M Hey everybody, it's me Josh, and for this week's s Y s K Selects, I chose our episode Why Can't We Find Amelia Earhart, which first aired in December of two thousand. Recently, a photo has been making the rounds that purports to show Amelia and her navigator, Poor Fred Noonan after they disappeared, which supposedly gives credence to the theory that the Japanese captured them. So I thought it was a good reason and a good time to revisit our episode on it. I hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Chuck Tryan. Jerry's in the other room with a golf putter that she's going to come in here and swing in us any second now, which makes this stuff you should not. I think we're on our last nerve today. Yes, well it's Friday. It's the last Friday in October. It's like three o'clock and we're going to get out of here after this. Yeah, Plus we were we've been gone a week and then we just get carried in here by our minions on our thrones, and we were plopped down and we just told Jerry to like make it so And yeah, wh wasn't that standing ovation from everyone we work with? Um? Just amazing. Yeah. Yeah, I'm kind of used to him by now, Chuck. Yes, do you ever get any Time Life books? No, I've never gotten them, but I used to love those when I was a kid. The commercials. Yeah, there's some cool ones, the Old West ones especially. I like the ones that we're just kind of like out there, like what the heck is going on? Like I first heard of Trepi Nation thanks to the Time Life Ancient brain Surgery from What the heck is going On series? Yes, exactly, very underrated. There's one, um, the Wild West once huh. Oh yeah, the once killed a man just for snore and too loud. Huh. That had a big impact on me. Yeah, I don't snore my dad like my dad like the World War two ones. Yeah, but he liked any think it's Old War two for a while and now he's kind of out of it really. Yeah, he's like kind of, um, well, there was a there is a book. It's still in print as far as I can tell it's called, uh, it's life, not Time Life, because I think Time went on with Warner in A O L. Which, by the way, someone at Time Life their time Warner said that their acquisition of A O L was one of the worst mistakes in the history of business recently. That's not nice. But there is a life book called, uh, the Greatest Mysteries of All Time, and it's like a top fifty, and it's things like, um, was Anastasia a live princess? Anastasia? Did she escaped the Bolshevik Revolution? Who? That's not really a mystery? How do they figure that one out? Yeah? Oh no, I'm in Atlantis? Okay? Yeah. I was like, you know, they they've got that one licked. We can go there, actually, if you'll pay for the plane tickets. Um, there's Jack, the ripper of our phase. Uh. And among them, as she should be in all lists of the greatest sunse Solved mysteries, is Amelia Earhart right. Um. In two thousand seven, we saw the seventieth anniversary of her disappearance. She just kind of flew into history. Uh. And I wrote an article about it last summer. UM, and I was really shocked to find that there is a lot of pieces in place that if one thing would change, we'd know for sure what happened to her. But still this mystery endures, um, and it drives people crazy and makes them want to go like. People spend tons of money and time and effort, sure uh to try to figure out what happened to her, And some people have come up with some theories that are interesting. Um. One was that she was actually captured by the Japanese. This is right before World Wars prison they were kind of adversarial. Of what they leave out is that the Japanese actually helped with her search, So that's not true what But that is a theory that's still going on, that she was captured by the Japanese, either executed or forced into servitude to become Tokyo Rose, who was a group of English speaking women who basically said, g I, your girlfriend back home is having sex with um Captain America and Superman. Yeah. Um, it's true. They said things along those lines. It's just that's good. Um. Another one is that there was an alien abduction. That's what I'm signing with. Have you heard of Irene Craig mile Bolum. Yeah, that was the Apparently, there was one theory that Amelia Earhart just assumed the life of a New Jersey housewife by that name, a successful banker who retired to become a New Jersey housewife. She's a very worldly woman. She had her pilot's license in the thirties. There was a lot of stuff that. Um. She actually had a mutual end with Amelia Earhart. Um. They kind of ran in the same circles. Um. And not much as known of her life before World War Two. She kind of appears out of nowhere. Supposedly, so alleged this guy who was about to release a biography in nineteen seventies saying this lady is Amelia Earhart, and the woman sued won one point five million dollars in the book was never published, I believe. Interesting. Yeah, but the guy was relentless after she died. Um, he asked to be able to photograph and fingerprint her body, and the family was like no, but he's taking it, Like exactly, why would you not let me do that? You know, because excuming your body isn't I think it was before she was buried. He was trying to get her. Still. I have a theory, Josh I'd like to have a theory that if you asked one thousand people who Fred Noonon was, that nine of them would have no idea who you we're talking. Yeah, I had no idea who he was until I researched this. Fred Noonan was in the plane in the Lockheed Electra as the navigator that went down um on July supposedly when you might not have seen him. There's a picture of him in their heart and he is the quintessential old timey navigator. His button down shirts buttoned all the way up to apple. He's got like some um papers in this front shirt pocket. His his his pants are pulled up to just below his um his nipples, uh, and he just looks like he's like all business. That's who I would hired a definitely. And he was a good guy apparently, um there was before before they went off on their um equatorial trip around the world. Yeah, explained to people. Because some people might not even know the back story, we assume everyone knows. But what they were trying to do was circumnavigate the globe along the equator, along the as long as you could possibly take to get around the right. Obviously not on when shot. They did this in installments, but they were definitely not doing it in installments of four to pop no. And by this time, we should also say, this is nineteen thirty seven when they undertook this um trip. But by this time a Melia he was already like this worldwide, internationally famous figure. She was a well known pacifist, which is pretty cool. Um. She was a women's right to advocate, like women can do anything