And that's not the only problem....
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Nikumaroro: Challenges to Doing Archaeology - 3
Once you get the surface clear, it looks like this -- made up of coral rubble. That's a 50 cm. scale. Hard to spot things, especially things like bones.
Nikumaroro: Challenges to Doing Archaeology - 2
Areas that aren't covered in Scaevola are often covered in coconuts and pandanus gone wild, which dump a tremendous load of leaves, fronds, nuts, etc. on the ground, which then rots and forms a pretty difficult ground-cover.
Walking through this stuff is not entirely easy, and detecting anything under it is something else again. Not a walk in the park.
Nikumaroro: Challenges to Doing Archaeology 1
I'm sometimes asked how come, given that Nikumaroro is such a small island and we've been there so often, we're still uncertain about exactly what's there to be found that might be related to Earhart. Having just learned (I think) to add images to a blog posting, I thought I'd illustrate. Apparently I can include only one image per post, so there will be several posts to follow.
Here's Challenge #1: Scaevola frutescens, or Mao: Covers many areas of interest including the Seven Site. Grows about 3 meters high, tangled, very hard to cut. Here John Clauss tries to penetrate a patch. Not easy.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
The Fickle Finger
In a just-published November 2010 "Review and Update" issue of Tighar Tracks, Ric Gillespie summarizes where things stand with the Earhart project; it's a good background to have on hand when watching the Discovery Channel's Finding Amelia on December 11.
One thing Ric writes about is "the fickle finger," a single phalange that turned up during the sorting of faunal remains from the Seven Site. I want to elaborate a bit on this interesting object.
Identified bones at the Seven Site fall into six general categories. There are fish bones, bird bones, rat bones, baby sea turtle bones, adult sea turtle bones, and medium mammal bones. The fish bones come from reef and lagoon fish; the bird bones come from Frigate Birds, Boobies, and perhaps a few other species. The baby turtle bones doubtless represent (duh) baby turtles collected either in the eggs or shortly after leaving them on the beach. The medium mammal bones appear to represent canned mutton. It was the adult turtle bones from all three fieldwork episodes at the Seven Site (2001, 2007, 2010) that I was sorting when I came upon the fickle finger (FF).
Turtles, of course, have phalanges; they're the skeletal structures of their flippers. The FF came from a part of the site -- the northeast end, under the big ren (Tornefortia) tree -- where turtle bones have been found, so I put it in the "adult turtle" category, but it looked enough like a human phalange (finger or toe bone) that I first sent it to forensic anthropologist Karen Burns (U. of Utah) for her diagnoses. She thought it was probably turtle, but couldn't rule out the possibility that it was human.
Meanwhile, for the first time I'd organized all the rest of the turtle bones, and found that the vast majority clearly represent the carapace (back) and perhaps the plastron (tummy) of one or more turtles; at the moment I see little reason to think we have more than a single individual, though the pieces were deposited at three locations on the site. There were also a number of odd long bones that I -- by no means a turtle specialist -- figured were fragments of femur, tibia, radius, ulna, or humerus. I imaged these bones and sent them out to TIGHAR's Earhart Project Advisory Council (EPAC) and others, seeking advice.
Dr. Howard Hutchison is a retired Paleontologist associated with the University of California Museum of Paleontology, and a friend of TIGHAR's Andrew McKenna, whose late father, Malcolm, was a noted paleontologist. Andrew showed Dr. Hutchison my images, and Dr. Hutchison identified my "long bones" as the peripheral bones that run around the periphery (duh) of the turtle's shell. In other words, I apparently had no long (leg) bones. We're in the process of working with Dr. Hutchison to confirm (or disconfirm) this identification.
So, as Ric says in Tracks, "if whoever brought the turtle to the Seven Site didn't bring the legs, how did a phalanx get there?" The interesting contrast is that -- assuming, of course, that we're right about the Seven Site being where the colonists collected human bones in 1940 -- human leg (and arm) bones have been found there. And Gallagher tells us that those bones, like the FF, were found under a ren tree.
The fickle finger is now with Dr. Cecil Lewis at the University of Oklahoma's Molecular Science Laboratories, being checked for human (or turtle) DNA. Stay tuned.
One thing Ric writes about is "the fickle finger," a single phalange that turned up during the sorting of faunal remains from the Seven Site. I want to elaborate a bit on this interesting object.
Identified bones at the Seven Site fall into six general categories. There are fish bones, bird bones, rat bones, baby sea turtle bones, adult sea turtle bones, and medium mammal bones. The fish bones come from reef and lagoon fish; the bird bones come from Frigate Birds, Boobies, and perhaps a few other species. The baby turtle bones doubtless represent (duh) baby turtles collected either in the eggs or shortly after leaving them on the beach. The medium mammal bones appear to represent canned mutton. It was the adult turtle bones from all three fieldwork episodes at the Seven Site (2001, 2007, 2010) that I was sorting when I came upon the fickle finger (FF).
