Believe it or not, Atasa didn’t know Nunan was on the airplane.

How is that possible? How is that possible? Previously on Today I Learned Science.

Last week, we uncovered what really happened to Amelia Heheart.

The evidence that’s been hiding in plain sight for 89 years.

The person who found it, this man, Rick Gillespie.

So, I flew out to Tiger headquarters and asked him to show me everything.

What he showed me changed how I see her story completely.

You’re telling me that we’ve got a picture of a lucky 10 landing gear on the reef at Nicaro 3 months after Airheart’s disappearance.

So the airplane has not crashed.

The airplane has made a safe landing someplace on land.

You guys are telling me that nobody has looked for Amelia Heheart in the most likely place.

They didn’t see an airplane, but they saw something that shouldn’t have been there.

What they saw was there’s a 99.

28% chance that that cast wave was Ameilia Airheart.

This is the truth of Amelia Heheart’s final flight.

Welcome to Today I Learn Science.

It’s a pleasure to speak to you in person now.

Well, it’s a pleasure to see you.

I I’m looking forward to this very much.

And just to get started, I’ll have you also introduce yourself, but just as a little intro from me, Rick, you we were just talking about this.

You were an airplane insurance investigator doing accident insurance, so that was kind of your foray into all of this, but you’re also the son of a World War II pilot.

You’re a pilot yourself.

And where we are today, we’re at the Tiger headquarters where all the magic happens.

You’ve led many, many expeditions over the last 20, 30 years.

I think it’s been 30 40 years now out to Nickmora Island and other islands to search for Amelia Heheart and figure out what happened on that fateful day in 1937.

So, let’s just jump right into it.

How did you even get into this in the first place? Specifically, her story.

What drew you to this investigation and made you want to spend the last 40 years of your life searching for answers? People were asking us at that time, “When are you going after Amelia?” And I said, “Look, um, she probably just ran out of gas looking for a tiny island in a big ocean and it’s too small a target and too big an ocean and there’s nothing substantive that can be done and it’s a media circus and I don’t want any part of it.

” And then uh in 1988, two of our members, Tom Willie and Tom Ganon, who were retired military navigators, called me up.

We got a theory about a millilart.

I don’t want to hear any theories.

No, no, you got to listen to us and we’re not talking about the Japanese or anything like that.

uh we’re navigators and um what we have to say makes sense and we’ll we’ll come and show you at our expense.

They lived in Florida.

And I said, “Well, all right.

Come on up and I’ll give you the time.

” So they show up in Wilmington, Delaware, and they spread their maps out on the kitchen table and they point out that like what Ameilia Airheart is known to have said in her last conversation at transmission to the Coast Guard cutter makes perfect sense to an aerial navigator, celestial aerial navigator, which we are.

She said she was running on the line 157337.

That’s a line of position.

It’s what she should have been doing given that she couldn’t find the island with radio direction finder.

Her navigator was telling her to fly on this line.

And if she did what she said she was doing, she should have gotten to another island.

Not Holl because she didn’t get to Holland.

We know that.

but she should have gotten to Gardener Island, which was uninhabited at the time.

And nobody ever looked for her there.

And I said, “Wait a minute.

You guys are telling me that nobody has looked for Amelia Heheart in the most likely place.

” And they said, “That’s the way it looks to us.

” Oh, man.

Well, okay.

We need to look into this and find the documentation for what you’re telling us.

And um people did look for her there.

This is exactly what the Navy thought happened in 1937.

This is not a new Amelia.

This is the oldest Amelia Heheart theory.

And the Navy sent a battleship all the way from Hawaii to Gardener Island to look for them with three catapult launched float planes.

And they didn’t see an airplane, but they saw something that shouldn’t have been there.

They didn’t know it shouldn’t have been.

What they saw was clear signs of recent habitation on this island.

They were under the impression that all these islands had native work parties harvesting coconuts.

And so yeah, people here.

There have been nobody on Gardener Island since 1892.

So they saw something that shouldn’t have been there.