that guys can do kind of thing. Um. She was a study in contrast though apparently like um, she had one of her friends had given her at fifty chance of surviving this trip, and she actually agreed with it. Um. And she had said that she wasn't worried for herself because she maintained this um uh this uh what she called a feminine um conceit that she was afraid of aging. So she wasn't really worried about dying. But she was worried about Fred because he was like this nice guy with the family. And she was right to worry because on July second, ninety seven, they disappeared off the face of the earth. So what you're saying is she guts of steel steel. She had already been awarded the Flying Cross UM by Congress. She received the National Geographic Award from President of Herbert Hoover UM. She was the first woman to cross the Atlantic, uh ten years before she'd broken in altitude record. UM. She was the first woman to fly around the world. So all of this in in about a ten or twelve year career. She's done all this stuff. So when she disappeared, the whole world knew. Oh yeah, it was big, big news and uh she Well, we'll talk about where she disappeared, UM broadly because they still don't know for sure, which is one of the problems. She departed in her Lockkeeed Electra, which is to me one of the coolest looking planes ever built, shiny silver, just really cool looking. Plain. And she departed lie Papua New Guinea, Yes, Papua New Guinea, to probably escape a key outbreak. Oh really, I don't know. That's the only place that that is found. Well, they departed lie to UM for one of the longest stretches of this of this flight, and they were um setting out for Howland Island, which was about miles away from when they were going. Right, So consider this chuck. They had already flown most of the way around the world, they had seven thousand miles short, yeah, and then this was the longest stretch and it was also um it was going to eat up a lot of that last seven thousand miles from Papua New Guinea to Howland Island. And Howland Island itself was pretty small, yeah, a mile and a half by a half mile, yes, tiny little and it only rose twenty ft out of the Pacific Ocean. Um. And basically these are tolls out there in the Pacific, just basically columns coming out of the ocean floor and that's it. So there's like no shelf on either side. I'm trying to land on a postage stamp, I would think, right. And it was very apparent to everybody in eating noon In and Earhart and the US Coast Guard and government that this is a very dangerous This is probably the most dangerous leg of the journey. Um. So they had a coast Guard cutter, the Itasca, who was tasked with tracking them. It was it Tascad. Yeah, and they also had two additional ships um for markers to help her along. So she wasn't just completely out there alone. They were they were trying to keep up with her because every you know, clearly everyone had added a stake in her being successful. And I say her and Fred, Poor Fred, he just he never gets any accolades. You know, no one even knows who he is. No one knows who he is. So Fred was trying to use um celestial navigation, but it was really overcast, so we couldn't do that. Uh. They fell out of radio contact and at dawned the it Taska picked up a transmission where she said that noon in kind of figured that they were should be just over where they were the boat, which was right off of the shore of how all In Island, right, but apparently they didn't see her and uh them the lock keyed Electra and they they didn't hear. There was no trace of it. They hadn't pretty sure that they were way off, and about an hour after that they knew the fuel was running low. And about an hour after that they got the final transmission from her, which basically um just said, we are running north to south. Those were her last words that anyone ever heard. Very sad so about that time, UM the news got back that they never showed up to Holland Island. UM and President Roosevelt, who was a friend of hers. He also was a great admirer of hers as well. Um ordered a massive search by the Navy, and remember we said the Japanese helped as well. So it was a multinational search and rescue UM mission that covered a quarter of a million square miles. Yeah, that is a huge, huge area. Yeah, Texas is um a little less than two hundred and seventy thousand, so it's it's just slightly less than the state of Texas. Right, And it was open water that they're searching, right, Um, they and and and you know the old joke is look at all that water, and the reply is yeah, and that's just the top of it. Right, that's one of the problems. Yeah, exactly, you're scanning area the size of Texas and what possibly lies beneath all that, right, And um, but you're hoping that if, if, if the thing broke up, you would find some wreckage, some sign of license. They found nothing, no, nothing that they could link to air Heart or noon and like they just disappeared. Um. And actually FDR took a lot of flak, we should say, because he spent four million bucks in the middle of the Great Depression just to search for this one person or well these two people see poor Fred noon in Um, but he always stood by that as far as I know. Um. Again, though, is a fruitless search. And they turned up thing right. I think they'd be a great band name. I know I say that, but poor Fred Noonan that's a good one. I have to remember that in case l cheap over breaks up. Uh. After the navy search, they basically discontinued their search and said, you know what, we can't find her and Fred and um, we're going to send a destroyer out to Gardner Island. It was called Gardener Island back then and now it's uh nick umar roo nick kumar ro nikumaroo. And uh they did this because radio transmissions on her frequency we're being broadcast in that area there were, which is pretty substantial. Yes, this is an uninhabited area. And um, this is still an unexplained aspect of this mystery. There were sporadic bursts of radio transmissions um, and no one still can say why they were. They were from some guy named Fred noon and so they didn't pay exactly. They're like, who's that he's seen? Ali, I guess he's a swimmer. Um. So They basically sent a couple of dispatch planes um to that island, found nothing and said, all right, we're calling off this area. That she's not out here, there's no evidence of life. Right, and that would have been that that was seven right, and the planes went back to the destroyer their aircraft carrier and left. Uh and that that that wouldn't that probably would have been the end of the association between Gardener Island or or Nika and Nick umar ro Ro and Amelia Earhart had it not been colonized by the British and ight hadn't not been for their pin