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.
Friday, August 13, 2010
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
Saturday, May 8, 2010
The Plan Comes Together
Just a tad over a week till we blast off for Apia, and thence to Nikumaroro. Things are coming together nicely; all up-front charter fees are paid, gear is shipped, the expedition ship Nai’a is refitted after a disastrous fire, and TIGHAR has executed an agreement with a major broadcaster that should result in a high-quality documentary on the project. Subject to Murphy’s Law, the work plan looks like this:
1. Remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) will search the reef face off the Nutiran land unit down to a depth of about 300 meters; if plane parts don’t turn up there, they’ll move on to the southeast along the reef face.
2. An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) will search in the lagoon (We don’t think the plane is in the lagoon, but others do, and we think substantial parts may have washed in there). Divers will spot-check results.
3. We’ll trowel-strip an area exposure of roughly 15x30 meters at the Seven Site, down to at least 10 cm. (the depth of most cultural material found to date), followed up with a ground-penetrating radar survey of the entire site, and excavation of any anomalies. There’ll also be repeated metal detector sweeps, screening of selected deposits, and where it appears useful, ultraviolet scans. Recovery of anything that might contain detectable DNA will be done under sterile conditions. Documentation will include total station mapping and kite aerial photography.
4. We’ll explore transects to the southeast, northwest, and northeast of what we now define as the Seven Site to see if anything extends out in those directions.
5. We’ll excavate at least one cookhouse feature in the colonial village, for comparative purposes, and search its site for plane parts.
6. We’ll document various interesting features in the lagoon, and
7. We’ll search crab dens in the forest around the Seven Site for any bones or artifacts the crabs’ ancestors may have dragged off and abandoned.
We’ll have about three weeks on the island to do all this. Daily reports will be sent in by satphone to TIGHAR Central in Wilmington, DE, US, and posted on TIGHAR’s website (www.tighar.org). We will not have direct internet access on the island or aboard ship.
That’s the plan, anyhow. But in 22 years on this project, no expedition has ever quite gone according to plan. We shall see. Or as Rudyard Kipling put it:
The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,
And The Deuce knows what we may do—
But we’re back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
We’re down, hull-down, on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new.
(Kipling: “The Long Trail”
1. Remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) will search the reef face off the Nutiran land unit down to a depth of about 300 meters; if plane parts don’t turn up there, they’ll move on to the southeast along the reef face.
2. An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) will search in the lagoon (We don’t think the plane is in the lagoon, but others do, and we think substantial parts may have washed in there). Divers will spot-check results.
3. We’ll trowel-strip an area exposure of roughly 15x30 meters at the Seven Site, down to at least 10 cm. (the depth of most cultural material found to date), followed up with a ground-penetrating radar survey of the entire site, and excavation of any anomalies. There’ll also be repeated metal detector sweeps, screening of selected deposits, and where it appears useful, ultraviolet scans. Recovery of anything that might contain detectable DNA will be done under sterile conditions. Documentation will include total station mapping and kite aerial photography.
4. We’ll explore transects to the southeast, northwest, and northeast of what we now define as the Seven Site to see if anything extends out in those directions.
5. We’ll excavate at least one cookhouse feature in the colonial village, for comparative purposes, and search its site for plane parts.
6. We’ll document various interesting features in the lagoon, and
7. We’ll search crab dens in the forest around the Seven Site for any bones or artifacts the crabs’ ancestors may have dragged off and abandoned.
We’ll have about three weeks on the island to do all this. Daily reports will be sent in by satphone to TIGHAR Central in Wilmington, DE, US, and posted on TIGHAR’s website (www.tighar.org). We will not have direct internet access on the island or aboard ship.
That’s the plan, anyhow. But in 22 years on this project, no expedition has ever quite gone according to plan. We shall see. Or as Rudyard Kipling put it:
The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,
And The Deuce knows what we may do—
But we’re back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
We’re down, hull-down, on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new.