Turtles, of course, have phalanges; they're the skeletal structures of their flippers. The FF came from a part of the site -- the northeast end, under the big ren (Tornefortia) tree -- where turtle bones have been found, so I put it in the "adult turtle" category, but it looked enough like a human phalange (finger or toe bone) that I first sent it to forensic anthropologist Karen Burns (U. of Utah) for her diagnoses. She thought it was probably turtle, but couldn't rule out the possibility that it was human.
Meanwhile, for the first time I'd organized all the rest of the turtle bones, and found that the vast majority clearly represent the carapace (back) and perhaps the plastron (tummy) of one or more turtles; at the moment I see little reason to think we have more than a single individual, though the pieces were deposited at three locations on the site. There were also a number of odd long bones that I -- by no means a turtle specialist -- figured were fragments of femur, tibia, radius, ulna, or humerus. I imaged these bones and sent them out to TIGHAR's Earhart Project Advisory Council (EPAC) and others, seeking advice.
Dr. Howard Hutchison is a retired Paleontologist associated with the University of California Museum of Paleontology, and a friend of TIGHAR's Andrew McKenna, whose late father, Malcolm, was a noted paleontologist. Andrew showed Dr. Hutchison my images, and Dr. Hutchison identified my "long bones" as the peripheral bones that run around the periphery (duh) of the turtle's shell. In other words, I apparently had no long (leg) bones. We're in the process of working with Dr. Hutchison to confirm (or disconfirm) this identification.
So, as Ric says in Tracks, "if whoever brought the turtle to the Seven Site didn't bring the legs, how did a phalanx get there?" The interesting contrast is that -- assuming, of course, that we're right about the Seven Site being where the colonists collected human bones in 1940 -- human leg (and arm) bones have been found there. And Gallagher tells us that those bones, like the FF, were found under a ren tree.
The fickle finger is now with Dr. Cecil Lewis at the University of Oklahoma's Molecular Science Laboratories, being checked for human (or turtle) DNA. Stay tuned.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Amelia Earhart on Nikumaroro: Responding to Some of the More Aggressive Questions
The more aggressive critics of the Nikumaroro Hypothesis on the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan routinely lodge several complaints about the hypothesis. Having just fielded some of them (from a polite and gentlemanly critic) I thought I’d take this opportunity to offer some responses.
1. How could Fred Noonan, one of the preeminent celestial navigators of the time, get so far off course as to wind up on Nikumaroro?
Answer: First, he never expected to navigate a bee-line right in to Howland Island. His job was to get them close to the island; then radio direction finding would guide them in. There’s no reason to think he didn’t get them close, but the RDF didn’t work, so they couldn’t find their way in to the island itself. Second, we don’t propose that he and Earhart flew straight from Lae to Nikumaroro, which would have required them to be way off course. We think they got close to Howland, couldn’t find it, and very rationally flew south along the line of position that Noonan had laid out, knowing that if they were north of Howland they should find it, and if they were south of Howland they should come into the Phoenix group – i.e. to Nikumaroro.
2. She didn’t have enough fuel to get to Nikumaroro.
Answer: Nobody can know for sure what conditions Earhart and Noonan faced on their flight, but if they managed their fuel the way they planned to manage it, they should have had enough fuel to do what we think they did – fly to the vicinity of Howland Island and then fly down the line of position to Nikumaroro. The hypotheses that have them crashing at sea invariably include assumptions about fuel evaporation, headwinds, dog-legs on their route of flight, or poor fuel management that are entirely speculative.
3. Nikumaroro was occupied by colonists from Kiribati and Tuvalu from 1939 until 1963. How come they never found evidence of Earhart and Noonan?
Answer: This is a real red herring, because the colonists did find evidence. They’re documented as having found a partial human skeleton, a woman’s shoe, a man’s shoe, a sextant box, a Benedictine bottle, and some corks on chains. They also found airplane parts, and left them in their village.
4. But that’s not definitive evidence!
Answer: It’s not a great big placard with “I am Amelia Earhart” written on it. It’s not a complete Lockheed Electra. It’s not Earhart’s journal stuffed in a bottle. If we controlled the universe, maybe we’d arrange for such definitive evidence to have been found, but we don’t. We don’t have a “smoking gun,” but in archaeology (or in crime scene investigation, for that matter) we seldom do. Between what was found in 1940 and what we’ve found on expeditions to the island, I think we have a pretty good body of evidence; it may not be definitive, but it’s pretty indicative.
5. But the island’s only four and a half miles long, only a mile and a half wide. You’ve gone there eight times and spent millions of dollars. You should have searched every square inch of the place; if she was there, why haven’t you found definitive evidence?