shot for colonization. Yes, period. If British imperialism didn't exist, this probably these these artifacts Nember would have turned up. But there um there how they like to colonize things. They colonize this remote outpost actually gathered up some other islanders nearby and said, hey, you're gonna live here now. Um. And when these islanders went on the island, they found evidence that a castaway had been there recently. They found some pretty jarring stuff, right Chuck, Yeah, And I mean most certainly a castaway, because they found a woman shoe, a man shoe, liquor bottle, well, yeah, and a container for a sextant, which is one of those you know, those are the cool looking navigational device that you hold up and it looks like something at a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or something, which Fred Nowtan had on the plane with them, of course he did, you know Fred. Uh. And then they also found um, certainly not the least of which would be human skull and bones. Yeah. Here's here's where this thing would be just done, probably in my opinion, or where they just say this is them. Yeah, yeah, um, they found one set of human remains. Um. The the islanders took this to the governor of the island. His name was, uh, Gerald, I can't remember, Gerald Gallagher, Thanks buddy. They took it to Gerald gallaghery Gallagher says, I suspect I know who this is. Let's get a physician looking at this. The physician examines it, and the bones are promptly lost forever. No one has any idea what happened to him. Luckily, this physician took pretty methodical notes and wrote descriptions and drew drawings with the bones, and so in the nineties some forensic anthropologists got their hands on these notes and they said pretty much unequivocally that these bones were the bones of a woman of Northern European ancestry who was about five ft seven and Amelia her heart was five eight. Well, you would think they're off by an inch. It wasn't her exactly, But in this day and age, you have to have DNA evidence to controvertibly. Right. Sure, so the bones go missing, we can't get a DNA match. But consider that on an uninhabited island, right where they think that Amelia Earhart might have gone down, the remains of a woman of Northern European ancestry who was pretty much the same high his Amelia heart were found a few years after disappearance. I say score, I say scores, game, set match. But they also found some other cool stuff. Um, and the area of the island was called seven Site, and that was the little encampment that they believe, you know, was used by them. And they found some other cool stuff like clamshell fragments that basically they were smashed open by somebody right and exposed to fire, which you know, unless they were struck by lightning, that's pretty much definitive evidence of human use. Well, yeah, and they also found bones of fish and birds and turtles that had been exposed to fire. So in other words, somebody was cooking up something to eat. Uh. What else did they found? They found, Um, they found pieces of bottle that show signs of use is cutting and sawing tools. Yeah. UM. They also found a little piece of a knife, UM, which they managed. I don't know how they did this, because you sent me this link. There's a picture of just the knife blade. And they went back and managed to identify it as a type of jack knife that was produced within this time period by this company Rhode Island, so it was it was produced from ninety ninety two or something like that. And then they went back this year. This group called the UM we should say their name the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery or TIGAR. Yeah, they've been I think three or four different times over the years to this island. They went this summer as I was writing this, they were preparing the expedition and they found the rest of the knife. UM. And this is where they hoped to get DNA evidence from. Well yeah, and not the reason that the knife discovery is important or the rest of the knife. They originally found the blades only, and then they found the knife this summer, and it showed that the knife blades had been forcibly removed from the knife, indicating that maybe that they took out each blade too. Maybe and of course you're speculating, but maybe to attach it to an end of a spear or something like that for fish fishing. Anyone was seeing castaway knows what that's all about. I saw that the other day again by the way um there. They also found Gardner Island, by the way, became uninhabited in nineteen sixty three. There was a prolonged drought and the British government, we're just like, just forgive it, everybody, just leave Um and the group Tighar when they went to excavate around there, they found in this abandoned village folk art made of aluminum aircraft metal right, which they can't definitively prove came from her plane. Obviously, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence of female castaway handicrafts or maybe Tom he was the big crafty guy, but there Um, I don't think Tom made it. I think Amelia Earhart made it. I think Tom was maybe kill an impact or drowned and Amelia made it to the island and died there alone, quite possibly, and she may have even eaten him. Now that's a that's that's a new theory. I think you'd launched. I don't know that goes in with your disappearance of the Neanderthals. That's right, they melted, Um, you you were. The reason we're talking about these objects that they've recently recovered, though, is because they're trying to get some DNA called touch DNA off of a few of these items. They submitted ten I believe out of a hundred. It's one of the reasons why finding that knife was very important. Is huge because I believe they submitted the blades, and then they found some glass from what looked like a cosmetics star and a couple of buttons, and they submitted these things to a place in Canada. And I think as of today, I still don't think they have the results of that DNA testing done. That I see that they had it done yet so guarded, but they wouldn't be such enormous news that we would have known. That's what I think, um Chuck. There's a lot of people out there who also think that her plane sur survived intact and is at the bottom of the Pacific. That's awesome, And people still I think tig are included um undertake sonar searches of the ocean bottom. Uh. And there's a good chance that the plane did make it. Um. They were flying supposedly at about a thousand feet, which is extremely low, and they were doing about a hundred miles an hour, which is pretty slow for a plane, especially a Lockheed Electra, so conceivably didn't necessarily bust into a million pieces. Yeah, so it's possible it's still out there at the bottom of the