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.)


	A MAN, A PLAN, A PLANE: Mike Kammerer and his 1935 Lockheed Electra 10-E. the only flying sister-ship of the plane Earhart disappeared in 1937.

A more forthright exhibition of obsession, hokum, and blunt honesty you could not hope for in a sales pitch. But Kammerer has a point: As mysteries go, Amelia Earhart is not a bad investment. The puzzle surrounding her disappearance ranks up there with the Kennedy assassination and the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. The one indisputable fact in a goulash of circumstantial findings is that she took off from Lae, New Guinea, at 10 a.m. on July 2, 1937, bound for Howland Island, some 2,556 statute miles away. The rest is a riddle. Documentation uncovered by TIGHAR reveals that human bones, a woman's shoe, and a sextant box were, in fact, discovered on Nikumaroro in 1940 by a British civil servant, with the bones later determined by a doctor on Fiji to belong to a short, stocky male of European descent. No one knows where those bones or the sextant box are today. Another popular though flawed theory is that Earhart was captured by the Japanese and later executed as a spy during World War II. Even Star Trek producers chimed in with an episode of the Voyager series in which Amelia is found in cryonic suspension on a distant planet.

But the two best hypotheses, the ones with the fewest unanswered questions and simplest conclusions, begin with the theory that the Lockheed ran out of gas while Earhart and Noonan frantically searched for their mid-Pacific pit stop. TIGHAR, headed by a former aviation insurance investigator named Ric Gillespie, has invested 13 years of research in Hypothesis No. 1: That the pair crash landed on or near Nikumaroro Island, about 360 miles southeast of Howland, and eventually died of thirst or injuries. Hypothesis No. 2, currently being investigated by the Nauticos Corporation, a Maryland-based deep-sea research firm, follows the logic laid out by the aviation historian and pilot Elgen Long, who surmises that Earhart ditched her plane 20 to 50 miles west of Howland Island and drowned.

No matter which hypothesis serious Amelia-heads subscribe to, looking for her ends up being the (relatively) easy part. The hard part—Kammerer's part—is making it seem relevant and exciting to everyone else. In other words, salable. Talk to Kammerer about how he intends to make money on his deal with TIGHAR, which expires in December 2003, and his story morphs from week to week. Last summer Kammerer provided funding for a production company in Los Angeles called KBK Entertainment. KBK was not set up to produce Amelia-related product; however, when TIGHAR's satellite images attracted a deluge of media attention, Kammerer got KBK involved in talks with National Geographic, which had expressed interest in possible magazine and TV coverage, as well as an IMAX film. In addition to talking to the networks and the Discovery Channel (which had already paid TIGHAR $50,000 for its story in 1997 to produce an hourlong show on an earlier expedition), Kammerer also contacted Outside with a pitch for an IMAX film.

"When you have something like this that involves promotion," Kammerer says, "you have to keep pushing the edges."

But with no one interested in televising a TIGHAR expedition, Kammerer has been left to daydream about how much money he could reap from the discovery of Earhart's plane. "I wouldn't let a reporter or photographer within a million miles of it," he says. "If the media want to cash in, they're going to have to pay." Beyond such bluster, his plans are very loose. If TIGHAR were to find the plane, Kammerer says, he would syndicate photos of it being exhumed from its watery grave to every news organization on earth. "I'm talking about that photo being worth $5 million!" he says.

Of course, finding the plane (difficult) and then safely recovering it (more difficult still) is expensive. Having already invested $1.6 million in the endeavor, Kammerer remains cagey about how much is too much.

"You can't answer that question," he says. "It's not an issue of spending enough money. It's a question of doing what it takes to intelligently pursue a goal."

OK, but ultimately, what's the point? Some people think there is one; some don't. "It is the mystery of the 20th century," says Dorothy Cochrane, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum who has followed TIGHAR's and Nauticos's exploits. But putting a value on something as esoteric as Earhart is nearly impossible. "Certainly there is a commercial value, there's no doubt," she says. "[But] historically it would be more important, because it would stop everyone from running around looking for her, and we could concentrate on who she was: a great aviator."

Susan Ware, author of Still Missing, sees it differently. "Part of me wishes they would just leave her in peace," she says. "We should be looking at the significance of her life, not the circumstances of her death."

For Kammerer, such concerns are just part of the challenge. He can sound a tad unhinged when he rants about the lack of vision and bravado he's encountered in TV-land. But when asked why he's even bothered getting involved in this three-ring circus of legend, mystery, and discovery, his tone changes to that of a kid—albeit a very rich kid—showing off the coolest new toy on his block.

"I think the idea that, after all these years, someone who knows nothing about archaeology can assemble a world-class team and can go out and solve an international mystery—I think that's neat," he says. "It's a neat thing."

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