They didn’t realize that.

They crossed the place off as having been searched and nobody ever looked there again.

The rest of the Navy search happened in open ocean looking for floating rack edge life ra at the end of the day they just decided that well she apparently just went into the drink sank without a trace.

We never stood a real chance of finding her.

Uh we didn’t do anything wrong but we have to go home now.

And that was the end of it.

Yeah.

Uh but it turns out that all kinds of things happened that as we continued our investigation, we learned uh three months later the British got around to sending an expedition to Gardener Island to check it out for future colonization.

It was uninhabited at the time and they needed land, more land to settle uh people from the Gilbert Islands which were severely overpop populated.

And so they set this small expedition with two colonial service officers and 16 Gilbert’s elders to evaluate this island.

H could we put people here and could they find water and raise coconuts? And they decided that yeah, yeah, you could you could do that.

And as they’re leaving, one of the colonial service officers, a man named Eric Bevington, who had been taking a bunch of photographs.

He was kind of the photographer for the expedition.

He took a photograph of the western shoreline of the island, mostly because he was interested in an old shipwreck that was there.

It was a British freighter called Norwich City, SS Norwich City that had gone around in November of 1929 in a storm.

It ran up on the reef.

It was still there.

And he’s looking at the shoreline on the wreck.

And what he didn’t realize, and we only discovered in 2010 that in that photograph there’s something sticking up out of the water on the reef that shouldn’t be there.

So, we called in our forensic imaging expert, Jeff Glickman, and Jeff was actually the one that pointed it out to us.

He says, “Hey, what’s this thing?” I said, “I don’t know.

Let’s look.

” Jeff looked at it.

He says, “I I need something better than just the copy photo that Bevington let my wife Pat take when we visited him.

He was still alive.

” Yeah.

We we in 1992 we we discovered that Eric Bevington was alive retired living in the south of England.

So we went and saw Eric.

So anyway, uh he had this photo album Mhm.

of pictures he had sent home to his father in 19 37, which is the only reason the pictures survived because when the Japanese attacked um the Gilbert Islands in 1941, they destroyed the British headquarters there, which included his negatives and everything.

Oh, wow.

But he had this photo album and he let Pat take picture, copy photos.

So, we’ve got this picture, but there’s something sticking up out of the water that Jeff Glickman said, “What is that thing?” By the time we discovered this, Bevington was dead.

His papers were at the Roads House Library at Oxford University.

We get the picture and Glickman says, “This is a man-made object.

This is definitely a man-made object and uh I really like what I’m seeing here, but we need something better than a 600 DPI scan.

So, we ended up going to Oxford with Glickman and setting up a whole rig to get a maximum resolution copy photo of that.

It turns out Glickman was horrified when he realized this.

That photograph is wallet size and the the thing we’re interested in is smaller than a grain of sand on this thing.

But we did get it and he did the forensic magic that he can do.

And what we ended up with, he comes back to me and he says, “This is wreckage from the landing gear of a Lockheed Model 10 Electra.

” And he can tell that from such a small Yeah.

photo.

Yeah.

Because of the shapes and the colors.

Well, it’s black and white, but the gradations and uh Yeah, it’s there.

You you can you can look at it and see it.

And and I said, “You’re telling me that we’ve got a picture of a Lucky 10 landing gear on the reef at Nicaro, Gardener Island, three months after Airheart’s disappearance.

” He says, ‘Yeah, that’s what I that’s too many eggs to have in one basket.

I need a second opinion on this.

Well, at that time, as it turns out, we had really good connections at the US State Department.

And I give him the picture.

Two months later, I get a call and he says, “I want you to come on down here.

Uh, the people want to talk to you.

” So, I go down there and I get this special clearance and I get into the secure area and I meet with three guys who don’t have last names and they said, “Well, uh, we did our own research and basically we see where your guy sees.

We can’t see for sure that it’s locked electro landing gear because we don’t have it on the floor here in front of us, but that’s what it looks like.

Our only concern is that the negative might have been altered to make it look like that.