Answer: First, there may not be any definitive evidence left. Imagine, critic, that you die on an island someplace, and the crabs eat you, your clothes, your wallet, your passport. What’s going to be left to show that you were you? Second, we have found a good deal of evidence, mostly at the Seven Site, in the form of female-related artifacts from the U.S., dating to the 1930s, and in the form of fish and shellfish remains that suggest subsistence by a non-indigenous islander. And we’ve found airplane parts, though none that can be absolutely linked to the Electra. Third, the island’s small, yes, but it’s not Central Park or the National Mall. It’s heavily forested, and much of it is covered by feral coconut and pandanus woodland that builds up a tremendous ground cover of deadfall. Much of it is covered by Scaevola, a shrub whose closely intertwined stalks form a near-impenetrable mass about three meters high; it’s very, very slow going to work through this stuff, and very difficult to see anything that’s in or under it. Fourth, the ground surface over much of the island is made up of coral rubble, most of it about finger-sized. Little stuff like bones and small artifacts sifts down through the surface layer and is effectively invisible. Finding such stuff requires literally crawling on hands and knees and troweling the surface. You don’t just stroll around Nikumaroro finding things.
6. But the Electra is a really big, utterly distinctive artifact. Why haven’t you found it, if it’s there?
Answer: Well, maybe we have, in part, in small pieces the colonists brought in to the village, probably after finding them on the reef. We’ve found a lot of aircraft aluminum; the problem is that aircraft aluminum is pretty much aircraft aluminum. It doesn’t have “I am an Electra” stamped all over it. Besides, if our reconstruction of what happened is correct, the airplane stayed on the reef flat for a few days and then went over the edge. At that point one of two things – or a combination of the two – happened. First, all or part of the plane may have slid down the reef face into deep water; the reef face is very steep down to about 300 meters, and that’s as deep as we’ve been able to survey so far. Second, all or part of the plane may have been ripped to shreds in the high-energy environment of the reef edge, and then scattered along the face of the reef by currents and storms, occasionally being coughed up onto the reef flat for the colonists to find. In short, we almost certainly don’t have a big, distinctive airplane to find on Nikumaroro. We may have one, or part of one, in deep water off the Nutiran reef (though personally, I doubt it), but getting down there to find it is a large, expensive undertaking, and thus far we haven’t been able to afford it. We’re going to do it; the money’s being raised right now, and planning is underway. But I’m not sanguine about it; I don’t think the chances are very good that enough of the plane has survived to be identified, and I’m afraid that if a deepwater search doesn’t reveal the Electra squatting someplace on the bottom, looking like an Electra, that will be taken as “proof” that Earhart didn’t land on Nikumaroro. It will, of course, be nothing of the kind, but as our critics routinely remind us, the fact that an allegation makes no sense is scant impediment to those intent on alleging it.
1. How could Fred Noonan, one of the preeminent celestial navigators of the time, get so far off course as to wind up on Nikumaroro?
Answer: First, he never expected to navigate a bee-line right in to Howland Island. His job was to get them close to the island; then radio direction finding would guide them in. There’s no reason to think he didn’t get them close, but the RDF didn’t work, so they couldn’t find their way in to the island itself. Second, we don’t propose that he and Earhart flew straight from Lae to Nikumaroro, which would have required them to be way off course. We think they got close to Howland, couldn’t find it, and very rationally flew south along the line of position that Noonan had laid out, knowing that if they were north of Howland they should find it, and if they were south of Howland they should come into the Phoenix group – i.e. to Nikumaroro.
2. She didn’t have enough fuel to get to Nikumaroro.
Answer: Nobody can know for sure what conditions Earhart and Noonan faced on their flight, but if they managed their fuel the way they planned to manage it, they should have had enough fuel to do what we think they did – fly to the vicinity of Howland Island and then fly down the line of position to Nikumaroro. The hypotheses that have them crashing at sea invariably include assumptions about fuel evaporation, headwinds, dog-legs on their route of flight, or poor fuel management that are entirely speculative.
3. Nikumaroro was occupied by colonists from Kiribati and Tuvalu from 1939 until 1963. How come they never found evidence of Earhart and Noonan?
Answer: This is a real red herring, because the colonists did find evidence. They’re documented as having found a partial human skeleton, a woman’s shoe, a man’s shoe, a sextant box, a Benedictine bottle, and some corks on chains. They also found airplane parts, and left them in their village.
4. But that’s not definitive evidence!
Answer: It’s not a great big placard with “I am Amelia Earhart” written on it. It’s not a complete Lockheed Electra. It’s not Earhart’s journal stuffed in a bottle. If we controlled the universe, maybe we’d arrange for such definitive evidence to have been found, but we don’t. We don’t have a “smoking gun,” but in archaeology (or in crime scene investigation, for that matter) we seldom do. Between what was found in 1940 and what we’ve found on expeditions to the island, I think we have a pretty good body of evidence; it may not be definitive, but it’s pretty indicative.
