down there.
Good job.
HIEBERT: Berkeley alerted right at the
center of our proposed “X marks the spot.”
NARRATOR: Right in the center of the ren
tree, where they've been digging for years.
They don't know whether he's detecting
trace remains that seeped into the
soil long ago, or actual bones dragged
deep into a burrow by a coconut crab.
But they're confident
something must be here.
TOM (off-screen): The dogs
right now are telling us that
right under the big
ren is where to look.
So, we're putting our
eggs in that basket.
NARRATOR: As often happens out here, while
they search, the reality of what they're
searching for sets in, that this is where
Amelia may have spent her final days.
TOM (off-screen): I think she
probably started out thinking,
“I'll get rescued and fly out.
The Itasca will get here, we'll fix
the wheel.” And then as days pass,
and it looks like that's not happening, she
begins to lose hope for that possibility.
And she's got to
figure out how to live.
NARRATOR: It's a fate
almost impossible to imagine,
especially for a
figure so full of life.
After a few flying lessons in
1920, Amelia buys a plane,
gets her pilot's license, only the 16th
woman in the country ever to do so,
and works any job she can
to pay for flights and fuel.
Within two years she
sets her first record.
TRACEY (off-screen): She said that
she believes women are bred for timidity.
You know, bred to be afraid and that
was the one thing she did not want to be.
She was determined that she would not be
afraid to do the scariest thing you could do
which is really to take these
pretty rickety primitive machines
as high as she
could possibly go.
So, her very first record that
she breaks is an altitude record.
She goes to 14,000 feet.
And no woman had
done that before.
NARRATOR: When Amelia wasn't
flying, she'd watch as others did.
CANDACE (off-screen):
One day she goes out and um,
a female pilot is out there doing
demonstrations and has an accident.
Doesn't kill herself but crashes the
plane and people are saying, do you see?
This is the perfect example.
Women cannot fly airplanes.
And what does Amelia Earhart do?
She races into one of the hangars
and basically jumps into a plane.
NARRATOR: She wows the crowd with stunts and
a beautiful landing, then meets the press.
CANDACE (off-screen):
"Why did you do it?"
"I did this to show you that women
are as good as pilots as men."
And not long afterwards, someone's looking
for a female pilot on the East Coast and lo
and behold the name that
they know, Amelia Earhart.
NARRATOR: That one bold move
is about to put Amelia on the map.
CREW (off-screen):
Are you wide on Argus?
MAN (off-screen):
Yeah, I'm wide.
NARRATOR: On Nikumaroro, Bob is
following Amelia's lead and making a rather
risky move of his own.
BALLARD: Yeah.
Alright let's step
in with the ship.
CREW: Bridge, Nav.
Ten meters, due east.
NARRATOR: For the last
six days, he has been slowly
maneuvering the Nautilus back and
forth along the island's Northwest corner,
guiding the ROVs up
the island's steep slope,
and in towards the reef break,
near the Norwich City and where
Amelia may have landed.
BALLARD (off-screen): We're
trying to get as shallow as we dare.
This is the diciest part.
'Cause we don't wanna be
sitting next to this wreck.
WOMAN: Starting to sweat?
MAN: A little bit.
NARRATOR: Bob doesn't want
to risk missing an inch of this area.
Beyond it being one of the most
likely spots to land a plane it's also the
exact site of another
tantalizing clue.
Where on October 13, 1937, just
months after the Electra disappeared,
this picture was taken by a British
colonial officer named Eric Bevington.
The Norwich City still
dominates the background.
Ric Gillespie first came across the photo
in 1992, but he was so focused on the ship,
he cropped out the rest of the print until
nearly 20 years later he got a call from
TIGHAR's forensic imaging
analyst, Jeff Glickman.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): Jeff
calls me up and he says, um,
"You know, the picture of the western
end of the island with the shipwreck?
What's the thing sticking up
out of the water on the reef?"
I said, "There's nothin' sticking up out
of the water." I get the full frame which I
hadn't seen in years.
And yeah, it's obvious, there's
something stickin' up out of the water.
I had cropped it out
when I blew it up.
I said, "Well what
the heck is that?"
NARRATOR: The pair headed to Oxford
University, where Bevington's archives are
housed, to analyze
the original print.
Sure enough something was there.
And by scaling it against the Norwich
City, they could estimate its size.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): The black thing is
36 inches and I can scale the other stuff and
it's like this fork-shaped
thing and I said, "Whoa."