Yeah, but the negative was destroyed by the Japanese in 1941.

So that ain’t in the cards.

You know, this these are prints that were sent home in 1937 and never had the negatives.

Nobody’s going to alter the negative in 1937 to make it look like a miller there.

You know, doesn’t make sense.

Yeah.

So God, you know, we we’ve got that piece of evidence.

Another thing that was developed that developed and continued to develop is the whole question of the post-loss radio signals.

Huge body of evidence for nearly a week after her heart disappeared.

There were radio distress calls heard by professional government operators in the Pacific and by normal everyday people uh around the US uh North America, Canada and the US.

One question on that.

That was something that came up I think from comments and people when I was posting the video last year.

How can you explain how regular people can pick up those radio transmissions? Yes.

Okay.

So the stations out in the Pacific that were specifically listening for Airheart were listening on her primary highfrequency frequencies u essentially 3105 kilo today we call them kilohertz kilocycles in those days and 6210 and they’re mostly heard on 3105 and 3105 is fairly short range uh stations the the stations that we’re hearing All they could tell for sure in most cases was that somebody was transmitting on that frequency, which was significant because at that time by international agreement, nobody was supposed to be using that frequency except a US registered aircraft calling a ground station and was the only US registered aircraft in that part of the world.

And even if all you heard was the carrier way, which means somebody was keying them.

Yeah.

On 3005, somebody’s transmitting on that frequency, and the air heart’s the only one allowed to.

In other cases, people reported hearing voice, a woman’s voice, but unintelligible.

That often happens with high frequency radio.

If you’d ever you can get a high frequency radio reception and you can tell my voice.

Yeah.

you know, and there was a an operator in uh government operator in Naru, British colony, that had heard the airplane in flight as it flew near there the night before.

She she’s she’s trying to call Itasa from the plane in flight and Naru heard her.

Wow.

And then the next night, long after she must be out of fuel, they’re hearing the same voice but unintelligible, except there was no hum of the plane in the background.

Okay.

Interesting.

You know, that’s interesting.

And three different times they heard that at at a time when she’s got to be down.

Yeah.

She can’t be in the air.

Itasca the Coast Guard that night hears unintelligible voice from a woman and they recognize the voice.

We hear her now.

It’s in the radio log.

Yeah.

And this is after her last her quote unquote last transmission or before.

No, this is her her last transmission heard by Atasa occurred at 9:55 a.

m.

on July 2nd.

Okay, we’re talking about reception and the everybody agreed that by noon the airplane’s out of fuel.

Okay, these are being heard at 6:00 p.

m.

900 p.

m.

that night.

She’s got to be down somewhere.

And so I task is we hear her now.

It’s in the log.

But then they hear a transmission.

Oh, man’s voice.

Oh, I guess it’s not her.

Believe it or not, Atasa didn’t know Nunan was on the airplane.

How is that possible? How is that possible? Everybody in the US knew that she had a navigator friend.

It task is out in the middle of the Pacific.

They don’t get newspapers.

All they get are the official transmissions coordinating radio schedules and it’s all Amelia.

There’s no mention of Nunan in any of that radio traffic and there’s there’s discussion back and forth.

What did she have somebody with her? We don’t know.

Later that turns out that yeah, the no one was with her.

But because they hear a voice, they said no, it’s not her.

But if it is her, she’s apparently down been floating around calling for help because the will the airplane float? And uh Hehart’s husband says, “Oh yeah, well the empty field thing, it’ll float indefinitely.

” Okay.

So they’re they’re out there calling for help.

And then Lockheed, the airplane manufacturer, finds out about this and says, “Wait a minute, guys.

” And this goes on, by the way, night after night after night.

the radio transmissions.

Radio transmissions, people hearing her uh out in the Pacific hearing her and there’s newspaper headlines about this.

Yeah, we can hear Amelia’s faint calls and and uh we’re she’s going to be rescued.

It’s this is going to have a happy ending.

And Lockheed says, “Guys, wait a minute.