5. But the island’s only four and a half miles long, only a mile and a half wide. You’ve gone there eight times and spent millions of dollars. You should have searched every square inch of the place; if she was there, why haven’t you found definitive evidence?
Answer: First, there may not be any definitive evidence left. Imagine, critic, that you die on an island someplace, and the crabs eat you, your clothes, your wallet, your passport. What’s going to be left to show that you were you? Second, we have found a good deal of evidence, mostly at the Seven Site, in the form of female-related artifacts from the U.S., dating to the 1930s, and in the form of fish and shellfish remains that suggest subsistence by a non-indigenous islander. And we’ve found airplane parts, though none that can be absolutely linked to the Electra. Third, the island’s small, yes, but it’s not Central Park or the National Mall. It’s heavily forested, and much of it is covered by feral coconut and pandanus woodland that builds up a tremendous ground cover of deadfall. Much of it is covered by Scaevola, a shrub whose closely intertwined stalks form a near-impenetrable mass about three meters high; it’s very, very slow going to work through this stuff, and very difficult to see anything that’s in or under it. Fourth, the ground surface over much of the island is made up of coral rubble, most of it about finger-sized. Little stuff like bones and small artifacts sifts down through the surface layer and is effectively invisible. Finding such stuff requires literally crawling on hands and knees and troweling the surface. You don’t just stroll around Nikumaroro finding things.
6. But the Electra is a really big, utterly distinctive artifact. Why haven’t you found it, if it’s there?
Answer: Well, maybe we have, in part, in small pieces the colonists brought in to the village, probably after finding them on the reef. We’ve found a lot of aircraft aluminum; the problem is that aircraft aluminum is pretty much aircraft aluminum. It doesn’t have “I am an Electra” stamped all over it. Besides, if our reconstruction of what happened is correct, the airplane stayed on the reef flat for a few days and then went over the edge. At that point one of two things – or a combination of the two – happened. First, all or part of the plane may have slid down the reef face into deep water; the reef face is very steep down to about 300 meters, and that’s as deep as we’ve been able to survey so far. Second, all or part of the plane may have been ripped to shreds in the high-energy environment of the reef edge, and then scattered along the face of the reef by currents and storms, occasionally being coughed up onto the reef flat for the colonists to find. In short, we almost certainly don’t have a big, distinctive airplane to find on Nikumaroro. We may have one, or part of one, in deep water off the Nutiran reef (though personally, I doubt it), but getting down there to find it is a large, expensive undertaking, and thus far we haven’t been able to afford it. We’re going to do it; the money’s being raised right now, and planning is underway. But I’m not sanguine about it; I don’t think the chances are very good that enough of the plane has survived to be identified, and I’m afraid that if a deepwater search doesn’t reveal the Electra squatting someplace on the bottom, looking like an Electra, that will be taken as “proof” that Earhart didn’t land on Nikumaroro. It will, of course, be nothing of the kind, but as our critics routinely remind us, the fact that an allegation makes no sense is scant impediment to those intent on alleging it.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Book Review: A Remote Viewer’s Take on the Fates of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan
Review of Evidential Details: Amelia Earhart, Takeoff to Oblivion, by Seeds/McMoneagle. Lisle, IL, Evidential Details Imprint, 2000?
This book posits – though it presents its hypothesis as fact – that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan ended their 1937 World Flight by crashing at Nikumaroro and dying without getting ashore. It reaches this conclusion through an exercise in “remote viewing” (RV) by Joseph McMoneagle. The book represents Mr. McMoneagle as an expert in RV. It implies but does not quite say that he was awarded the U.S. Army’s Legion of Merit Award (an image of which serve’s as the book’s cover art and which is described on the back of the title page) for his RV services to the U.S. intelligence community.
I became aware of Evidential Details during our 2010 expedition to Nikumaroro; SeaBotix remotely operated vehicle (ROV) expert Jesse Rodocker had a copy, and it was the subject of some discussion. I recently obtained my own copy from its publisher, and have had time to read it with care. It’s a very odd piece of work.
To begin with, there’s a question of authorship – who wrote it? The cover and title page ascribe its authorship to “Seeds/McMoneagle, but a note on page 5 says that “(a)ny interpretations or historical conclusions contained herein cannot be considered to represent the opinion of, or to be endorsed by Joseph McMoneagle or any other named individual.” It goes on to say that (t)he final manuscript was not submitted for approval” (by whom?). Whatever this note is intended to convey, it seems pretty clear that Joseph McMoneagle is not the author. This leaves us with “Seeds,” who is never identified or even given a first (or last?) name.
