AMELIA EARHART'S SHOE: Is the Mystery Solved?

"Whatever happened to Amelia Earhart?" has been an enduring question since she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared somewhere in the Pacific on July 2, 1937. Since then, the mystery has been "solved" by people who claim, among other things, that she was flying as a U.S. agent against the Japanese, that she died in a prisoner-of-war camp and that she was abducted by aliens. This book posits that due to bad weather, Earhart and Noonan missed their refueling stop on Howland Island in the mid-Pacific and landed on Nikumaroro, a small island south of their target. While most Earhart quests are based on imaginative, usually untested hypotheses, this volume is scrupulous in not making any unevidenced assertions. Working from a wide range of fields—its authors are an archeological consultant, a geophysicist, a forensic anthropologist and an army engineer—this book claims that human bones and a shoe found on Nikumaroro indicate that Earhart possibly landed and died there. Unlike other Earhart detectives, the authors repeatedly emphasize that their conclusions are tentative and conjectural. While their judgments are tantalizing and plausible, the fun of the book is being in on the excitement of the discoveries and the scientific testing of the hypothesis. Written in a colloquial, good-humored style that takes itself seriously but is not above cracking a joke to make a point, this is a must for "what happened to Amelia" fanatics, and also those who are interested in how science can be used to test the veracity of theories about historical mysteries. (Oct.)