If she’s sending calls night after night, the airplane’s not in the water because if it’s in the water, the radios are going to be wet.

The because of where the radios are in the airplane, and radios don’t like to be wet.

That airplane can’t transmit and go.

That airplane’s on land.

On top of that, these have been going on night after night.

She’s got to be able to recharge the battery that the radios depend on.

And the only way to do that is to run the right-hand engine with a generator on it.

And she can’t do that unless shits on its wheels.

So the airplane has not crashed.

The airplane has made a safe landing someplace on land.

And there’s just not a lot of land out there.

And Locky said this back in 1977.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

That puts a different spin on this thing.

Yeah.

Now, the captain of the Itasca doesn’t buy it.

He’s convinced the airplane’s in the water and they’re going to go find it.

And there is this one message that was heard by the Navy station in Hawaii and very poorly sent Morse code that the cryptic message uh 281 North Howland can’t hold with us much longer above water shut off.

And uh the captain of the Ataska interpreted that to mean, “Oh, the airplane’s a float in the water, 281 miles north of Holland, and we’re going to go find it.

” And they go tear it off to find it.

Meanwhile, the Navy in um at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Murph in charge of the whole thing, says, “Well, it’s more likely that the airplane is on one of those islands down.

There’s nothing nor she said 337157 337 direction there’s nothing there um 157 yeah there are islands of the Phoenix group down there so we got to send some airplanes down there to look that was an interesting situation too because at that time Pearl Harbor was not yet the base for the seventh fleet the Pacific fleet they were in San Diego San Diego.

And so Murvin didn’t have any airplanes or ships.

Well, what else can we do? Well, we’ve got a battleship here, but it’s not here at Pearl Harbor.

It’s uh USS Colorado and they’re on their they’re based out of San Francisco and they’re on their annual Navy ROC training crews and they’ve got 96 college kids aboard firing the big guns and having a big time and they have just put into Honolulu uh for the Fourth of July weekend and all the kids have gone ashore the parties and it’s a big deal and Murphin says if If you want and but Colorado has three float planes, so if you want airplanes down there, that’s what I’ve got.

Yeah.

And the chief of naval operations said, “Yeah, send Colorado.

” So all these kids get the word back to the ship.

You’re going looking for Amelia Heheart.

And they’re just not happy about this.

Meanwhile, uh, Pan-American Airways, who have been flying scheduled passenger service across the Northern Pacific for a year, have radio direction finding stations in Hawaii, Midway Island, and Wake Island that they use to guide their clippers across the Pacific.

You take bearings out of back and forth, and they’re hearing these radio calls, too.

And Nan used to work for him.

They know Nan.

And they’re taking bearings on these things.

And the most reliable bearings, five of them are crossing right near very close to Gardener Island.

Okay, we know she’s on land.

We know the wheels are down.

Uh if these calls are genuine and they’re coming from land and garden is the only land there.

Mhm.

So, Colorado, you got to get down there and put airplanes over Gardener Island.

Well, that’s 2,000 miles from Hawaii.

So, on the 9th of one week after the disappearance, three float planes from Colorado come up overhead Gardener Island and they they spend about 20 minutes over the island.

They don’t see an airplane on the ground.

They’re looking for an airplane because there’s got to be an airplane there.

after these calls.

By then the mysterious radio calls have stopped.

Okay.

Uh now we know now we know why because rising tides and surf had washed the airplane off the edge of the reef into the ocean.

So it wasn’t there anymore.

But they weren’t even looking at the reef where she landed because when she came up over the island a week earlier, the tide was out and the reef was dry.

It looked like a runway and that’s why she landed there, safely land.

When Colorado’s planes came up, it was high tide and all they saw was surf running across a reef, you know, airplane there.

And so they’re looking on there, no airplane here.

Despite repeated circling and zooming, zooming, which makes a lot of noise, uh there was no answering wave and we concluded that no one was there and we left.

Okay.

So, Air Airheart’s on the ground.

The plane’s gone.

She’s literally marooned on a desert island.