"This is starting to sound like landing gear
components" and it just happens to be the same
size and shape of a Lockheed
Electra landing gear.
NARRATOR: Acknowledging the image is
nebulous enough to evoke comparisons to the
Lochness Monster,
they enlisted specialists at the US
State Department who concurred,
it appeared to be a match.
BALLARD (off-screen): They had that
image enhanced and it was a landing gear;
That's what got me to come here.
That was so compelling.
NARRATOR: So why would the landing
gear survive on the reef and not the
rest of the plane?
Ric believes it may have been
knocked loose during the rough landing,
similar to what happened
on takeoff in Hawaii.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): In Hawaii, the right
main landing gear separated from the airplane
and it came apart just like we
see in the Bevington photo.
NARRATOR: By the time
Bevington took his picture,
Ric says the plane
would have washed off the reef
with only the landing gear
left peeking above the surface.
If so, it could still be here.
With Nautilus' stern now a
little too close to the reef,
to find the alleged
landing gear,
Bob is going to need
some different tools.
BALLARD: We're not
gonna go any further.
So we have a
100-meter gap to fill.
Probably half of it will
be solved by drones.
NARRATOR: The drones' high-resolution
cameras can image from the reef to several
feet into the shallows.
BALLARD (off-screen): And then we've got
divers taking it deeper to where they meet up
with our ROVs.
NARRATOR: But though Nikumaroro's
reef is protected and teeming with life,
there's no trace of
the Bevington object.
ALLISON: A lot of great
coral and great fish.
But, nothing shiny or
metal or nothing manmade.
SAMANTHA: Really interesting
kind of near the surge.
Lot of, lot of wave action.
So, if, if there
was anything there.
It's probably been
blasted to smithereens.
NARRATOR: It's another blow,
but as Amelia liked to say,
adventure is worthwhile in itself.
No doubt she'd be
pleased by the attempt.
By Spring, 1928, Amelia is a social worker
for immigrant families when her legacy of
adventure is about to take off.
One year has passed since Charles
Lindberg flew his Spirit of St. Louis
from New York to Paris.
REPORTER (over radio): He had completed
his historic 3600-mile flight in 34 hours.
NARRATOR: He became an
instant celebrity, and now,
the man who
published Lindbergh's
blockbuster biography, George
Putnam, is leading a new search to find
his female equivalent.
CANDACE (off-screen): She needs to
be attractive, college educated, female
and a good pilot.
And the first name that
comes up is Amelia Earhart.
TRACEY (off-screen): She looked
middle class enough, wholesome enough,
she had the right
kind of background.
She was the image of the modern
woman that they wanted to project.
NARRATOR: Putnam arranges the flight
for June 1928, one year after Lindbergh.
But as her plane readies for
takeoff, there's one small catch.
SAMMIE: What no one told Amelia was that
she wasn't going to be flying the plane.
NARRATOR: The pilot
would be Wilmer Stoltz.
Amelia would be relegated to
commander, or to use her words,
“A sack of potatoes.”
No matter.
20 hours, 40 minutes after taking off from
Newfoundland, despite missing their mark by
nearly 200 miles, she's greeted
as if she'd landed on the moon.
REPORTER (over radio): Her
reception is overwhelming.
SAMMIE (off-screen): There was some embarrassment
on her part that she suddenly was the first
woman to fly across the
Atlantic but she didn't pilot it.
REPORTER (over radio): Two months
before she had been saving her money for
brief weekend joyrides.
Today she is hailed
Queen of the Air.
NARRATOR: The year after
Amelia's first Atlantic crossing,
the Norwich City ran
aground on Nikumaroro.
BALLARD: Now wait a minute.
That looks like a propeller.
WOMAN (off-screen):
That looks like a propeller.
BALLARD: Doesn't that
look like a propeller?
WOMAN (off-screen):
That looks like a propeller.
NARRATOR: And so far, Bob has been doing his
best to avoid its disintegrating remains.
BALLARD (off-screen): Doesn't look like
the propeller off an airplane, does it?
MAN (off-screen): No.
BALLARD (off-screen): Rats.
NARRATOR: By day eight he's found plenty
of iron from the ship but not a single
piece of aluminum
from Amelia's plane.
CREW (off-screen): I've
got samples here at 0-9.
That looks hard.