ocean. Well, I I am totally sold. And I know I said like every single Jack the Ripper killer we brought up. Yeah, he sounds like the guy. But I'm completely convinced that this is where she spent her last days like you, and that she ate Fred noon In. I don't know that Fred or Fred. Uh. We should also mention too that UM they use a new well new to them at least ground penetrating radar g PR for the first time on this last trip to summer, and that is when you can actually look beneath the surface for anything that was buried. Like Fred, it's magic and um. They they didn't find anything though, because not because there was anything there necessarily, but there were lots of roots and air pockets underneath the thing. And I get the feeling that this looks since you're looking for something buried, looked for pockets of air, and so that it was completely in conclusive. They threw in the ocean. She may have also pulverized his bones to cover up her abomination. Yeah, I wonder it's I think this is what happened. I wonder how long they survived though. I wonder if it was weeks or months or what. Well consider it. I mean, if her plane went down in ninety seven and they started colonizing at ninety eight, she lasted less than a year. But can you imagine if she like just gave up and then like a week later the British come to colonized Gardener Island. Yeah, I mean, how horrible would that be? So she she made it less than a year, if she made it to Gardner Islander, Nicol mro ro what I'm surprised about, And maybe she tried to do this and Fred tried to do this. I'm surprised she didn't leave something behind, like instead of doing a handicraft. Maybe try and scratch the name Amelia into the aluminum and bury that or something, or maybe it's something is there and they just haven't found it yet. Yeah, there's a tree that says crow with towing on it because she was a history buff, Amelia was here. Well that's uh, that's it as it stands so far. Huh. You think we'll ever do an update if they find her. We always say we will, and we never do, and we never do. So the answer to that question is no. If you want to learn more about Amelia Earhart and see a picture of how cute Fred Noonan is and it's little old timey aviator get up, you should type air heart into the search bar at how stuff works dot com. It's e A R H A r T and that should bring it up. I would think unless we have articles on other air hearts, think so. I guess it's time then for a listener man. All right, Yeah, I got one here. I asked for rehab experiences quite a while ago, and I've got one that I meant to read earlier, and here it is, and I'm gonna jump around here. It's kind of along. Uh. This is from Scott and in two thousand five, he had pretty much worked himself into a rehab hospital. He was working three different jobs, hit a wall, couldn't decide to walk this way or that way, or even pick up a pencil, so he went to the er. After a fifteen minute interview with a psychiatrist who he said was quite attractive. I'm not sure why he told me that, he said. She left and a guard came to stand outside the room and she said, you know you're not just gonna take a break. She said, you need to be checked in. And this is how I learned of the seventy two hour hold, where a doctor decides you're at risk. So that's what happened to him initially. Next I wound up in an ambulance for a trip to a cyclocked downward called Station two. It sounds like the beginning of a very bad movie, like a horror film exactly. They dropped me off behind two heavily locked doors, and the next thing you knew, I was relieved of my laces and belt. Now I should say I was not suicidal. I was just really out of ideas. I don't I don't know what that means, out of ideas like he was. He had he was indecisive, he couldn't know. I think he means he was just burned out, was having a nervous breakdown, out of options, out of ideas. Yeah, it sounds like it. I spent eight days in Station twenty two and saw some interesting things, and here are a few. A meth addict was admitted. She looked like she should weigh about a hundred and ten to a hundred twenty pounds, but she weighed more like eighty. She took one drink of orange juice promptly dropped to the floor like a sack of bones. And this is what I learned. What a code red was the crash cart, the e er in the whole parade. After leaving Station twenty two, I transferred to a place in the suburbs for a twenty eight day program. It was pretty cool. I met a very well known author and many other fascinating people. I saw the girl sneaking out of the guy's room. The whole thing had to bear the A A rhymes and sayings, and I totally understand Sandra Bullock. In twenty eight days, now the big news was the guy who wrote a million little pieces I was coming the next week because he had stayed there before when he was writing the book, and the Oprah people came on site to work out camera locations in blocking and uh, two days before they were to descend the I made it up scandal occurred, so I never showed clearly. Um, and here just a few other little tips. People in rehab are insane about sweets. I think there's a definite link between sugar and addiction. Everyone seemed to want to hook up with something sweet. Um. I have seen that heroin sickness looks worse than dying in a fire. Wow, that's pretty bad. That's pretty bad. And a surprising number of people were repeats I'm talking like, yeah, this is my seventh time here. And I also saw a lot of people who snuck off for a drink and got kicked out. So Scott is doing much better now. He is back on track, living a great Lifett and he says, I love what you guys do and how you do it. I now give Takiva and co Ed and pretty much pace the halls into your next episode. Awesome, Thank you very much, Scott. I'm very glad you're feeling better. Right, took as long as you're not pacing the halls of Station twenty two. Buddy. Um, keep in touch with this on Facebook and Twitter? Yeah, yeah, you know quickly? Can I say that? If you have written listener mail, we don't answer all those anymore because there's just too many. Facebook is a great place to submit questions and get answers quicker or at all. That's uh Facebook, Yeah. Dot com slash stuff you should know, but we still read the listener mails. Twitter is uh s y s K podcast. We also have that Kiva team k I v A dot org slash team slash stuff you should know. Coed's website is c O E d U C dot org. Um, and you can always email us. Like Chuck said, we don't always respond. I do sometimes, do you still? Yeah? Okay, um, send us an email to let us know what you do and what you think you would do, or what you should do when you run out of ideas, wrap it up, send it to us at stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.