Another question is its publication date. Its copyright (“copywrite”) date is given as 2000, based on “RV session work” in 1998, but toward the book’s end, a scornful discussion of TIGHAR’s plans for the 2010 expedition suggests that it was published only this year, or perhaps in 2009.
Be all this as it may, the book has a prologue (“prolog”) attributed to H.E. Pruthoff of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin (Texas), describing the beginning, early successes, and history of RV programs carried out by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and other U.S. agencies between 1972 and 1995. This paper makes interesting reading, and provides a potentially useful bibliography for anyone interested in learning more about RV.
What is RV? Wikipedia defines it as “the ability to gather information about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means.” As described in Evidentiary Details’ prologue, it involves giving a skilled viewer the geographic coordinates of a place or thing of interest, whereupon the viewer visualizes, describes, and sometimes sketches the place or object. How the viewer prepares to perform this work is not discussed, but a short description on pages 155-156 of some RV sessions seems to suggest that the viewer enters some sort of light trance state.
Following the prologue is a 40-page discussion of events surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. This seems like something of a digression, but appears to be designed to illustrate the utility of RV in historical research. In this case and in that of Earhart’s disappearance, the viewer is given a target date as well as the geographic coordinates of a target location. We are told that on October 29, 1997, two months after Princess Diana’s demise, McMoneagle was given an envelope containing the latitude and longitude of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, together with the date of the accident that took her life. McMoneagle’s visualizations are then woven together with Seeds(?) account of the accident, providing details said to have been confirmed through subsequent police work and allegedly evidencing that the driver of Princess Diana’s car, Henri Paul, was not – as widely reported – intoxicated.
With this preparation, we are taken to Mr. McMoneagle’s viewing of the world flight’s denouement. Apparently – the details are not provided – Mr. McMoneagle was given the coordinates of the Lae airfield and the date of Earhart’s takeoff for Howland Island. As with the Spencer example, his observations (in bold face) are interwoven with Seeds’(?) account of recorded events with which all Earhart researchers are familiar.
McMoneagle and Seeds(?) collectively posit that Earhart and Noonan were south of their intended course when they hit the line of position extending through Howland Island. They have them doing a good deal of maneuvering – accounting for Earhart’s cryptic reference to “circling” – and then coming up on Nikumaroro, very low on fuel, from the southeast. They attempt to land “between outside reefs” (p. 118), think all is going well, but then strike a coral head. The plane flips, crashes upside-down, and Earhart and Noonan are killed.
As part of his viewing session, McMoneagle apparently produced a sketch-map of the reef on which he visualized the crash to have taken place, with an X marking the spot and his estimates of water depths and ranges to landforms. Seeds(?) discusses his efforts to match this map with Howland and other islands, and his eventual discovery that it is a pretty good match for the lee side of Nikumaroro. Comparing maps and using McMoneagle’s estimates, he places the crash site off Aukaraime South, southeast of Bauareke Passage, 2283 feet from the southwest tip of the island, in 650 feet of water. He proceeds to provide instructions for finding the site and trolling for the plane’s remains.
In the course of his studies, Seeds(?) of course came upon TIGHAR’s research, though he doesn’t seem to have read much about it. His bibliography lists two 1996 issues of Tighar Tracks, and lists neither Amelia Earhart’s Shoes nor Finding Amelia. He assures us that the tide was high when Earhart and Noonan arrived off Nikumaroro, appearing unaware of Bob Brandenburg’s hindcasting indicating that it was not. He flatly says that all the post-loss radio messages were hoaxes, without addressing any of Ric Gillespie’s evidence that some or most were not. He scores TIGHAR for wasting money on our research rather than simply “reading a map” (presumably, McMoneagle’s).
So what about that map, and the scenario McMoneagle portrayed?
First, of course, if the scenario is correct we will have to find non-Earhart explanations for all the radio transmissions, the 1940 bones discovery, the sextant box, the shoes, the accounts of wreckage on the Nutiran reef, the Nessie and other imagery, and all our archaeological findings at the Seven Site. I’m not unwilling to give remote viewing the benefit of a doubt or two, but I’m hardly prepared to throw out a large body of historical, oral historical, archaeological, and radio data on the strength of one person’s reported visualization .
Second and more important, there are some things about the visualization that don’t add up.
A. McMoneagle has the landing attempt take place “between outside reefs” (p. 118). But there are no “outside reefs” at Nikumaroro between which to land. There is only one reef around Nikumaroro, with a broad reef flat extending from the reef’s precipitous outer edge to the shore of the island. The reef flat, lying between the reef edge and the island’s shore, is a very plausible landing place, and if one landed there one might hit a coral head, or more likely a block of coral thrown up by storm action. But a crash landing on the reef flat would not produce wreckage at 650-foot depth, except through some process of secondary deposition that McMoneagle does not mention. Nor would it produce wreckage 13-1400 feet off – that is, outside – the reef.