BALLARD (off-screen): Yeah,
it's from the Norwich City.
NARRATOR: Now he's trying a new strategy,
following the river of debris down slope in
the hope that debris from the
Electra will have followed a similar trail.
BALLARD (off-screen): We can see the drainage
pattern of all the debris coming off the
Norwich City and you have rivers
of that material flowing downslope.
NARRATOR: They trace the iron
debris down to about 1,300 feet,
to where the trail
finally peters out.
Now Bob can start looking for lighter,
aluminum fragments from Amelia's plane farther
from the shipwreck.
BALLARD: If that's from the Norwich
City, it tells us she's more than likely
upslope, so, that
was very useful.
All we need is one piece.
We get one piece,
we get all of it.
NARRATOR: Halfway up the wall.
CREW (off-screen): Uh,
look left for a second.
Roger, look left.
See that black?
BALLARD: Alright, can we come
in and take a peek at that?
CREW (off-screen):
Zoom in please. Comin' in.
NARRATOR:
Bob may get his wish.
BALLARD (off-screen):
That looks interesting.
NARRATOR: A piece of metal
not from the Norwich City.
NARRATOR: After her Transatlantic
crossing in 1928, Amelia is unstoppable.
And practically before the last
ticker tape falls, she sets out to prove
that she's much more
than “a sack of potatoes.”
She sets speed records.
And yet another altitude record.
She's the first woman ever
to fly solo across the country.
EARHART (off-screen): It took me
about 19 hours and a few minutes.
I wish I could have
done it faster.
NARRATOR: And the first person to
fly solo from Hawaii to the mainland.
ANN (off-screen): You have to remember,
women didn't even drive cars back then,
much less fly airplanes,
so this was a big deal.
NARRATOR: Along the way,
George Putnam works behind the
scenes to keep her in the spotlight.
And in 1931, Amelia
agrees to marry him.
CANDACE: He asked her numerous times to
marry him and she said, no, no-no, no-no.
Because she always saw
marriage as this cage,
once a woman got
married you were stuck,
you were in the house,
you were having kids,
that was it, your life was over.
NARRATOR:
But even in marriage,
Amelia wasn't about to
conform to social norms.
On the morning of their wedding,
draped in brown, not white,
she hands George a letter,
now at Purdue University along
with many of her other belongings,
laying down her terms.
SAMMIE: According to George,
she handed him this letter
silently and waited for him to read it.
EARHART: Dear GPP, You must
know again my reluctance to marry.
I want you to understand I shall not hold
you to any medieval code of faithfulness
to me nor shall I consider
myself bound to you similarly.
I must exact a cruel promise and
that is you will let me go in a year if
we find no happiness together.
NARRATOR: George accepts her
terms and they vow to love, honor,
and omit the word “obey.”
TRACEY: It is absolute proof
that Amelia Earhart did not
intend either in her personal life or her
professional life to concede to conventions that
would limit women in any way.
NARRATOR: The following year,
on May 20, 1932,
Amelia climbs into her
red Lockheed Vega and proves
she knows no limits.
REPORTER (over radio):
Blazing a trail of feminine glory,
the dauntless courage
of an indomitable soul
was not to be denied.
NARRATOR: She becomes the first
woman to fly solo across the Atlantic
not as passenger, but as pilot.
REPORTER (over radio): 14 hours later she
brought her Lockheed monoplane safely down
on the barren fields of Londonderry,
Ireland, hailed as the first woman to fly the
ocean alone.
NARRATOR: She may have planned on landing
in Paris as Lindbergh had but nothing
could dampen her reception.
REPORTER (over radio): As they
have Lindbergh, New Yorkers took
Lady Lindy to their hearts.
NARRATOR: Eighty plus years later,
Lady Lindy has outshined Lindbergh himself.
And her mystique continues to
entice explorers like Bob Ballard.
BALLARD (off-screen):
Pick it up.
CREW (off-screen): My go.
NARRATOR: The round-the-clock search
on Nautilus goes on and the ROV cameras
focus in on something unusual.
BALLARD (off-screen):
Zoom in on it.
NARRATOR: They can't tell
if it's a plane part.
But it's a welcome sign.
CREW (off-screen):
Doesn't have a ton of growth.
Does it look like aluminum?
BALLARD (off-screen): It's
got some holes at the end.
CREW (off-screen): Yeah.