M Hey everybody, it's me Josh, and for this week's s Y s K Selects, I chose our episode Why Can't We Find Amelia Earhart, which first aired in December of two thousand. Recently, a photo has been making the rounds that purports to show Amelia and her navigator, Poor Fred Noonan after they disappeared, which supposedly gives credence to the theory that the Japanese captured them. So I thought it was a good reason and a good time to revisit our episode on it. I hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Chuck Tryan. Jerry's in the other room with a golf putter that she's going to come in here and swing in us any second now, which makes this stuff you should not. I think we're on our last nerve today. Yes, well it's Friday. It's the last Friday in October. It's like three o'clock and we're going to get out of here after this. Yeah, Plus we were we've been gone a week and then we just get carried in here by our minions on our thrones, and we were plopped down and we just told Jerry to like make it so And yeah, wh wasn't that standing ovation from everyone we work with? Um? Just amazing. Yeah. Yeah, I'm kind of used to him by now, Chuck. Yes, do you ever get any Time Life books? No, I've never gotten them, but I used to love those when I was a kid. The commercials. Yeah, there's some cool ones, the Old West ones especially. I like the ones that we're just kind of like out there, like what the heck is going on? Like I first heard of Trepi Nation thanks to the Time Life Ancient brain Surgery from What the heck is going On series? Yes, exactly, very underrated. There's one, um, the Wild West once huh. Oh yeah, the once killed a man just for snore and too loud. Huh. That had a big impact on me. Yeah, I don't snore my dad like my dad like the World War two ones. Yeah, but he liked any think it's Old War two for a while and now he's kind of out of it really. Yeah, he's like kind of, um, well, there was a there is a book. It's still in print as far as I can tell it's called, uh, it's life, not Time Life, because I think Time went on with Warner in A O L. Which, by the way, someone at Time Life their time Warner said that their acquisition of A O L was one of the worst mistakes in the history of business recently. That's not nice. But there is a life book called, uh, the Greatest Mysteries of All Time, and it's like a top fifty, and it's things like, um, was Anastasia a live princess? Anastasia? Did she escaped the Bolshevik Revolution? Who? That's not really a mystery? How do they figure that one out? Yeah? Oh no, I'm in Atlantis? Okay? Yeah. I was like, you know, they they've got that one licked. We can go there, actually, if you'll pay for the plane tickets. Um, there's Jack, the ripper of our phase. Uh. And among them, as she should be in all lists of the greatest sunse Solved mysteries, is Amelia Earhart right. Um. In two thousand seven, we saw the seventieth anniversary of her disappearance. She just kind of flew into history. Uh. And I wrote an article about it last summer. UM, and I was really shocked to find that there is a lot of pieces in place that if one thing would change, we'd know for sure what happened to her. But still this mystery endures, um, and it drives people crazy and makes them want to go like. People spend tons of money and time and effort, sure uh to try to figure out what happened to her, And some people have come up with some theories that are interesting. Um. One was that she was actually captured by the Japanese. This is right before World Wars prison they were kind of adversarial. Of what they leave out is that the Japanese actually helped with her search, So that's not true what But that is a theory that's still going on, that she was captured by the Japanese, either executed or forced into servitude to become Tokyo Rose, who was a group of English speaking women who basically said, g I, your girlfriend back home is having sex with um Captain America and Superman. Yeah. Um, it's true. They said things along those lines. It's just that's good. Um. Another one is that there was an alien abduction. That's what I'm signing with. Have you heard of Irene Craig mile Bolum. Yeah, that was the Apparently, there was one theory that Amelia Earhart just assumed the life of a New Jersey housewife by that name, a successful banker who retired to become a New Jersey housewife. She's a very worldly woman. She had her pilot's license in the thirties. There was a lot of stuff that. Um. She actually had a mutual end with Amelia Earhart. Um. They kind of ran in the same circles. Um. And not much as known of her life before World War Two. She kind of appears out of nowhere. Supposedly, so alleged this guy who was about to release a biography in nineteen seventies saying this lady is Amelia Earhart, and the woman sued won one point five million dollars in the book was never published, I believe. Interesting. Yeah, but the guy was relentless after she died. Um, he asked to be able to photograph and fingerprint her body, and the family was like no, but he's taking it, Like exactly, why would you not let me do that? You know, because excuming your body isn't I think it was before she was buried. He was trying to get her. Still. I have a theory, Josh I'd like to have a theory that if you asked one thousand people who Fred Noonon was, that nine of them would have no idea who you we're talking. Yeah, I had no idea who he was until I researched this. Fred Noonan was in the plane in the Lockheed Electra as the navigator that went down um on July supposedly when you might not have seen him. There's a picture of him in their heart and he is the quintessential old timey navigator. His button down shirts buttoned all the way up to apple. He's got like some um papers in this front shirt pocket. His his his pants are pulled up to just below his um his nipples, uh, and he just looks like he's like all business. That's who I would hired a definitely. And he was a good guy apparently, um there was before before they went off on their um equatorial trip around the world. Yeah, explained to people. Because some people might not even know the back story, we assume everyone knows. But what they were trying to do was circumnavigate the globe along the equator, along the as long as you could possibly take to get around the right. Obviously not on when shot. They did this in installments, but they were definitely not doing it in installments of four to pop no. And by this time, we should also say, this is nineteen thirty seven when they undertook this um trip. But by this time a Melia he was already like this worldwide, internationally famous figure. She was a well known pacifist, which is pretty cool. Um. She was a women's right to advocate, like women can do anything