Amelia Earhart was the first woman aviator who crossed the Atlantic and was on her way to becoming the first woman to circumnavigate the Earth. However, as she was crossing the Pacific, the legendary aviator suddenly disappeared without a trace. This woman's death is so shrouded in mystery that it continues to fascinate the minds of today. As the song goes, "whatever happened to Amelia Earhart?"
According to previous news reports, the timeline seems to point to a specific direction. In the '40s, the partial bones of a castaway were found on a deserted island of Nikumaroro in Kiribati. With the island along Earhart's route, this discovery has given rise to speculations about the true story behind her death. Could she have survived the crash but died on the island? Unfortunately, there were no parts found that would specifically indicate that the bones belonged to a female. If anything, the bones were thought to be too large to belong to a woman. Thus, this new theory was dismissed.
Not giving up hope, the case was reopened in the nineties, and a new team of investigators was sent to the island to search for better clues. What was discovered were bonfires with animal bones indicating prolonged attempts of survival. Then in 1998, reinvestigation of archives on the bones found in 1940 showed that Earhart was a woman taller than the norm at 1.73 meters.
Amazingly, scaled comparisons of her photos and the bones' photos indicated an almost-perfect match. On top of that, aviation archives from the area indicated that distress radio signals had been received around the time of Earhart's disappearance. More than a decade later, news from Nikumaroro wowed the world when a discovery of a jar of freckle cream, well-known to be used by Earhart herself, surfaced in 2012.
Today, more and more discoveries solidify the theory that she did not die on the fateful night of July 2, 1937. Though no conclusive evidence has been discovered so far, all clues point us to only one direction: all this time, we may have actually found her.