BALLARD (off-screen): Yep, guys.
Put in the box.
NARRATOR: For now, they tuck
it away and keep on searching.
CREW (off-screen): Yeah. BALLARD
(off-screen): Looks like aluminum.
NARRATOR: As the hours pass
and the watches change.
CREW: Go ahead and zoom in
a little bit there, video.
Zooming in.
NARRATOR: More
interesting bits of metal.
CREW: That's good.
NARRATOR: Even a piece
of aluminum, their first.
CREW (off-screen): Try
grabbing it by the lip here.
NARRATOR: Then, just before sun-up, Herc's
lights spy something that clearly doesn't
belong down here.
CREW (off-screen): What is that?
What is that?
It looks kinda weird, huh?
It looks freshly, oh my Gosh,
it's your hat! Lindsey!
LINDSEY: Oh, my hat!
CREW: It's your hat.
NARRATOR: All of the specimens,
and navigator Lindsay Gee's hat,
are stowed away and will be
examined once Hercules surfaces,
on the hope that one of them happens
to be a piece of Lockheed Electra.
BALLARD (off-screen): It's just
hours and hours and hours and hours,
searching at night
with a flashlight.
You never know.
NARRATOR: If the ROV's
spot-lights has found no sign of Amelia,
there was no
escaping the spotlight
after her solo
transatlantic flight.
Mixing it up with the
likes of Cary Grant,
Marlene Dietrich, Harpo Marx,
even First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt,
her star shines ever brighter.
And she takes full
advantage of the fame.
TRACEY (off-screen): She wanted
to be a symbol of what women
could do when they were
not being held back.
NARRATOR: She pens stories
for Cosmopolitan Magazine.
Produces her own
brand of luggage.
She even comes out with
her own fashion line,
designed to give women
a greater sense of
mobility and freedom.
EARHART: I carried a sandwich
in case, I didn't eat it though.
NARRATOR: Empowering as she tries to
be, she also knows how to play the charming
feminine role as well.
REPORTER: What kind
of sandwich was it?
EARHART: A chicken sandwich.
CANDACE (off-screen): She would act like
she was kind of demure and not particularly,
opinionated when we know that
she had very, very definite opinions.
She would tell people that that tousled
hairdo is just, she'd just let it go,
and in fact she took a curling iron
to it to make it a little more tousled.
EARHART: I christen
thee Resolute.
MAN: It gets
better every time!
TRACEY: She knows that she's
got a lot riding on this public persona
that she's crafting.
And that there's a purpose that
is a bit bigger than selling luggage
or setting records.
NARRATOR: In 1935, Amelia finds the
perfect place to combine her love of flying
with her goal of championing women, as a
live-in faculty mentor at Purdue University,
a role Gender Studies Professor
TJ Boisseau recently revived.
TRACEY: Oh, she
is one upping you!
She was here to inspire women, give them
a sense of confidence that you were gonna
be allowed to have careers after college
and to even instill that confidence in
students was a revolutionary
act at that moment.
SAMMIE (off-screen): There's a
rumor that some of the fraternities were
very concerned the women
wouldn't want to marry them
after hearing Amelia
talk that she was giving them
all these radical ideas like, maybe
you don't have to be a wife and mother.
REPORTER (over radio): It's
the world-famous Amelia Earhart,
first woman to fly across
the Atlantic Ocean.
NARRATOR: Through it all
Amelia continues flying.
And in 1936, Purdue, helps raise
the $80,000 for her to build the
plane of her dreams.
Whether or not that plane,
or Amelia, ever made it to
Nikumaroro remains to be seen.
Day 10 and the archaeology team
continues to dig at the base of the big
ren where the forensic dogs
first alerted.
They're searching for bones that may
have been left behind eighty years ago,
in a seemingly
endless sea of coral.
TOM (off-screen): Millions and
millions and millions of pieces of coral.
And coral looks a lot like
bone, bone looks a lot like coral,
bone and coral look a
lot like other things.
NARRATOR: For the last few days
they've been on the trail of what they
think may be a crab burrow.
TOM (off-screen): We know the crabs tend to
establish burrows under trees among the roots.
The thought is that perhaps a crab
dragged part of the skeleton into his hole.
NARRATOR: Nobody knows how
deep they'll need to go.
TOM: That's where
the bone would be.
NARRATOR: But they
keep on digging.
TOM (off-screen):
That's a big if.