that guys can do kind of thing. Um. She was a study in contrast though apparently like um, she had one of her friends had given her at fifty chance of surviving this trip, and she actually agreed with it. Um. And she had said that she wasn't worried for herself because she maintained this um uh this uh what she called a feminine um conceit that she was afraid of aging. So she wasn't really worried about dying. But she was worried about Fred because he was like this nice guy with the family. And she was right to worry because on July second, ninety seven, they disappeared off the face of the earth. So what you're saying is she guts of steel steel. She had already been awarded the Flying Cross UM by Congress. She received the National Geographic Award from President of Herbert Hoover UM. She was the first woman to cross the Atlantic, uh ten years before she'd broken in altitude record. UM. She was the first woman to fly around the world. So all of this in in about a ten or twelve year career. She's done all this stuff. So when she disappeared, the whole world knew. Oh yeah, it was big, big news and uh she Well, we'll talk about where she disappeared, UM broadly because they still don't know for sure, which is one of the problems. She departed in her Lockkeeed Electra, which is to me one of the coolest looking planes ever built, shiny silver, just really cool looking. Plain. And she departed lie Papua New Guinea, Yes, Papua New Guinea, to probably escape a key outbreak. Oh really, I don't know. That's the only place that that is found. Well, they departed lie to UM for one of the longest stretches of this of this flight, and they were um setting out for Howland Island, which was about miles away from when they were going. Right, So consider this chuck. They had already flown most of the way around the world, they had seven thousand miles short, yeah, and then this was the longest stretch and it was also um it was going to eat up a lot of that last seven thousand miles from Papua New Guinea to Howland Island. And Howland Island itself was pretty small, yeah, a mile and a half by a half mile, yes, tiny little and it only rose twenty ft out of the Pacific Ocean. Um. And basically these are tolls out there in the Pacific, just basically columns coming out of the ocean floor and that's it. So there's like no shelf on either side. I'm trying to land on a postage stamp, I would think, right. And it was very apparent to everybody in eating noon In and Earhart and the US Coast Guard and government that this is a very dangerous This is probably the most dangerous leg of the journey. Um. So they had a coast Guard cutter, the Itasca, who was tasked with tracking them. It was it Tascad. Yeah, and they also had two additional ships um for markers to help her along. So she wasn't just completely out there alone. They were they were trying to keep up with her because every you know, clearly everyone had added a stake in her being successful. And I say her and Fred, Poor Fred, he just he never gets any accolades. You know, no one even knows who he is. No one knows who he is. So Fred was trying to use um celestial navigation, but it was really overcast, so we couldn't do that. Uh. They fell out of radio contact and at dawned the it Taska picked up a transmission where she said that noon in kind of figured that they were should be just over where they were the boat, which was right off of the shore of how all In Island, right, but apparently they didn't see her and uh them the lock keyed Electra and they they didn't hear. There was no trace of it. They hadn't pretty sure that they were way off, and about an hour after that they knew the fuel was running low. And about an hour after that they got the final transmission from her, which basically um just said, we are running north to south. Those were her last words that anyone ever heard. Very sad so about that time, UM the news got back that they never showed up to Holland Island. UM and President Roosevelt, who was a friend of hers. He also was a great admirer of hers as well. Um ordered a massive search by the Navy, and remember we said the Japanese helped as well. So it was a multinational search and rescue UM mission that covered a quarter of a million square miles. Yeah, that is a huge, huge area. Yeah, Texas is um a little less than two hundred and seventy thousand, so it's it's just slightly less than the state of Texas. Right, And it was open water that they're searching, right, Um, they and and and you know the old joke is look at all that water, and the reply is yeah, and that's just the top of it. Right, that's one of the problems. Yeah, exactly, you're scanning area the size of Texas and what possibly lies beneath all that, right, And um, but you're hoping that if, if, if the thing broke up, you would find some wreckage, some sign of license. They found nothing, no, nothing that they could link to air Heart or noon and like they just disappeared. Um. And actually FDR took a lot of flak, we should say, because he spent four million bucks in the middle of the Great Depression just to search for this one person or well these two people see poor Fred noon in Um, but he always stood by that as far as I know. Um. Again, though, is a fruitless search. And they turned up thing right. I think they'd be a great band name. I know I say that, but poor Fred Noonan that's a good one. I have to remember that in case l cheap over breaks up. Uh. After the navy search, they basically discontinued their search and said, you know what, we can't find her and Fred and um, we're going to send a destroyer out to Gardner Island. It was called Gardener Island back then and now it's uh nick umar roo nick kumar ro nikumaroo. And uh they did this because radio transmissions on her frequency we're being broadcast in that area there were, which is pretty substantial. Yes, this is an uninhabited area. And um, this is still an unexplained aspect of this mystery. There were sporadic bursts of radio transmissions um, and no one still can say why they were. They were from some guy named Fred noon and so they didn't pay exactly. They're like, who's that he's seen? Ali, I guess he's a swimmer. Um. So They basically sent a couple of dispatch planes um to that island, found nothing and said, all right, we're calling off this area. That she's not out here, there's no evidence of life. Right, and that would have been that that was seven right, and the planes went back to the destroyer their aircraft carrier and left. Uh and that that that wouldn't that probably would have been the end of the association between Gardener Island or or Nika and Nick umar ro Ro and Amelia Earhart had it not been colonized by the British and ight hadn't not been for their pin