Amelia Earhart ’s disappearance during her attempt to vaporize around the world has captivated historians and conspiracy theorists for more than 80 age . One organisation is now suggest that her fate may have been seal by elephantine crabs .
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery ( TIGHAR ) believes thatAmelia Earhartand sailing master Fred Noonan may have landed their plane on Nikumaroro Island when they could n’t ascertain their target , Howland Island , and that Nikumaroro ’s endemic crustaceans may have played a part in theensuing mystery .
concord toNational Geographic , there are several clue back up TIGHAR ’s theory . The large Rand that hugs Nikumaroro ’s slide makes it conducive to emergency aircraft landing . In 1940 — just three days after Earhart ’s disappearing — British colonists found 13 human osseous tissue beneath a ren tree on the island and shipped them to Fiji , where they were lost . The dependency ’s executive , Gerald Gallagher , sent a telegram back to England positing that it was Earhart ’s skeletal system . Then , in 2001 , researchersuncoveredU.S.-made artifacts around the ren tree including a jackknife , a charwoman ’s covenant , a zipper , and glass jarful . The plot of land thicken even further in 2017 , when four forensic os - whiff frankfurter all indicate that a human had indeed give way at the site , though excavators fail to dig up any more evidence .
If those 13 bones beneath the ren tree did belong to the inauspicious pariah , where are the relief of her remains ? Tom King , TIGHAR ’s former main archeologist , thinks thatcoconut crabscan do that question .
Nikumaroro is home to thousands of the colossal creatures , which can grow to a terrifying 3 foot across and weigh 9 Cypriot pound . They ’re sometimes called robber crabs because of their penchant for absconding with object that smell out like food , and they ’ll eat much anything — coconut palm , yield , birds , rodents , other crabs , their own cast aside soundbox parts , and carrion .
It ’s not unreasonable , then , to think that coconut tree crabmeat may have feasted on Earhart ’s corpse and then taken her bones home with them . In one experimentation to try the theory , TIGHAR researchers deposited a pig carcass on the island and shoot the aftermath . With the service of small strawberry hermit crabs , coconut crabs stripped the pig bed down to the bone in two weeks . After a year , some of the os had been haul 60 feet from the carcase ’s original locating , and some were never recuperate at all .
King believes Earhart ’s missing 193 bones could be hide in the burrows of various coconut crab louse . As in the pig experimentation , crabs may have scattered some of Earhart ’s ivory oodles of feet away , but possibly not all of them — after all , the forensic dogs smell pearl near the ren Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree that have n’t yet been located . Right now , TIGHAR is function with the Canine Forensics Foundation to further research the area .
While we wait for more answer , dive into theseother theoriesabout Earhart ’s disappearing .
[ h / tNational Geographic ]