ANDREW: Into the hole we go.
DAWN: You know, every now and then you just
find a gem and that's enough to feed the
addiction and keep you digging
for many, many, many more hours.
BALLARD (off-screen): See
that guy there with the holes?
Zoom in on that.
CREW (off-screen):
Okay. Standby video.
NARRATOR: On Nautilus, they've
also been going for hours.
BALLARD: Whoa, whoa.
It looks like coral
but it's got a hole.
NARRATOR: And there's lots
of tempting pieces here too.
CREW (off-screen):
It's got a perfect hole.
Want to sample it?
BALLARD: Yeah,
just flip it over.
CREW: Just a piece of coral.
BALLARD: That's
a piece of coral.
NARRATOR: Coral everywhere,
but not a plane part in sight.
BALLARD (off-screen):
Coral, coral, coral, coral.
That's nothing.
CREW (over radio):
Okay, securing deck.
NARRATOR: After 48 straight
hours Bob pulls the ROVs.
He can now get his hands on
some of those promising bits of metal.
BALLARD: This is
stainless steel.
NARRATOR: But one by
one, hopes are dashed.
MEAGHAN: It does look like
some sort of part or ring.
But when you flip it over it's
pretty clearly a Coke can, so.
NARRATOR: This is not the
aluminum they're looking for.
MEAGHAN: There's a lot of rocks
that look like a lot of other things,
and a lot of other things
that look like airplane parts.
LINDSAY: I have a hat.
And it's my hat!
NARRATOR: The dive wasn't
a total loss though.
BALLARD: If we can find his
hat in over 1000 feet of water,
I think we can find anything.
NARRATOR: With precious few days left,
Bob decides to throw a much larger net.
Rather than searching for tiny metal fragments,
he's now going to look for one big one.
BALLARD: There are two
fundamental options for the plane.
One is that it slipped off the reef and did
a very traumatic trip over giant cliffs,
banging on rocks,
clearly breaking up.
Which is more than
likely what happened.
But then there's the other
possibility that the plane floated.
And then was drifting to sea, sank and
literally flew down to the bottom of the ocean.
NARRATOR: If so, the plane could have glided
miles offshore, likely landing intact.
And over the next two days, far
from the falling debris of the island,
Argus' side scan sonar
will try to find it.
BALLARD (off-screen): When you
get way out away from the island,
all the big
objects have dropped out.
So, you get very few targets on them, which
is good because then if you see a target,
you have a good chance
of seeing her plane.
It just takes patience.
I don't normally have
patience on land.
But I learned a long time ago
to develop patience out here.
NARRATOR: Patience was
never Amelia's strong suit.
By June 1937, with her Lockheed Electra
repaired, once again she'll attempt to
fly further than anyone has
flown before, around the world.
NARRATOR: Amelia's Electra
isn't any off the shelf plane.
It's been retrofitted and reinforced
for a one-of-a-kind journey.
CANDACE: She was unbelievably
proud of that plane.
You know by the pictures where
she stands there in front of the plane.
I mean, well think about this, this is
cutting edge technology and they've
given it to her.
Men have basically raised
money for her to take it on this,
this trip that no one
else has ever done before.
REPORTER (over radio): Always daring
and courageous, Amelia never hesitated.
Taking off in her flying
laboratory, the last word in planes.
CANDACE (off-screen): It's an unbelievably
risky, unbelievably big venture and
I think she thought, this is it,
so I'm gonna do it big.
And big is around the world.
NARRATOR: From
Oakland to Miami,
down to South America
and across to Africa,
Asia and the Pacific,
the pair has nearly two
months and more than 2 dozen
remote stopovers ahead of them.
SAMMIE (off-screen): We have the manuscript,
the handwritten pages where she's talking
about all of these accounts and we just have
hundreds of telegrams that she was sending
back to the newspapers.
NARRATOR: Telegrams,
and at least 100 photos,
documenting the entire journey.
NARRATOR: It's not
all smooth sailing.
In Africa, she misses her
intended landfall by 163 miles,
an ominous sign for upcoming
targets with less room for error.
But for Amelia, Africa
is a dream come true.
CANDACE (off-screen): She'd dreamed
of being in Africa as a child in Atchison
and there she was
flying over Africa.
NARRATOR: After 6
straight weeks and 29 stops,
on July 1, Amelia finally
touches down in Lae, New Guinea.