shot for colonization. Yes, period. If British imperialism didn't exist, this probably these these artifacts Nember would have turned up. But there um there how they like to colonize things. They colonize this remote outpost actually gathered up some other islanders nearby and said, hey, you're gonna live here now. Um. And when these islanders went on the island, they found evidence that a castaway had been there recently. They found some pretty jarring stuff, right Chuck, Yeah, And I mean most certainly a castaway, because they found a woman shoe, a man shoe, liquor bottle, well, yeah, and a container for a sextant, which is one of those you know, those are the cool looking navigational device that you hold up and it looks like something at a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or something, which Fred Nowtan had on the plane with them, of course he did, you know Fred. Uh. And then they also found um, certainly not the least of which would be human skull and bones. Yeah. Here's here's where this thing would be just done, probably in my opinion, or where they just say this is them. Yeah, yeah, um, they found one set of human remains. Um. The the islanders took this to the governor of the island. His name was, uh, Gerald, I can't remember, Gerald Gallagher, Thanks buddy. They took it to Gerald gallaghery Gallagher says, I suspect I know who this is. Let's get a physician looking at this. The physician examines it, and the bones are promptly lost forever. No one has any idea what happened to him. Luckily, this physician took pretty methodical notes and wrote descriptions and drew drawings with the bones, and so in the nineties some forensic anthropologists got their hands on these notes and they said pretty much unequivocally that these bones were the bones of a woman of Northern European ancestry who was about five ft seven and Amelia her heart was five eight. Well, you would think they're off by an inch. It wasn't her exactly, But in this day and age, you have to have DNA evidence to controvertibly. Right. Sure, so the bones go missing, we can't get a DNA match. But consider that on an uninhabited island, right where they think that Amelia Earhart might have gone down, the remains of a woman of Northern European ancestry who was pretty much the same high his Amelia heart were found a few years after disappearance. I say score, I say scores, game, set match. But they also found some other cool stuff. Um, and the area of the island was called seven Site, and that was the little encampment that they believe, you know, was used by them. And they found some other cool stuff like clamshell fragments that basically they were smashed open by somebody right and exposed to fire, which you know, unless they were struck by lightning, that's pretty much definitive evidence of human use. Well, yeah, and they also found bones of fish and birds and turtles that had been exposed to fire. So in other words, somebody was cooking up something to eat. Uh. What else did they found? They found, Um, they found pieces of bottle that show signs of use is cutting and sawing tools. Yeah. UM. They also found a little piece of a knife, UM, which they managed. I don't know how they did this, because you sent me this link. There's a picture of just the knife blade. And they went back and managed to identify it as a type of jack knife that was produced within this time period by this company Rhode Island, so it was it was produced from ninety ninety two or something like that. And then they went back this year. This group called the UM we should say their name the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery or TIGAR. Yeah, they've been I think three or four different times over the years to this island. They went this summer as I was writing this, they were preparing the expedition and they found the rest of the knife. UM. And this is where they hoped to get DNA evidence from. Well yeah, and not the reason that the knife discovery is important or the rest of the knife. They originally found the blades only, and then they found the knife this summer, and it showed that the knife blades had been forcibly removed from the knife, indicating that maybe that they took out each blade too. Maybe and of course you're speculating, but maybe to attach it to an end of a spear or something like that for fish fishing. Anyone was seeing castaway knows what that's all about. I saw that the other day again by the way um there. They also found Gardner Island, by the way, became uninhabited in nineteen sixty three. There was a prolonged drought and the British government, we're just like, just forgive it, everybody, just leave Um and the group Tighar when they went to excavate around there, they found in this abandoned village folk art made of aluminum aircraft metal right, which they can't definitively prove came from her plane. Obviously, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence of female castaway handicrafts or maybe Tom he was the big crafty guy, but there Um, I don't think Tom made it. I think Amelia Earhart made it. I think Tom was maybe kill an impact or drowned and Amelia made it to the island and died there alone, quite possibly, and she may have even eaten him. Now that's a that's that's a new theory. I think you'd launched. I don't know that goes in with your disappearance of the Neanderthals. That's right, they melted, Um, you you were. The reason we're talking about these objects that they've recently recovered, though, is because they're trying to get some DNA called touch DNA off of a few of these items. They submitted ten I believe out of a hundred. It's one of the reasons why finding that knife was very important. Is huge because I believe they submitted the blades, and then they found some glass from what looked like a cosmetics star and a couple of buttons, and they submitted these things to a place in Canada. And I think as of today, I still don't think they have the results of that DNA testing done. That I see that they had it done yet so guarded, but they wouldn't be such enormous news that we would have known. That's what I think, um Chuck. There's a lot of people out there who also think that her plane sur survived intact and is at the bottom of the Pacific. That's awesome, And people still I think tig are included um undertake sonar searches of the ocean bottom. Uh. And there's a good chance that the plane did make it. Um. They were flying supposedly at about a thousand feet, which is extremely low, and they were doing about a hundred miles an hour, which is pretty slow for a plane, especially a Lockheed Electra, so conceivably didn't necessarily bust into a million pieces. Yeah, so it's possible it's still out there at the bottom of the