And suddenly there are airplanes overhead.

Mhm.

Why didn’t they Why don’t they say she goes out on the beach and waves? Why don’t they see her? Because people on the ground at Gardner are very hard to see.

We know that because in 2001 we had a unique experience to fly over the island in a helicopter and there are people on the ground waving to the helicopter and you don’t know they’re there in the video unless I freeze frame the video and point see right there.

Yeah, very hard to see.

And if Hehheart was back away from the beach any distance at all, that beachfront is covered with a vegetation called Skavola foressence in Gilbert’s Mau and horrible stuff and it can take you 10 minutes to go 20 ft through.

So she maybe just can’t get to the beach in time to to see.

Anyway, they don’t see anybody.

They leave and the conclusion was, well, if those radio signals that everybody was excited about were genuine, there had to be a plane there and there’s no plan there.

Therefore, all those signals must have been bogus or misunderstandings or something.

And the rest of the Navy search took place in open ocean and found nothing.

You’re probably probably maybe as long as two months.

She probably live for two months.

Could be.

Yeah.

The one one thing that makes us suspect that is one of the things we found were the remains of a baby turtle.

There was a big turtle, but but she couldn’t move a full grown turtle.

She would had to have butchered it out on the beach, but there’s remains of a baby turtle there.

Well, the turtles come ashore and lay their eggs and then the eggs hatch.

Um, and of course, baby turtles are easy to catch.

That usually happens in September.

Oh, I see.

You know, you look at the data that’s there and you know, what does this tell us for sure? What might this tell us? And uh you develop a hypothesis and so many hypothesis are not testable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You you you can’t know.

Uh so, but it’s just heartbreaking to know that she could have been there for two months.

Think about being on the island hoping for rescue.

Yeah.

Uh in the first days and suddenly there are airplanes overhead, which is the last thing you expected because you’re the only airplane in this part of the world.

And now there are three airplanes overhead.

But you can’t make them see you and they leave and you know, okay, they’ve looked here.

Yeah.

They’re not coming back.

I mean, geez.

Can’t even imagine that.

I know.

Um, yeah.

Yeah.

So, okay.

So, we’ve we’ve got our landing gear on on the reef that shows up in the photograph.

We’ve got an analysis of the um radio direction finder bearings that can only have come from uh that airplane at that location.

And then you’ve got the post loss radio signals that were heard by the people in the US, which was your original question.

How does, and most of these people were regular citizens, usually housewives listening on their commercial radios that also had a shortwave band.

And it was fairly quite common, quite popular at that time.

Late at night when the propagation was right after your husband was in bed and the ch kids were put to bed and everything was cleaned up, you took a break and you cruised and listening for foreign stations and music and stuff.

These people weren’t listening for Amelia Airheart on 3105.

But Airheart’s radio when it transmitted on 3105 also put out signals on multiples of that frequency.

Betty Clink, 15 year old girl in St.

Petersburg, Florida, is cruising the dial.

This was in the afternoon as it turned out.

Um, and is astounded to suddenly hear Ameliahard calling for help.

And she has a notebook that she jops down the lyrics of her favorite songs and makes sketches and she grabs a notebook and starts transcribing what she can make out.

And this goes on for an hour and three quarters.

Wow.

Her father comes home from work.

Dad, I’m hearing a millart and she’s in bad trouble and she’s calling for help.

And he says, “Yeah, holy man, a lot of people are worried about let me let me see if so and so, our neighbor can get it cuz he’s got a short roof set, too.

” He goes to the neighbor.

Neighbor can’t pick it up because he doesn’t have as good as antenna as this guy has.

And he says, and he gets back and after they decided that that’s all we’re gonna hear, she’s got like five pages of this.

My gosh.

And it’s it’s it reads the notebook reads like a transcript of a modern 911 call.

Um, people are very upset.

There’s a woman who says she’s a millier heart.

There’s a man with her that’s acting irrationally and she’s trying to deal with him at the same time as trying to get a message out and and sometimes it’s garbled and she can’t Betty can’t make out quite what she like numbers.