Exhausted, she sends a
long telegram back home.
SAMMIE (off-screen): She was talking
about personnel problems which, you know,
people assume was referring to Fred Noonan's
drinking, problems with the plane and
the weather.
But at that point they were so close to
finishing and George Putnam wanted them
to come back by Fourth of July.
NARRATOR: Not wanting to get
off schedule, at 10 a.m., July 2, 1937,
a camera catches Amelia and Fred Noonan
climbing into their Lockheed Electra and
setting off one last time.
EARHART (off-screen): The whole
width of the world has passed behind us,
except this broad ocean.
I shall be glad when we have the
hazards of its navigation behind us.
NARRATOR: On Nautilus, Bob is still plumbing
the depths of that broad ocean to see if
Amelia's plane glided
down to the bottom.
They search more than a mile and
a half off the coast of Nikumaroro,
but the side-scans
come up empty.
BALLARD (off-screen): So,
we've pretty well taken in all
the easy space you
can do with sonar.
So, check that box.
And now it's back to
hand-to-hand combat.
NARRATOR: Back to the primary target area,
the idea that the plane broke up into pieces,
and one last visual
sweep with Hercules.
CREW: Good, good.
NARRATOR: Putting his geology hat on, Bob's
been scanning for places he may have missed,
eyeing the dozens of
volcanic chutes and valleys,
channeling rocks
and debris down the
slope of the island.
BALLARD: There's the
chutes, see them?
Bam, bam, bam, bam.
There they are, can't miss them.
NARRATOR: They may be channeling,
and hiding, fragments of plane as well.
CREW (off-screen): Do
you want me to keep turning?
BALLARD (off-screen): Yeah.
We should be moving away
from the wall, actually.
NARRATOR: With a day and a half to go, Bob's
well aware that this is his last chance.
CREW (off-screen):
Let's keep an eye on that.
Come up.
BALLARD (off-screen): I
now understand my opponent.
I think I know what to do.
NARRATOR: On the island, the archaeologists
are also running low on time.
And unfortunately, at the big
ren, there's still not a bone in sight.
JOHN (off-screen): There's
nothing to get out of here anymore.
NARRATOR: The dig is over.
Whatever the dogs alerted on must have
been dispersed by crabs or decomposed.
But Fred Hiebert isn't
ready to give up.
If the dogs are alerting on chemical traces,
he thinks there must be DNA here as well
and collects several soil
samples for later analysis.
HIEBERT (off-screen):
An exceptional story,
like the search for Amelia Earhart,
deserves exceptional evidence.
If the remnant human DNA
is the same as what came over
from Gallagher and the British mandate
and matches the family of Amelia Earhart.
That is what we call
exceptional data.
NARRATOR: In Florida, Erin Kimmerle has
been working up some exceptional data of her
own, analyzing the female skeleton
she and Fred collected on Tarawa.
She's reassembled the
skull, scanned it in 3D and
is now trying to
determine whether it matches
the one found in 1940 and
was described by Dr. Hoodless.
KIMMERLE: Hoodless
took four measurements.
Two are in the area of the eye orbit
and then two are basically the length and
breadth of the skull.
NARRATOR: When Erin took those
same measurements on the Tarawa skull,
she found 3 out
of 4 were a match.
KIMMERLE: It's interesting because, if
we just use the three measurements that are
consistent with Hoodless, then
it comes up as a white female.
NARRATOR: But when she added in that fourth
measurement plus a few more commonly used
for identification today?
KIMMERLE: We find that this skull classifies
most closely with local populations to the
South Pacific and that the
European ancestry falls pretty low.
Based on just those
measurements, I wouldn't rule this out.
NARRATOR: But does
it match Amelia?
The markers she'd
hoped would tie to Amelia,
the gap in the teeth
and the sinus surgery,
are missing on the skull,
so Erin is left to rely on a
technique called
superimposition.
KIMMERLE: So, you want to
look at the corner of the eyes.
The eyebrow, which you notice
on her, are pretty low over the eye.
NARRATOR: Amelia's brow, eye shape
and spacing match the skull pretty closely.
Her nasal openings, not so much.
KIMMERLE: And so,
it's complicated.
Because there's certain things that
are very consistent and then of course,
there's other things that
are just less diagnostic.
So, we're not sure.
NARRATOR: There's one way to
find out if this was Amelia's.
