Nikumaroro reef where Amelia Earhart is believed to have landed.
“The last leg of the trip
was more than 20 hours
across the Pacific Ocean,”
explains Silvert. “In 1 hour,
if you’re off just by 1 degree
due to wind or a minor
miscalculation, you’re 60
miles away from where
you’re [planning] to be. In
a period of of 20 hours, you
could be 120 miles or more
off course and you’ll never
find your destination.”
Earhart’s navigator was
Fred Noonan, who had
worked for Pan-American
Airways and was widely
considered one of the top
aviation experts of his time.
This is one of the reasons
Silvert doesn’t abide by the
theory that Earhart’s plane
simply veered off course and
crashed into the ocean. According to him, an experienced team
like Earhart and Noonan would have had a “Plan B” if they
couldn’t reach their intended target.
“In navigation, you always have a Plan B. If you can’t figure
out where you are supposed to be, you have to ask yourself
where do you think you are, and where is the closest place you
can head to,” says Silvert.
Silvert continued to follow TIGHAR’s research on the island
throughout the rest of his career. When he retired, he decided
that he wanted to do more than just monitor TIGHAR’s
progress from afar. He officially joined the organization around
2012.
Then, in 2014, he learned that TIGHAR was planning a
2015 trip to Nikumaroro via a partnership with the California-
based Betchart Expeditions. Inspired by Earhart’s famous
quote, “There’s more to life than being a passenger,” Silvert
signed up for the voyage.
“I had retired in 2008. All of a sudden, it was one of these
things like you’ve always told yourself—that you’ve got to do
something exciting,” Silvert recalls. “I love history, I love a good
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mystery, and Amelia Earhart was a role model for me as a
kid. So, I figured if she could do it, I could do it.”
With TIGHAR’s chief archaeologist Tom King on
board, Betchart navigated a small cruise ship from Fiji
to Nikumaroro—a five-day trip that was fraught with
rough seas and horrible storms. By the time they arrived,
TIGHAR’s research ship was already anchored off of the
small island.
On the first day there, one of the members of the Betchart
group, a botanist, discovered the first of two hair combs that
had been fabricated from airplane aluminum.
“That gave us, the civilians, some bona fides,” Silvert says,
laughing.
Following that successful expedition, Silvert and his
fellow TIGHAR members (in partnership with the National
Geographic Society) returned to the island in 2017, this time
bringing along four cadaver dogs to the location known as
the “Seven Site,” which takes its name from a seven-shaped
natural clearing on the island. This is also the location
where the bones of a castaway were found by the British
in 1940. The bones were recently reanalyzed by a forensic
anthropologist who says that the evidence “strongly supports
the conclusion that the Nikumaroro bones belonged to
Amelia Earhart.”
Still, the TIGHAR team was hoping to unearth a tooth or
even a tooth fragment—widely considered the “holy grail”
of artifacts because of DNA properties.
“I spent one day there, for six and a half hours, sitting
cross-legged on the ground with a little trowel and rubber
gloves—it was ‘CSI Nikumaroro,’” Silvert says. “But after
80 years of serious weather conditions, nothing actually
definitive was able to be recovered.”
He remains hopeful that one day the mystery of what
happened to Amelia Earhart will be solved.
“She was such a remarkable woman and so much of an
inspiration to young women of the 1930s and 1940s—
needless to say, we have to remember how things were for
women back then,” Silvert adds. “I think she deserves to be
an inspiration for this generation of young people and the
next. I think she deserves to be brought home.”
For more information about TIGHAR’s research,
including extensive reports of the group’s trips to
Nikumaroro, visit tighar.org. n