ocean. Well, I I am totally sold. And I know I said like every single Jack the Ripper killer we brought up. Yeah, he sounds like the guy. But I'm completely convinced that this is where she spent her last days like you, and that she ate Fred noon In. I don't know that Fred or Fred. Uh. We should also mention too that UM they use a new well new to them at least ground penetrating radar g PR for the first time on this last trip to summer, and that is when you can actually look beneath the surface for anything that was buried. Like Fred, it's magic and um. They they didn't find anything though, because not because there was anything there necessarily, but there were lots of roots and air pockets underneath the thing. And I get the feeling that this looks since you're looking for something buried, looked for pockets of air, and so that it was completely in conclusive. They threw in the ocean. She may have also pulverized his bones to cover up her abomination. Yeah, I wonder it's I think this is what happened. I wonder how long they survived though. I wonder if it was weeks or months or what. Well consider it. I mean, if her plane went down in ninety seven and they started colonizing at ninety eight, she lasted less than a year. But can you imagine if she like just gave up and then like a week later the British come to colonized Gardener Island. Yeah, I mean, how horrible would that be? So she she made it less than a year, if she made it to Gardner Islander, Nicol mro ro what I'm surprised about, And maybe she tried to do this and Fred tried to do this. I'm surprised she didn't leave something behind, like instead of doing a handicraft. Maybe try and scratch the name Amelia into the aluminum and bury that or something, or maybe it's something is there and they just haven't found it yet. Yeah, there's a tree that says crow with towing on it because she was a history buff, Amelia was here. Well that's uh, that's it as it stands so far. Huh. You think we'll ever do an update if they find her. We always say we will, and we never do, and we never do. So the answer to that question is no. If you want to learn more about Amelia Earhart and see a picture of how cute Fred Noonan is and it's little old timey aviator get up, you should type air heart into the search bar at how stuff works dot com. It's e A R H A r T and that should bring it up. I would think unless we have articles on other air hearts, think so. I guess it's time then for a listener man. All right, Yeah, I got one here. I asked for rehab experiences quite a while ago, and I've got one that I meant to read earlier, and here it is, and I'm gonna jump around here. It's kind of along. Uh. This is from Scott and in two thousand five, he had pretty much worked himself into a rehab hospital. He was working three different jobs, hit a wall, couldn't decide to walk this way or that way, or even pick up a pencil, so he went to the er. After a fifteen minute interview with a psychiatrist who he said was quite attractive. I'm not sure why he told me that, he said. She left and a guard came to stand outside the room and she said, you know you're not just gonna take a break. She said, you need to be checked in. And this is how I learned of the seventy two hour hold, where a doctor decides you're at risk. So that's what happened to him initially. Next I wound up in an ambulance for a trip to a cyclocked downward called Station two. It sounds like the beginning of a very bad movie, like a horror film exactly. They dropped me off behind two heavily locked doors, and the next thing you knew, I was relieved of my laces and belt. Now I should say I was not suicidal. I was just really out of ideas. I don't I don't know what that means, out of ideas like he was. He had he was indecisive, he couldn't know. I think he means he was just burned out, was having a nervous breakdown, out of options, out of ideas. Yeah, it sounds like it. I spent eight days in Station twenty two and saw some interesting things, and here are a few. A meth addict was admitted. She looked like she should weigh about a hundred and ten to a hundred twenty pounds, but she weighed more like eighty. She took one drink of orange juice promptly dropped to the floor like a sack of bones. And this is what I learned. What a code red was the crash cart, the e er in the whole parade. After leaving Station twenty two, I transferred to a place in the suburbs for a twenty eight day program. It was pretty cool. I met a very well known author and many other fascinating people. I saw the girl sneaking out of the guy's room. The whole thing had to bear the A A rhymes and sayings, and I totally understand Sandra Bullock. In twenty eight days, now the big news was the guy who wrote a million little pieces I was coming the next week because he had stayed there before when he was writing the book, and the Oprah people came on site to work out camera locations in blocking and uh, two days before they were to descend the I made it up scandal occurred, so I never showed clearly. Um, and here just a few other little tips. People in rehab are insane about sweets. I think there's a definite link between sugar and addiction. Everyone seemed to want to hook up with something sweet. Um. I have seen that heroin sickness looks worse than dying in a fire. Wow, that's pretty bad. That's pretty bad. And a surprising number of people were repeats I'm talking like, yeah, this is my seventh time here. And I also saw a lot of people who snuck off for a drink and got kicked out. So Scott is doing much better now. He is back on track, living a great Lifett and he says, I love what you guys do and how you do it. I now give Takiva and co Ed and pretty much pace the halls into your next episode. Awesome, Thank you very much, Scott. I'm very glad you're feeling better. Right, took as long as you're not pacing the halls of Station twenty two. Buddy. Um, keep in touch with this on Facebook and Twitter? Yeah, yeah, you know quickly? Can I say that? If you have written listener mail, we don't answer all those anymore because there's just too many. Facebook is a great place to submit questions and get answers quicker or at all. That's uh Facebook, Yeah. Dot com slash stuff you should know, but we still read the listener mails. Twitter is uh s y s K podcast. We also have that Kiva team k I v A dot org slash team slash stuff you should know. Coed's website is c O E d U C dot org. Um, and you can always email us. Like Chuck said, we don't always respond. I do sometimes, do you still? Yeah? Okay, um, send us an email to let us know what you do and what you think you would do, or what you should do when you run out of ideas, wrap it up, send it to us at stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.