Just as Fred extracted
DNA from the soil,
Erin will now attempt
the same for the skull,
to see if it matches
one of Amelia's relatives.
BALLARD (off-screen):
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Zoom in a little tighter.
I see that edge.
Down below.
CREW: The shell? BALLARD: Those
are shells, ok. CREW (off-screen): Yeah.
BALLARD (off-screen):
Ok, zoom out and rise up.
And look up.
See if a Pratt-Whitney
engine is jamming us.
NARRATOR: As Bob races to find traces of
Amelia's plane on this tiny Pacific atoll,
on July 2, 1937, Amelia is flying somewhere
over that same vast ocean in search of
Howland Island,
which is even tinier.
The 2,500 mile flight from Lae is
expected to take about 18 hours.
But as Itasca awaits her arrival
that morning, it becomes clear,
that's not to be.
With overcast skies, stronger than
expected winds and no luck with the
direction-finding radio, her
Electra has veered off course.
CANDACE (off-screen): The most
frustrating thing about that last hop to
Howland was that she had her
salvation right at her fingertips, if
she'd known how to use that radio.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): The mood
on Itasca at first is exciting.
Amelia Earhart is on her way.
That turns into
alarm when she says,
"We've been unable to reach you
by radio and we must be on you,"
and she's not.
CANDACE (off-screen): They
could hear her growing realization that
obviously something was wrong,
that there was something that was keeping them
from finding each other and the realization
that she wasn't gonna find them.
NARRATOR: At 8:43 a.m., Itasca receives
its final radio message from Amelia.
NARRATOR: They make dozens of transmission
attempts over the next several hours,
until finally, at 1:03 issue
an all-emergency broadcast.
"All ships, all stations.
Amelia Earhart plane apparently
down at sea, position unknown."
So would begin the largest search
ever undertaken in Naval history.
For more than two weeks,
as Pan Am takes radio bearings
on Amelia's frequencies and
people like Betty Klenck
report distress calls,
seven US ships cover more than
250,000 square miles of ocean.
REPORTER (over radio):
The battleship, Colorado,
reports planes
being catapulted to
scour the South Pacific
from dawn to dusk.
NARRATOR: Aircraft carriers
launch dozens of search planes.
On July 9, one week
after Amelia goes missing,
one even snaps this
photo over Gardner Island.
The pilot reports signs of
recent habitation, but no plane.
It's perhaps the strongest evidence
against the Nikumaroro theory.
But Ric argues by then the Electra
was already washed off the reef.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): The tide was
high and there was a heavy surf running.
We can see that
in the photograph.
NARRATOR: As the Navy
searches, the world holds its breath.
REPORTER (over radio): On the chance that
she might be safe on some remote island.
CANDACE (off-screen): I think
people fully expected her to be found.
They sat by that radio and they
waited and they expected her to come
and she didn't come.
She didn't come.
REPORTER (over radio): Some 200,000 square
miles of ocean and nearby islands were to be
searched but to no avail.
NARRATOR: 17 days and $4
million later, the Navy declares,
“All search for
Earhart, terminated.”
And the theories about what really happened
to Amelia arise almost immediately.
REPORTER (over radio): Whether she and her
navigator had been lost at sea or had been
captured and executed by the Japanese,
no one has been able to prove conclusively.
NARRATOR: From spying for the U.S Government
and getting captured by the Japanese,
to assuming a new identity and living
out her days as a housewife in New Jersey.
REPORTER (over radio): Her
fate still remains a mystery.
CANDACE: We don't want
to believe that she's gone,
we don't wanna
believe that she died.
She did amazing things and
survived, you know, over and over again.
So, it's hard to imagine that she would've
just dropped into the ocean and disappeared.
NARRATOR: After 14 days of searching Nikumaroro,
Bob is starting to think maybe Amelia
did just drop into the ocean.
BALLARD (off-screen): Oh my God.
Haul me out of here.
NARRATOR: But as so often
happens as expeditions wind down,
they find one more
promising piece.
CREW: Can you zoom in?
WOMAN (off-screen): Zooming in.
Has holes in it.
Bob.
It doesn't look rusty either.
NARRATOR: It's the
last day on Nikumaroro.
And the last chance for Herc to
deliver a piece of Amelia's airplane.
CREW: Sure looked like
aluminum underwater.
BALLARD: Yeah, it sure did.
