What Happened To Amelia Earhart? Forensic Dogs To Search For Pilot’s Remains

Famed pilot Amelia Earhart went missing almost 80 years ago — but the search for her remains hasn’t ceased. A specialized expedition was set to embark Saturday on a journey to a remote island in yet another attempt to find her.

Earhart, the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic, vanished in 1937 in an attempt to make her way around the world. Since then, her disappearance has captivated the nation as explorers continued to search for her remains.

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Members of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR, think they may have pinpointed Earhart’s last location. The team is headed to Nikumaroro, a tiny, uninhabited island about 350 miles southwest of Earhart’s intended refueling stop on Howland Island. The group thinks Earhart may have landed on Nikumaroro after being unable to find Howland.

“If you don’t know where you are, that’s the logical direction to head,” Ric Gillepsie, TIGHAR’s executive director, told National Geographic Tuesday.

What’s further led the group to believe Earhart may have died on Nikumaroro was the discovery of 13 bones on the island during its colonization in 1940. The bones were measured and shipped back to Fiji, but were ultimately lost somewhere along the way. The TIGHAR team said it was entirely possible that the remaining 193 bones were still resting somewhere on Nikumaroro. Should they locate the bones, they’ll be able to ship them back to the United States for analysis against a living relative of Earhart’s.

The shining stars of the TIGHAR team will be a group of four forensically trained border collies. The dogs, named Berkely, Piper, Marcy and Kayle, come from the Institute for Canine Forensic and have been trained in the art of locating bones.

“No other technology is more sophisticated than dogs,” said Fred Heibert, an archeologist at the National Geographic Society, according to National Geographic. “They have a higher rate of success identifying things than ground penetrating radar.”

TIGHAR has, however, already launched 12 unsuccessful expeditions in their search for Earhart. Other people around the world have gotten involved as well over the years. A 53-year-old science teacher from Washington state named Dick Spink has spent $50,000 of his own money in an attempt to prove that Earhart landed amid the Marshall Islands on a tiny atoll called Mili.

“The world needs to know this,” he told National Geographic in 2015. “I heard a consistent story from too many people in the Marshalls to dismiss it. They say, ‘She landed at Mili. Our uncles and aunts, our parents and our grandparents know she landed here.’”

None of the searches so far, however, have borne significant fruit. But TIGHAR’s senior archaeologist Tom King told National Geographic there’s “real potential” for this mission.

“This expedition is less of a shot in the dark than any expedition we’ve had,” he said.

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It won’t come without obstacles — rats who have gnawed on bones, a week-long trip at sea and hot, dense land not conducive to DNA preservation might all stand in the way.

“If the dogs don’t find anything, we’ll have to think about what that means,” said Hiebert. “But if the dogs are successful, it will be the discovery of a lifetime.”