(Kipling: “The Long Trail”
Saturday, May 1, 2010
It's All Done With Mirrors
In case you've ever wondered how long it takes a mirror to lose its silvering (reflective backing), there's now a short paper reporting an experiment on the subject, on TIGHAR's Ameliawiki (or Ameliapedia) at http://tighar.org/wiki/Deterioration_of_a_Mirror%27s_Silvering. The wiki is the vehicle we're using to develop, organize, and present a wide range of data pertinent to the Earhart project, including archaeological site reports, artifact and other analyses, historical data, environmental data, etc. etc. The mirror study was occasioned by finding (in 2001 and 2007 on the Seven Site) pieces of what we're pretty sure was the mirror from a woman's compact from the 1930s.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Frustration; or, The Airplane is not the Only Game in Town
I’ve been corresponding with a fellow who wrote, initially, asking some seemingly reasonable questions about our Earhart search, and offering some seemingly thoughtful suggestions. But as our correspondence has progressed, it’s taken on a sadly familiar form – a sufficiently good (or bad) example of a common type of thinking that I thought it would be worth discussing here.
My correspondent first asked some questions relating to navigational and radio transmission particulars, which I referred to the relevant experts in TIGHAR’s Earhart Project Advisory Council (EPAC). In passing, I mentioned our plans for work at the Seven Site. He responded:
The search off the island reef is what I am interested in, as the plane is not on the island.
I resisted saying “duh,” and replied:
Well, with all due respect for my colleagues who think they're going to find the plane, or big parts of it, on the reef face (and I certainly hope they do), I expect our biggest bang for the buck to come from work on land, both at the putative death site (the Seven Site) and in the village, where there certainly may be parts of the plane, albeit not big ones. We shall see.
But my correspondent simply is not interested in what we find on land. His response was:
If the plane made it to Gardner and is not on the land, it should be in the sea off the reef.
Again resisting the urge to thank ObviousMan for his enlightenment, I said:
The sea off the reef is a big place, the sea generally is a dynamic environment, and the plane was fragile.
He responded:
It weighed 7400 Lbs empty, and two heavy engines are not going to let it travel far. If it washed off the reef, it should have gone straight down I should imagine Tom. I can only imagine this will be TIGHARS last expedition to Gardner Island.
Rather short on imagination, my correspondent, but his “imagining” did, I thought, reveal something of a bias: “They’re not going to find the airplane, so that will disprove their silly hypothesis, and that will be the end of TIGHAR.” But I tried again to explain, answering:
"Straight down" is a relative term, on the face of a seamount. And there's a lot of "down" into which it could have gone -- straight, crooked, intact or in pieces. It's simplistic to think this expedition or any such project is going to yield a black-and-white, yes-or-no answer; the answer is more likely to come from a sifting of the whole body of evidence.
Such sifting is not something to which my correspondent seems to relate well. He immediately shifted focus, saying:
Didn’t Earhart’s 3105 signal only have ½ a watt radiation due to the antenna set up, surely that was too weak for Pan Am to detect from 1800 miles away? Mr Jones on Hull said he could work Australia with his set up and Canton had a Navy wireless station left from the eclipse observation, aren’t these stations more likely to be the targets Pan Am detected? Even if Earhart’s plane had made it to land, the batteries would have run down by the 4th and 5th of July Tom.
At this point I passed my correspondent off to Ric Gillespie, who says he handles at least one such inquiry a day. Ric referred him to Bob Brandenburg’s analysis of radio matters (http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Research/ResearchPapers/Brandenburg/RDFResearch/RDFAnalysis/RDFpaper.htm) – suffice to say that the matter of what could have been detected where is a good deal more complicated than my correspondent seems to think. Ric also advised him that Mr. Jones did not have a functioning transmitter at the time of Earhart’s disappearance (Jones told the USS Colorado pilots that his transmitter had been down for some time – of course, he could have been lying), and that as far as we can tell from the records, nobody left a transmitter (electronic and/or human) on Canton after the eclipse expedition. As for the batteries running down, as Ric succinctly put it:
The batteries would have run down long before that, unless she ran an engine to recharge them, which is exactly what we think she did.
None of this, however, is likely to convince my correspondent, or others like him who are utterly convinced that the Nikumaroro Hypothesis is wrong, ignore evidence that’s contrary to their convictions, and who see no value in anything but absolute smoking-gun proof.
Setting aside my correspondent’s willful ignorance of evidence, I can render the core of our correspondence as the following abstraction:
My correspondent: “So you think X.”
Me: “Well, I think X, but there are lots of variables involved, so – assuming we’re generally correct in our assumptions – it might be X, X1, X2, X3, or maybe Xn.”
My correspondent: “But if it’s X, then you’ll find Y evidence.”
Me: “Well, maybe, but given all the variables, it could be Y1, Y2, Y3 or Yn. Plus you need to consider evidence A, B, M, Q, and Z.”