She has a hard time understanding the numbers that are being said.

She writes down what she can and so her father says, “I’m going to take this notebook down to the Coast Guard and they need to know about this.

” He goes down to the Coastg Guard office in St.

Pete and he shows him this and they said, “Yeah, we know a lot of people are hearing this stuff.

We know about Don’t worry about it.

We’re on top of it.

We have people out there.

” Yeah, but no, don’t worry about it.

So, he’s very frustrated.

He comes back and Betty tries repeatedly for the next years trying to get somebody to pay attention to this and finally gives up and says, “Yeah, I know what happened, but nobody wants to pay attention to me.

” And we only learned about this through a uh one of her neighbors by the time she was 63 years old and living in in Hston, Illinois with her husband who then had Alzheimer’s.

Um, but she had a neighbor, fell named John Hathaway, who’s a member of Tiger, okay? Who knew Betty and Betty had told him about this and Hatheraway called me.

He said, “Look, I’ve got this neighbor who has this notebook and nobody will pay attention to it, but it sounds like what you’re looking you’re saying happened, but I don’t know if she’ll even talk to you.

” I said, ‘Well, I’ll put put us in touch with her.

So, I talked to her and then we got looking at it.

I said, “Oh, well, uh, how about the notebook itself? Is this a genuine 1937 school notebook?” Yep, that’s what it is.

All right.

Uh, what else can we check? We looked at the content.

Some of the stuff, notations in the notebook don’t seem to make any sense.

several places in the notebook she has Amelia she her notation say NY and I asked Betty what’s that she says that’s the way I write New York City um she was saying New York City or or something that sounded like New York City the ship ground on the reef at Gardenner Island is SS Norwich City oh Amelia is trying to tell people something that tells them what island it is.

Cuz Ameilia doesn’t know the name of the island she’s on.

Why not? I mean, if if you know you’re on Gardener Island Yes.

and you’re sending radio calls, I’m on Gardener.

That’s Gardener.

Gardner.

Gardner.

Nowhere in any of these messages is there a name of any island.

Okay.

What map did they have with them? We don’t know.

Okay.

There’s no way to know.

But the map that Admiral Murphin at Navy in in Hawaii was using to manage the whole Navy search was hydrographic office map 50/50 and it’s a great map for covering the Howland Island Baker Island that area of the Pacific.

that it stops 2 and a half degrees south of the equator.

And if Airheart is using that same map, it’s a good map.

And if Nunan was using that map and they’re flying south on that line, they fly off their map.

So they get to an island, Nunan maybe can can get star sightings.

He knows the latitude, longitude, but he can’t plot it on a map and know the name of the guy because he doesn’t have a map that shows that area.

That’s that’s what seems to make sense.

Okay.

So, that that’s why she never said, but there’s a shipwreck here.

It’s Norwich City.

Maybe somebody knows it’s a big old shipwreck.

Somebody knows that.

And uh it was a good plan, but it didn’t work.

So, again, occult information.

No way Betty could have known or something that sounds like New York City.

Yeah.

So, we look at Betty’s notebook and even without knowing Betty herself, and I can tell you when she was still alive, there is no way you could talk to that woman and not absolutely believe that she was telling the truth.

But, you know, that’s subjective.

I can’t.

But these other things are objective.

And Bettyy’s the re Betty was the real deal.

Let’s talk about Betty’s notebook.

I have it right here.

Amazing.

And that that’s Betty.

It’s a beautiful photo.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And this is her notebook kept in acid proof.

And so this is the notebook from 1937.

37.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

This is where it starts.

And she’s writing down what she can make out.

It says there’s a lot of help me kneedeep.

These are the things I’ve been seeing online and now I’m seeing in person is incredible.

So waters kneede where are you? Let me out.

Where are you going? We can’t bail out.

And she says so she writes here it says Amelia.

Yes.

And is that something that she has said? Like Amelia is saying her name.

This is Amelia.