B. But what if McMoneagle was mistaken only in his “between outer reefs” observation? Could Earhart have attempted a wheels-up landing as he describes on open water 1300 to 1400 feet off the reef edge? Certainly, but she would not have encountered a coral head there. The water that far off the reef is hundreds if not thousands of feet deep .
C. Add to these difficulties the fact that TIGHAR divers searched the reef face down to 100-150 feet through the target area in 1989, and that TIGHAR had side-scan sonar sweeps through the same area to a much greater depth in 1991, all with negative results, and the McMoneagle map looks less and less worthy of serious attention.
On page 135, Seeds(?) quotes Ric Gillespie (who he refers to, rather irritatingly to this TIGHAR member, as TIGHAR’s “owner”), as saying “that psychic stuff is just hocus-pocus.” That’s probably an accurate quote; Ric is utterly dismissive of paranormal powers as displayed by anyone but his remarkable horse Gofer. Others in the organization (This one, at least) are not so ready to reject alternative views of reality. I don’t think Seeds(?) and McMoneagle have put forth much of a case in this odd little book, but they have advanced an hypothesis, generating an X on a map whose meaning can be tested. Time was not available during the 2010 expedition to apply the SeaBotix ROV technology to the McMoneagle hypothesis, but if and when TIGHAR gets back to the island for more deep-water searching, I hope such a test will be included in the research plan. Or someone else may want to take a stab at doing so, as Seeds(?) and McMoneagle (subject to the page 5 caveat) propose on pages 123-124. If anyone does pursue such an enterprise, I trust they will do so only with the permission and cooperation of the Kiribati government and the administration of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, employing all appropriate archaeological and environmental protection protocols. Neither Nikumaroro’s fragile reef nor its fragile archaeology need people grappling around for airplane wreckage as Seeds(?) and McMoneagle propose, and undertaking such an enterprise without the permission of Kiribati authorities would be flatly illegal.
This book posits – though it presents its hypothesis as fact – that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan ended their 1937 World Flight by crashing at Nikumaroro and dying without getting ashore. It reaches this conclusion through an exercise in “remote viewing” (RV) by Joseph McMoneagle. The book represents Mr. McMoneagle as an expert in RV. It implies but does not quite say that he was awarded the U.S. Army’s Legion of Merit Award (an image of which serve’s as the book’s cover art and which is described on the back of the title page) for his RV services to the U.S. intelligence community.
I became aware of Evidential Details during our 2010 expedition to Nikumaroro; SeaBotix remotely operated vehicle (ROV) expert Jesse Rodocker had a copy, and it was the subject of some discussion. I recently obtained my own copy from its publisher, and have had time to read it with care. It’s a very odd piece of work.
To begin with, there’s a question of authorship – who wrote it? The cover and title page ascribe its authorship to “Seeds/McMoneagle, but a note on page 5 says that “(a)ny interpretations or historical conclusions contained herein cannot be considered to represent the opinion of, or to be endorsed by Joseph McMoneagle or any other named individual.” It goes on to say that (t)he final manuscript was not submitted for approval” (by whom?). Whatever this note is intended to convey, it seems pretty clear that Joseph McMoneagle is not the author. This leaves us with “Seeds,” who is never identified or even given a first (or last?) name.
Another question is its publication date. Its copyright (“copywrite”) date is given as 2000, based on “RV session work” in 1998, but toward the book’s end, a scornful discussion of TIGHAR’s plans for the 2010 expedition suggests that it was published only this year, or perhaps in 2009.
Be all this as it may, the book has a prologue (“prolog”) attributed to H.E. Pruthoff of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin (Texas), describing the beginning, early successes, and history of RV programs carried out by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and other U.S. agencies between 1972 and 1995. This paper makes interesting reading, and provides a potentially useful bibliography for anyone interested in learning more about RV.
What is RV? Wikipedia defines it as “the ability to gather information about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means.” As described in Evidentiary Details’ prologue, it involves giving a skilled viewer the geographic coordinates of a place or thing of interest, whereupon the viewer visualizes, describes, and sometimes sketches the place or object. How the viewer prepares to perform this work is not discussed, but a short description on pages 155-156 of some RV sessions seems to suggest that the viewer enters some sort of light trance state.
Following the prologue is a 40-page discussion of events surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. This seems like something of a digression, but appears to be designed to illustrate the utility of RV in historical research. In this case and in that of Earhart’s disappearance, the viewer is given a target date as well as the geographic coordinates of a target location. We are told that on October 29, 1997, two months after Princess Diana’s demise, McMoneagle was given an envelope containing the latitude and longitude of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, together with the date of the accident that took her life. McMoneagle’s visualizations are then woven together with Seeds(?) account of the accident, providing details said to have been confirmed through subsequent police work and allegedly evidencing that the driver of Princess Diana’s car, Henri Paul, was not – as widely reported – intoxicated.
