This Wild Theory Says Amelia Earhart Was Eaten by Crabs. Is It True?
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In August 2019, Robert Ballard, the deep-sea explorer who uncovered the Titanic and John F. Kennedy’s WWII patrol boat, among other famous wrecks, set out on a mission to find the aircraft at the center of history’s most enduring mystery: Amelia Earhart’s downed Lockheed Model 10-E Electra.
On July 2, 1937, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were en route to Howland Island in the Pacific, about 1,700 miles southwest of Honolulu. They were six weeks and 20,000 miles into their trip around the world. By then, Earhart had already become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and from Hawaii to the U.S. Mainland; her globetrotting trek would simply be the latest in a line of incredible accomplishments for the aviation pioneer.
Earhart and Noonan, of course, never made it to Howland. Somewhere along the way, the Electra became too heavy and short on fuel, and the pilot and her navigator lost sight of the tiny, two-and-a-half-square-mile island in the middle of the ocean. No one knows exactly what happened next.
Conventional wisdom holds that the Electra simply ran out of fuel and crash landed somewhere close to Howland, sinking thousands of feet into the ocean. That’s what the U.S. government believes, at least. But others think Earhart and Noonan instead landed about 350 nautical miles southeast of Howland, touching down on the coral reef barrier that surrounded Gardner Island—now known as Nikumaroro Island. They point to the distress radio calls that came from the island over the next several nights following the purported crash.
Ballard and Allison Fundis of the Ocean Exploration Trust searched the waters off Nikumaroro, while a team of archaeologists from National Geographic combed the island to find traces of the plane.
During the expedition, National Geographic reported on a theory that might explain what happened to Earhart and Noonan if they indeed landed near Nikumaroro: Noonan died, the Electra floated away, and Earhart lived for weeks on the island with no creatures but the indigenous, three-foot-long coconut crabs to keep her company.
Those crabs, the theory goes, ate Earhart after she perished on the island.
In 1940, British settlers found 13 bones, including a skull, on the island—“possibly that of Amelia Earhardt [sic],” according to a telegram sent after the discovery. Upon further examination, doctors said the bones belonged to a short, European male, though some anthropologists disagree with the assessment.
But if the 13 bones did belong to Earhart, what happened to the other 193 in a human skeleton that weren’t found? Credit the crabs: The Brits who uncovered the bones said “coconut crabs had scattered many bones,” per the National Geographic report.
To test this theory, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) gave the crabs a pig carcass to feast on. Turns out the crabs swarmed the pig’s body, removed most of its flesh, and moved some of the bones as far as 60 feet away. “This tells us crabs drag bones,” TIGHAR’s Tom King told National Geographic.
While Ballard and co. left Nikumaroro without the Electra—after a visual examination of 100 percent of the island down to 2,400 feet, Ballard couldn’t find any evidence of the plane—the search may not be over.
National Geographic archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert and his team may have found fragments of the skull from 1940 in the Te Umwanibong Museum and Cultural Centre in Tarawa, Kiribati. And forensic anthropologists say it belonged to an adult female.
“We don’t know if it’s [Earhart] or not,” the University of South Florida’s Erin Kimmerle told National Geographic, “but all lines of evidence point to the 1940 bones being in this museum.” Kimmerle reconstructed the skull, and the team sent it out for DNA testing. It wasn’t until earlier this year that Hiebert told Radio Kiribati the DNA results showed the bones actually belonged to a young Polynesian women who had lived in Kiribati 1,000 years ago, as reported by Radio New Zealand.
Most recently on September 2, 2023, TIGHAR announced that an underwater photo from 2009 might be proof that Earhart’s plane sits off the coast of Nikumaroro Island. The exact location where the photo was taken is unknown, but it is currently being analyzed by a forensic imaging specialist.
We might never know what truly happened to Amelia Earhart, whether she was eaten by crabs or eventually met up with D.B. Cooper and Jimmy Hoffa to hang on a beach in Mexico. But more than 80 years after her disappearance, Earhart still matters more than ever.
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