I I’d have to look at the videotape of the interview to be sure.

Yeah.

About let let me look at it.

Where Betty wrote um this is Amelia Heheart.

That’s of course Amelia talking where she just writes Amelia.

That’s probably Nunan saying Amelia.

Yeah.

What? And there’s there’s back and forth like that.

Oh, so she is hearing both of them.

Well, yeah, she’s hearing both of them.

Wow.

It it’s an open mic thing in a very small cockpit, right? So, you’ve got this narrow cockpit and there’s a hatch.

This certainly open because it’s hot and and Nan’s trying to get out because it’s so hot.

Nunan’s trying to get out.

But in order to get out, he’s got to climb over Amelia to get out and she’s trying to talk on the radio and struggling and the whole thing you you could act it out as a play, I’m sure, if you wanted to.

But this goes on and then New York.

New York.

Oh, you do see that the New York Amelia here.

What are you doing? Stop.

And then she writes the NYNY at the end.

Something that sounded like New York.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or something that sounded like New York.

That’s important.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah.

That’s incredible.

It is.

It’s just Wow.

Who would have thought you’d have something? I know.

These are the things that really make it come together.

The people that save these and treasure these items just hoping, you know, one day maybe this might get solved by someone else.

Yeah.

A a couple of of the other women who heard these calls uh wrote down what they heard and tried to save it, but none of it had survived.

like in Betty’s cat.

One woman, I think it was Thma Loveless, said that uh she had put it in the fly leaf of a book that had gotten lost in several moves and that kind of thing.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

So, that’s the notebook.

Um so, we’ve got the post radio signals and there were other people.

Betty Clank is the most dramatic, but there was Dana Randolph, there was Stelman Loveless, there was um uh the one in in El uh Amarella, Texas, but but and they all agree that what’s going and one of the things they agree on is that new the navigator is badly injured and needs uh help.

We don’t know what injuries were.

Betty had the impression that he had a head injury.

Okay.

I have a theory.

It’s pure speculation based on my knowledge of that reef.

That reef has a coating of algae on it in that area that’s slickered and we like to say slicker and snot.

When when we’re out there, you have a stout walking stick and you wish you had a walker.

you know it’s and uh very easy and it’s jagged and if you fall on on that reef which I have done you end up with coral in your and and that’s instant infection because it’s a living organism but if you’re nunan uh within a couple of three days you could be dealing with sepsis blood poisoning this affecting your brain And if he is incapacitated by the time the rising tides and surf are threatening to put the airplane over the edge, if he’s incapacitate, she can’t get him out of that airplane.

Yeah.

And leave noon in there.

Maybe he’s dead.

If he isn’t, he’s going to be because So that I think may be why we haven’t find found any and nobody has found any remains of Fred Nunan.

Wow.

Heart’s remains were found in 1940 by a British colonial service officer named Gerald Gallagher who found the uh partial skeleton of a castaway on the souththeast end of the island.

And their bones, dead bird, dead turtle, parts of a woman’s shoe or near the skeleton.

Yeah.

Okay.

It was all together just around there.

Now, um, what had been found first before Gallagher arrived on the island in September 1940, back in April of 40, there was a Gilbert work party cutting wood in that area and they came across a human skull.

Okay? And they buried it because that’s what you do if you’re Gilbert.

Otherwise, you have ghost trouble.

So they bury this skull, but when Gallagher shows up in September, he hears about this.

He says, “Well, if you find a skull, there’s got to be more.

” And he goes and pokes around and he finds the the partial skeleton and later exumes the the skull.

Okay.

The the skull uh the and with the bones that he found were parts of a woman’s shoe.

and he says, “Wait, Castaway woman’s shoe.

Um, this might be Millia Airheart.

” So, Gallagher finds this stuff.

And he sends a message to his superiors in Fiji, thousand miles away.

Says, “I I found all this stuff and I think it might be Amelia Heheart.

” And the reaction from the high commissioner who’s in charge of that whole part of the British Empire says, “Will you send all that the bones and all that stuff to us and keep your mouth shut?” Oh, okay.