My correspondent: “I’m not interested in anything but Y. If you don’t find Y, your hypothesis is wrong and that’s that.”
I suppose it might be nice if reality were organized in such a straightforward way, but of course it’s not. Returning from abstraction to reality and focusing on my correspondent’s stated central interest, we have pretty good evidence (anecdotal and photographic, with consistent tidal and topographic data) suggesting that Earhart and Noonan put their plane down on the Nutiran reef flat, off the northwest end of Nikumaroro. But supposing they did, there’s no guarantee that there’s evidence of the plane still to be found in that neighborhood. We think there’s enough likelihood that evidence has survived that we – and our sponsors and cooperating organizations – are willing to invest quite a bit of time and money sending down submersibles to search the reef face, but we aren’t about to say it’s a sure thing those submersibles will find something. And if they don’t, it won’t prove that Earhart and Noonan didn’t land where we think they did. It might mean that:
1. Once the airplane washed off the reef, it floated quite a way before sinking, going down far from the reef edge and therefore way down the side of the volcano that underlies the island, beyond the reach of our submersiables (There’s evidence suggesting that this isn’t what happened, but it’s still possible).
2. Once the airplane washed off the reef, it simply tumbled down the face of the reef to some abyssal point below the depth (about 300 meters) at which our submersibles can operate.
3. The airplane has broken up over the years into such tiny pieces that its debris field is not detectable in the doubtless complex environment of the reef face.
Shifting to the body of evidence that my correspondent scorns, we think the Seven Site, at the southeast end of the island, is most likely where Earhart – or perhaps Noonan, or perhaps both – expired, and we’re going to dig the bejeebers out of the place this year in hopes of finding out whether we’re right. But even assuming we ARE right:
1. There may not be any recoverable human remains left; they may have been completely reduced by the crabs, microorganisms, and other forces of nature.
2. There may be such remains, but they’re not discernible given the search technology we’re able to deploy, and the limitations of our own tiny brains.
3. The same goes for distinctive artifacts, which Earhart and Noonan may or may not have had with them anyway.
It’s my guess that:
(a) We’re basically right about what happened to Earhart and Noonan; but
(b) The chances of our finding absolute smoking-gun proof that we’re right are relatively slim.
Of course, we hope for smoking guns, but we’re not counting on them, and our research isn’t built around finding them. Particularly at the Seven Site, we’re aiming to add to the mass of evidence we already have that points to this being where Earhart or Noonan (probably the former) breathed her last – that is:
The bones, shoes, and sextant box found on the site (or somewhere else on the southeast end that closely matches its description) in 1940;
The evidence of someone unskilled in the relevant subsistence practices trying to process shellfish and fish on the site.
The evidence suggesting someone trying to purify water in a fire on the site;
The apparent remains of a woman’s compact from the 1930s, and
The various other non-military, American-origin artifacts on the site.
What’s frustrating is that none of this impresses my correspondent at all. To him, we must find a specific, obvious piece of definitive evidence (the airplane), and if we don’t find it, this will be proof that we’re wrong. The absence of evidence (or our simple human inability to find or recognize it) is evidence of absence. I wonder how the guy survives if he applies the same sort of rigid thinking to his everyday life.
My correspondent first asked some questions relating to navigational and radio transmission particulars, which I referred to the relevant experts in TIGHAR’s Earhart Project Advisory Council (EPAC). In passing, I mentioned our plans for work at the Seven Site. He responded:
The search off the island reef is what I am interested in, as the plane is not on the island.
I resisted saying “duh,” and replied:
Well, with all due respect for my colleagues who think they're going to find the plane, or big parts of it, on the reef face (and I certainly hope they do), I expect our biggest bang for the buck to come from work on land, both at the putative death site (the Seven Site) and in the village, where there certainly may be parts of the plane, albeit not big ones. We shall see.
But my correspondent simply is not interested in what we find on land. His response was:
If the plane made it to Gardner and is not on the land, it should be in the sea off the reef.
Again resisting the urge to thank ObviousMan for his enlightenment, I said:
The sea off the reef is a big place, the sea generally is a dynamic environment, and the plane was fragile.
He responded:
It weighed 7400 Lbs empty, and two heavy engines are not going to let it travel far. If it washed off the reef, it should have gone straight down I should imagine Tom. I can only imagine this will be TIGHARS last expedition to Gardner Island.
