Hypothesis #1: Amelia Earhart Perished on a Lonely Pacific Island. Hypothesis #2: Amelia Earhart Lies at the Bottom of the Ocean. Hypothesis #3:Who Cares? We're Having a Helluva Good Time Not Finding Her! (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine January 2002

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Hypothesis #1: Amelia Earhart Perished on a Lonely Pacific Island. Hypothesis #2: Amelia Earhart Lies at the Bottom of the Ocean. Hypothesis #3:Who Cares? We're Having a Helluva Good Time Not Finding Her! (Cont.)

I followed kammerer back to his 20,000-square-foot adobe ranch home, set on 174 acres of rolling high desert outside Santa Fe. The house is a monument to the Old West. One room is filled with life-size statues displaying an array of Native American clothing; entire walls are festooned with turn-of-the-century riding chaps. We repaired to the den, where Kammerer hunkered down behind a massive black-walnut desk buried under papers, books, and bronze statuettes of cowboys on bucking broncos. He lit his corncob pipe and resumed his spiel.

It was now early August 2001. The TIGHAR expedition was set to leave later in the month for a four-week trip, but at the moment, Kammerer lamented, major media outlets were unimpressed, seeing only visions of Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone's empty vault. "I called a few friends and told them I had acquired the rights to this thing; the most I got was a yawn," he said. "Discovery Channel was interested, then dropped out. National Geographic lost interest when I couldn't guarantee that we would bring something back. Where's the adventure in that? We may get a network deal this week. We have interest from CBS, but it all may go away."

It's difficult now to recall the frenzy that Earhart elicited when she took off from Oakland, California, on May 20, 1937, to fly around the world. She had already achieved celebrity status as the first woman to fly solo across North America and the Atlantic Ocean, and had set the female altitude record (at the time) of 18,415 feet. America, in the depths of the Great Depression and in denial about the coming world war, badly needed a diversion and happily followed every detail of her circumnavigation with rapt attention.

Earhart was attempting a feat of admirable strength and derring-do, and when she vanished off the screen before the newsreel ended, her legend only grew—and spawned a cottage industry that is thriving still. Over the last 65 years, more than 200 books have been published about her, from Amelia Earhart: First Lady of Flight to Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism. A host of Internet sites are devoted to her saga as well, including her estate's site (www.ameliaearhart.com), a trove of Navy search reports (www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq3-1.htm) and Amelia's Mall (www.usa1.nu/ks/atchison/amelia/stores.htm), a half-assed, Atchison, Kansas-based clearinghouse site for all things aviatrix. This perpetual buzz eggs on the news media, which keeps the dream alive by covering any blip that appears on the "Where's Amelia?" radar. Just last summer, TIGHAR got a flurry of attention—coverage in The Washington Post, an interview on Today—when they announced that "anomalous pixels" in satellite images they had commissioned for their upcoming expedition seemed to indicate that something may be rusting away on that coral reef in the Pacific.

The intrigue, and the Pavlovian reaction it produces in daily-deadline newsrooms, is precisely what Kammerer hopes to turn into a larger triumph. "There's all kind of mystery surrounding this thing!" he said, drawing out the words for effect. "There's booooones, and sextant boxesssss. There are incredibly mysterious characters involved, and mysterious events. All this kind of stuff is more dramatic and interesting to me than just a piece of metal. Whether they find the plane or not is really incidental. Everybody wants credit for the damn thing. I don't give a shit—I just want to make money and have a good time."

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