It's an interesting thing
adhering to it, like wood.
NARRATOR:
It's not looking good.
BALLARD: Yeah. Nice holes, but.
No, it's not her plane.
NARRATOR: With five full passes around
the island, nearly 150 miles back and
forth with the ASV and ROVs, nearly total
aerial drone coverage of the reef-line,
and hundreds of hours of imagery
recorded, Bob Ballard's search for Amelia's
plane seems to rival the Navy's.
And after two full weeks,
he too is calling it quits.
BALLARD (off-screen): We spent hundreds and
hundreds of hours underwater researching
all the primary sites.
And we saw nothing that suggested
that her plane landed, went off that reef,
and tumbled down that hill.
NARRATOR: He's not
ruling this place out.
There's still a lot of data to
pore over and samples to check.
And Bob's still haunted by those radio
transmissions that triangulate right around here.
BALLARD: The radio evidence, that's
the one piece that's just gnawingly there.
NARRATOR: But for
now he's moving on.
As Nautilus bids farewell to Nikumaroro, its
next leg just happens to be Howland Island,
Amelia's intended target.
BALLARD (off-screen):
We're off to Howland.
We have been tasked by our government
to map the area around Howland.
It will come.
Titanic took four expeditions,
Bismarck took two expeditions.
That plane is somewhere.
So, stay tuned.
MIGUEL (over phone): 14,766.
FRANKIE (over phone):
And you said 766.
NARRATOR: In Florida, Fred Hiebert and
Erin Kimmerle aren't losing hope either,
even as their highly anticipated DNA
results from the Tarawa skull come in.
FRANKIE (over phone): Actually
at this particular locus, I do have a T,
so I would be able to say that that
is a possible, a possible match there.
NARRATOR: But while they can
identify some key markers.
FRANKIE (over phone): These samples underwent
a lot of degradation over the years.
NARRATOR: Much of the
sample is unreadable.
FRANKIE (over phone): My suggestion
would be to do some targeted re-sequencing.
NARRATOR: For the moment, it's
another inconclusive result.
But Fred is forever
the optimist.
HIEBERT: There's something
there. KIMMERLE: Yeah.
HIEBERT: Well, perfection in science
doesn't always happen and it's so rare.
I thought maybe we had that, but that simply
isn't going to stop this amazing story of
searching for
Amelia Earhart, right?
I think it's worth keep
going and going and going.
NARRATOR: There's no doubt Ric
Gillespie and TIGHAR, will keep going.
They recently acquired a new piece of film
that may help determine whether the rivet
holes on their prized scrap of
metal match those on the aluminum
patch put on Amelia's Electra.
They're not about to be dissuaded
by DNA results or the lack of a plane.
GILLESPIE (off-screen): Whether the
magical smoking gun ever shows up.
Well, that would be nice.
And maybe it can be found
and I sure hope it is.
But it's also possible that the best
we're gonna get is what we already have,
which ain't half bad.
NARRATOR: Whether the film will add
another piece to the Nikumaroro saga,
time will tell.
But already, it holds something
special in its final frames.
GILLESPIE: And there's Amelia.
NARRATOR: Another haunting glimpse
of Amelia, posing with an airline worker,
just a day before
she goes missing.
With a figure this iconic, it's
no wonder the search will go on.
BALLARD (off-screen): She was a
dreamer and she had the guts to try.
She paid for it, but, boy,
people remember her.
TRACEY (off-screen): Fortunately, her getting
lost in the Pacific, because it was such
an ambitious undertaking, and because she
had already proven herself in so many ways,
her legacy was intact.
Women could do whatever men could
do and were willing to take the risk and
enjoy the adventure.
CANDACE: It's not how she died
that's important, I think.
It's really how she lived because she
showed us through her own example that one
doesn't have to accept what society says
you are, that one can follow their dreams,
that one can live
big, live bold.
All they have to do
is seize it, you know.
That's what Amelia's taught us.
NARRATOR: It's a sentiment best captured
by Amelia herself in a letter she left
for her sister Muriel on the
chance she didn't return from her
first transatlantic flight.
EARHART (off-screen): "I have
tried to play for a large stake and if
I succeed all will be well.
If I don't, I shall be happy to pop off
in the midst of such an adventure."
NARRATOR: Adventure did
finally claim Amelia Earhart,
but her spirit continues
to lift us all.
Captioned by Cotter
Captioning Services.