Rather short on imagination, my correspondent, but his “imagining” did, I thought, reveal something of a bias: “They’re not going to find the airplane, so that will disprove their silly hypothesis, and that will be the end of TIGHAR.” But I tried again to explain, answering:
"Straight down" is a relative term, on the face of a seamount. And there's a lot of "down" into which it could have gone -- straight, crooked, intact or in pieces. It's simplistic to think this expedition or any such project is going to yield a black-and-white, yes-or-no answer; the answer is more likely to come from a sifting of the whole body of evidence.
Such sifting is not something to which my correspondent seems to relate well. He immediately shifted focus, saying:
Didn’t Earhart’s 3105 signal only have ½ a watt radiation due to the antenna set up, surely that was too weak for Pan Am to detect from 1800 miles away? Mr Jones on Hull said he could work Australia with his set up and Canton had a Navy wireless station left from the eclipse observation, aren’t these stations more likely to be the targets Pan Am detected? Even if Earhart’s plane had made it to land, the batteries would have run down by the 4th and 5th of July Tom.
At this point I passed my correspondent off to Ric Gillespie, who says he handles at least one such inquiry a day. Ric referred him to Bob Brandenburg’s analysis of radio matters (http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Research/ResearchPapers/Brandenburg/RDFResearch/RDFAnalysis/RDFpaper.htm) – suffice to say that the matter of what could have been detected where is a good deal more complicated than my correspondent seems to think. Ric also advised him that Mr. Jones did not have a functioning transmitter at the time of Earhart’s disappearance (Jones told the USS Colorado pilots that his transmitter had been down for some time – of course, he could have been lying), and that as far as we can tell from the records, nobody left a transmitter (electronic and/or human) on Canton after the eclipse expedition. As for the batteries running down, as Ric succinctly put it:
The batteries would have run down long before that, unless she ran an engine to recharge them, which is exactly what we think she did.
None of this, however, is likely to convince my correspondent, or others like him who are utterly convinced that the Nikumaroro Hypothesis is wrong, ignore evidence that’s contrary to their convictions, and who see no value in anything but absolute smoking-gun proof.
Setting aside my correspondent’s willful ignorance of evidence, I can render the core of our correspondence as the following abstraction:
My correspondent: “So you think X.”
Me: “Well, I think X, but there are lots of variables involved, so – assuming we’re generally correct in our assumptions – it might be X, X1, X2, X3, or maybe Xn.”
My correspondent: “But if it’s X, then you’ll find Y evidence.”
Me: “Well, maybe, but given all the variables, it could be Y1, Y2, Y3 or Yn. Plus you need to consider evidence A, B, M, Q, and Z.”
My correspondent: “I’m not interested in anything but Y. If you don’t find Y, your hypothesis is wrong and that’s that.”
I suppose it might be nice if reality were organized in such a straightforward way, but of course it’s not. Returning from abstraction to reality and focusing on my correspondent’s stated central interest, we have pretty good evidence (anecdotal and photographic, with consistent tidal and topographic data) suggesting that Earhart and Noonan put their plane down on the Nutiran reef flat, off the northwest end of Nikumaroro. But supposing they did, there’s no guarantee that there’s evidence of the plane still to be found in that neighborhood. We think there’s enough likelihood that evidence has survived that we – and our sponsors and cooperating organizations – are willing to invest quite a bit of time and money sending down submersibles to search the reef face, but we aren’t about to say it’s a sure thing those submersibles will find something. And if they don’t, it won’t prove that Earhart and Noonan didn’t land where we think they did. It might mean that:
1. Once the airplane washed off the reef, it floated quite a way before sinking, going down far from the reef edge and therefore way down the side of the volcano that underlies the island, beyond the reach of our submersiables (There’s evidence suggesting that this isn’t what happened, but it’s still possible).
2. Once the airplane washed off the reef, it simply tumbled down the face of the reef to some abyssal point below the depth (about 300 meters) at which our submersibles can operate.
3. The airplane has broken up over the years into such tiny pieces that its debris field is not detectable in the doubtless complex environment of the reef face.
Shifting to the body of evidence that my correspondent scorns, we think the Seven Site, at the southeast end of the island, is most likely where Earhart – or perhaps Noonan, or perhaps both – expired, and we’re going to dig the bejeebers out of the place this year in hopes of finding out whether we’re right. But even assuming we ARE right:
1. There may not be any recoverable human remains left; they may have been completely reduced by the crabs, microorganisms, and other forces of nature.