With this preparation, we are taken to Mr. McMoneagle’s viewing of the world flight’s denouement. Apparently – the details are not provided – Mr. McMoneagle was given the coordinates of the Lae airfield and the date of Earhart’s takeoff for Howland Island. As with the Spencer example, his observations (in bold face) are interwoven with Seeds’(?) account of recorded events with which all Earhart researchers are familiar.
McMoneagle and Seeds(?) collectively posit that Earhart and Noonan were south of their intended course when they hit the line of position extending through Howland Island. They have them doing a good deal of maneuvering – accounting for Earhart’s cryptic reference to “circling” – and then coming up on Nikumaroro, very low on fuel, from the southeast. They attempt to land “between outside reefs” (p. 118), think all is going well, but then strike a coral head. The plane flips, crashes upside-down, and Earhart and Noonan are killed.
As part of his viewing session, McMoneagle apparently produced a sketch-map of the reef on which he visualized the crash to have taken place, with an X marking the spot and his estimates of water depths and ranges to landforms. Seeds(?) discusses his efforts to match this map with Howland and other islands, and his eventual discovery that it is a pretty good match for the lee side of Nikumaroro. Comparing maps and using McMoneagle’s estimates, he places the crash site off Aukaraime South, southeast of Bauareke Passage, 2283 feet from the southwest tip of the island, in 650 feet of water. He proceeds to provide instructions for finding the site and trolling for the plane’s remains.
In the course of his studies, Seeds(?) of course came upon TIGHAR’s research, though he doesn’t seem to have read much about it. His bibliography lists two 1996 issues of Tighar Tracks, and lists neither Amelia Earhart’s Shoes nor Finding Amelia. He assures us that the tide was high when Earhart and Noonan arrived off Nikumaroro, appearing unaware of Bob Brandenburg’s hindcasting indicating that it was not. He flatly says that all the post-loss radio messages were hoaxes, without addressing any of Ric Gillespie’s evidence that some or most were not. He scores TIGHAR for wasting money on our research rather than simply “reading a map” (presumably, McMoneagle’s).
So what about that map, and the scenario McMoneagle portrayed?
First, of course, if the scenario is correct we will have to find non-Earhart explanations for all the radio transmissions, the 1940 bones discovery, the sextant box, the shoes, the accounts of wreckage on the Nutiran reef, the Nessie and other imagery, and all our archaeological findings at the Seven Site. I’m not unwilling to give remote viewing the benefit of a doubt or two, but I’m hardly prepared to throw out a large body of historical, oral historical, archaeological, and radio data on the strength of one person’s reported visualization .
Second and more important, there are some things about the visualization that don’t add up.
A. McMoneagle has the landing attempt take place “between outside reefs” (p. 118). But there are no “outside reefs” at Nikumaroro between which to land. There is only one reef around Nikumaroro, with a broad reef flat extending from the reef’s precipitous outer edge to the shore of the island. The reef flat, lying between the reef edge and the island’s shore, is a very plausible landing place, and if one landed there one might hit a coral head, or more likely a block of coral thrown up by storm action. But a crash landing on the reef flat would not produce wreckage at 650-foot depth, except through some process of secondary deposition that McMoneagle does not mention. Nor would it produce wreckage 13-1400 feet off – that is, outside – the reef.
B. But what if McMoneagle was mistaken only in his “between outer reefs” observation? Could Earhart have attempted a wheels-up landing as he describes on open water 1300 to 1400 feet off the reef edge? Certainly, but she would not have encountered a coral head there. The water that far off the reef is hundreds if not thousands of feet deep .
C. Add to these difficulties the fact that TIGHAR divers searched the reef face down to 100-150 feet through the target area in 1989, and that TIGHAR had side-scan sonar sweeps through the same area to a much greater depth in 1991, all with negative results, and the McMoneagle map looks less and less worthy of serious attention.
On page 135, Seeds(?) quotes Ric Gillespie (who he refers to, rather irritatingly to this TIGHAR member, as TIGHAR’s “owner”), as saying “that psychic stuff is just hocus-pocus.” That’s probably an accurate quote; Ric is utterly dismissive of paranormal powers as displayed by anyone but his remarkable horse Gofer. Others in the organization (This one, at least) are not so ready to reject alternative views of reality. I don’t think Seeds(?) and McMoneagle have put forth much of a case in this odd little book, but they have advanced an hypothesis, generating an X on a map whose meaning can be tested. Time was not available during the 2010 expedition to apply the SeaBotix ROV technology to the McMoneagle hypothesis, but if and when TIGHAR gets back to the island for more deep-water searching, I hope such a test will be included in the research plan. Or someone else may want to take a stab at doing so, as Seeds(?) and McMoneagle (subject to the page 5 caveat) propose on pages 123-124. If anyone does pursue such an enterprise, I trust they will do so only with the permission and cooperation of the Kiribati government and the administration of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, employing all appropriate archaeological and environmental protection protocols. Neither Nikumaroro’s fragile reef nor its fragile archaeology need people grappling around for airplane wreckage as Seeds(?) and McMoneagle propose, and undertaking such an enterprise without the permission of Kiribati authorities would be flatly illegal.