2. There may be such remains, but they’re not discernible given the search technology we’re able to deploy, and the limitations of our own tiny brains.
3. The same goes for distinctive artifacts, which Earhart and Noonan may or may not have had with them anyway.
It’s my guess that:
(a) We’re basically right about what happened to Earhart and Noonan; but
(b) The chances of our finding absolute smoking-gun proof that we’re right are relatively slim.
Of course, we hope for smoking guns, but we’re not counting on them, and our research isn’t built around finding them. Particularly at the Seven Site, we’re aiming to add to the mass of evidence we already have that points to this being where Earhart or Noonan (probably the former) breathed her last – that is:
The bones, shoes, and sextant box found on the site (or somewhere else on the southeast end that closely matches its description) in 1940;
The evidence of someone unskilled in the relevant subsistence practices trying to process shellfish and fish on the site.
The evidence suggesting someone trying to purify water in a fire on the site;
The apparent remains of a woman’s compact from the 1930s, and
The various other non-military, American-origin artifacts on the site.
What’s frustrating is that none of this impresses my correspondent at all. To him, we must find a specific, obvious piece of definitive evidence (the airplane), and if we don’t find it, this will be proof that we’re wrong. The absence of evidence (or our simple human inability to find or recognize it) is evidence of absence. I wonder how the guy survives if he applies the same sort of rigid thinking to his everyday life.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Countdown
Under three months now till the 2010 TIGHAR expedition to Nikumaroro launches, sailing out of Apia, Samoa. We have two major and one subsidiary objective.
Major: 1. Systematic excavation of the Seven Site, at the SE end of the island, where we think the bones that may have been Earhart's were found in 1940.
Major: 2. Robotic survey of the reef face off Nutiran, where we think Earhart and Noonan landed in 1937, down to a depth of about 300 meters.
Subsidiary: Excavation of one or more cookhouses in the colonial village at Ritiati, to obtain faunal material for comparison with fire features at the Seven Site. Ancillary site mapping, metal detecting, surface collection.
Of course, the way things usually happen, we have to be prepared for major changes in plan, but that's what we INTEND to do. D-Day is May 18, with return on June 15. News of progress will be posted at www.tighar.org as it happens.
Major: 1. Systematic excavation of the Seven Site, at the SE end of the island, where we think the bones that may have been Earhart's were found in 1940.
Major: 2. Robotic survey of the reef face off Nutiran, where we think Earhart and Noonan landed in 1937, down to a depth of about 300 meters.
Subsidiary: Excavation of one or more cookhouses in the colonial village at Ritiati, to obtain faunal material for comparison with fire features at the Seven Site. Ancillary site mapping, metal detecting, surface collection.
Of course, the way things usually happen, we have to be prepared for major changes in plan, but that's what we INTEND to do. D-Day is May 18, with return on June 15. News of progress will be posted at www.tighar.org as it happens.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Sir Ian Thomson
I'm reminded this morning my my on-line calendar that Sir Ian Thomson's 91st birthday would be coming up in early January, had he not passed away last year. Sir Ian, known fondly as "Mungo," was Aide-de-Camp to Sir Harry Luke, High Commissioner of the Western Pacific and Governor of Fiji, in 1940-41, before returning to his regiment where he served with distinction in World War II. I became acquainted with Sir Ian when -- in Fiji in 1999 -- I was told that it was too bad he had recently died, because he could have told me a lot about that critical period in the history of Nikumaroro and its elusive bones. I wrote to Sir Ian's son in New Zealand, expressing regret at his father's passing and asking if he'd left any papers. Awhile later I received an aerogramme from Sir Ian himself, in Edinburgh. "Whilst some in Fiji may equate Scotland with the hereafter," he wrote, "I am not, in fact, deceased." For several years following my rather flustered response to his note, we maintained a correspondence that I found delightful, and Sir Ian pointed me toward a number of useful sources of information -- though he said that he himself had no direct knowledge of what might have happened to the bones from Nikumaroro.
I greatly valued my contact with Sir Ian, as I have with the late Harry Maude and other veterans of the great days of the British Empire in the western Pacific. I mourn their passing, and honor their achievements.
TFK
17 December 2009
I greatly valued my contact with Sir Ian, as I have with the late Harry Maude and other veterans of the great days of the British Empire in the western Pacific. I mourn their passing, and honor their achievements.
TFK
17 December 2009
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