Friday, June 18, 2010
We're Baaaack
Some preliminary observations, etc. on the 2010 TIGHAR expedition to Nikumaroro, from which I arrived home at about 3 am yesterday -- was it only yesterday?
1. We all got home safe and sound. No major accidents or incidents. Great weather, good operating conditions.
2. The ROV searched down to about 300 meters in the primary search area, found the reef face to be more precipitous and uncluttered than expected, but depth soundings revealed a substantial sloping ledge beginning just BELOW the ORV's range (naturally) on which a plane could easily get hung up.
3. The AUV, augmented with towed side-scan sonar, did a pretty thorough survey of the lagoon, with negative results.
4. At the Seven Site, we pretty much carried out the agreed-upon strategy, excavating seven two-meter wide lanes along the ridge crest by trowel, plus a transverse lane and several 2x2 and 1x1 units in key areas (See attached KAP image).
Kite Aerial Photograph of Seven Site with excavations and major features marked
5. We found that fire features are much more numerous than previously understood, but the two big ones excavated in 2007 (and re-explored in 2010) appear to be the most likely to be associated with the castaway -- together with one new feature found to the SE.
6. We thoroughly explored the area under the Big Ren (Tournefortia) tree, with generally negative results.
7. We brought home a considerable collection of items that might retain DNA, all collected under sterile conditions. These include fragments of a cosmetic(?) jar, several possible human bone fragments, and much of the rest of the jackknife of which fragments were found in 2007, plus a number of additional pieces of probable rouge. Also a large collection of fish, bird, and turtle bones from fire features and elsewhere.
8. The possible DNA sources are en route to the DNA lab. Most of the remaining material (Lane-segment bags, etc.) are en route to me from Samoa via Fedex. I'll be making arrangements for faunal analysis.
9. Technologically -- KAP imagery worked great, UV scanning was once again a bust, and Ground-Penetrating Radar yielded many very interesting signals that when excavated proved to be nothing at all; very puzzling.
Everyone on the team worked their butts off; all the boats worked most of the time, the two expedition ships stayed afloat, and things went pretty much according to schedule.
General View of Excavations -- Lifesaving canopies courtesy Karl Kern
Be on the lookout for a documentary on the project on a major TV channel in the fall.
Now to get back to the real world.....
Tom
1. We all got home safe and sound. No major accidents or incidents. Great weather, good operating conditions.
2. The ROV searched down to about 300 meters in the primary search area, found the reef face to be more precipitous and uncluttered than expected, but depth soundings revealed a substantial sloping ledge beginning just BELOW the ORV's range (naturally) on which a plane could easily get hung up.
3. The AUV, augmented with towed side-scan sonar, did a pretty thorough survey of the lagoon, with negative results.
4. At the Seven Site, we pretty much carried out the agreed-upon strategy, excavating seven two-meter wide lanes along the ridge crest by trowel, plus a transverse lane and several 2x2 and 1x1 units in key areas (See attached KAP image).
Kite Aerial Photograph of Seven Site with excavations and major features marked
5. We found that fire features are much more numerous than previously understood, but the two big ones excavated in 2007 (and re-explored in 2010) appear to be the most likely to be associated with the castaway -- together with one new feature found to the SE.
6. We thoroughly explored the area under the Big Ren (Tournefortia) tree, with generally negative results.
7. We brought home a considerable collection of items that might retain DNA, all collected under sterile conditions. These include fragments of a cosmetic(?) jar, several possible human bone fragments, and much of the rest of the jackknife of which fragments were found in 2007, plus a number of additional pieces of probable rouge. Also a large collection of fish, bird, and turtle bones from fire features and elsewhere.
8. The possible DNA sources are en route to the DNA lab. Most of the remaining material (Lane-segment bags, etc.) are en route to me from Samoa via Fedex. I'll be making arrangements for faunal analysis.
9. Technologically -- KAP imagery worked great, UV scanning was once again a bust, and Ground-Penetrating Radar yielded many very interesting signals that when excavated proved to be nothing at all; very puzzling.
Everyone on the team worked their butts off; all the boats worked most of the time, the two expedition ships stayed afloat, and things went pretty much according to schedule.
General View of Excavations -- Lifesaving canopies courtesy Karl Kern
Be on the lookout for a documentary on the project on a major TV channel in the fall.
Now to get back to the real world.....
Tom
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