Strictly secret.

And Gallagher does that.

The bones and artifacts arrive in Fiji to Dr.

Hoodless, who’s the head of the medical school, and have him evaluate the bones.

Well, Hoodless was a very talented administrator, but he had no training in forensic anthrop forensic anthropology wasn’t even a science yet.

But he gets the bones and he takes measurements of several of them and he applies the formulas he knows about and he draws a conclusion.

Um, this is a a short, stocky European or possibly mixed race male.

And again, the British didn’t know she had a man with her because all they had seen was newspaper articles about Amelia Heheart, right? Uh everything they had because this is like this is years later and there was never any consideration of Nunan.

And um so he this word gets back to Sir Harry Luke the commissioner.

He’s so good.

Not these these wretched relics, as they were called, uh are of no consequence.

And uh Hoodless, what do you want me to do with them? And just hold on to them until further instructions.

And that’s the end of it.

That’s that’s what the And so there’s no records of these B.

Don’t know if it’s still in storage somewhere or there we have turned Fiji upside down three times including the hospital where Hoodless worked and the only thing I can conclude is that the bones were thrown out because they were considered meaningless, right? They they were in too bad shape to which is what happens when crabs chew on bones.

They’re in too bad shape to use in an anatomy class or anything like that.

So, and is there any possibility because they thought it was a male? Yeah.

So, is that confirmed that it was a male? So, it’s not it couldn’t be Amelia Heheart’s skeleton.

Well, in in their view because they didn’t know she had a a man with her.

And if it’s definitely a male, it’s not Ailia Airheart and they don’t need to worry about it.

Dr.

Richard JS, worldrenowned forensic anthropologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, had been one of the original ones that concluded that this was Northern European.

He says, “Well, we can we can take this further if if you can get me because we have this tremendous collection of bones here in Tennessee.

And if you can get me the right photographs, we can work out Amelia’s bone measurements and compare them to these bones in detail.

So I got with Jeff Glickman and I said, “Well, uh, what do you need to get?” But he says, “Well, I need a good photograph of Amelia.

” Um f first of all to to get her height I need her standing in the same plane of something of absolutely known dimensions and to get her bone lengths I need a picture of her uh with a straight arm holding something of known dimensions preferably in a short sleeve shirt.

So, I found a picture of Amelia standing beside the propeller of her Lockheed Vega that she flew across the Atlantic in 1932.

That airplane is now in the National Air and Space Museum.

Mhm.

And I said, “Well, if that prop is still there, if we can go to the museum and put the prop in that position and set up the right um calibration of everything.

Glickman uh we can tell you how how tall she was.

So I had to go to the museum which has never agreed with our hypothesis at all.

You know they they’ve no she crashed the seat for I said I need to borrow your airplane.

Yeah.

What? I said yeah I need the Vega.

Uh here’s what I need to do and here’s why.

All right.

All right.

So Jeff and I get into the museum at 6:00 in the morning before it’s open and with their approval, we disassemble the exhibit and we set up the cameras and we take the pictures.

Ameilia was 5 foot seven.

We establish that.

Okay.

But how about this other thing? Well, there’s a picture of her in Darwin, Australia, standing by the cabin door of the Electra, holding a can of lubricant called Mobile Grease, and her n her is kind of heavy.

So, her arm is nice and straight, and she’s wearing a short sleeve shirt.

Amazing.

Perfect.

Yeah.

We got to find a can.

It took Jeff 10 minutes to find one on eBay.

Nice.

of that vintage old gunky thing and he had to explain to his wife why he just paid $32 for this horrible I’ve got the thing upstairs now nice um but that gave him what he needed so we could get pixel by pixel bone lengths and stuff and Dr.

Jance came back to us with that.

He says, “Well, for one thing, um, the bone lengths match, but on top of that, her ratio of upper bone to lower armb bone is a bit unusual.

It’s not freaky, but it’s fairly rare.

And she’s got unusually long forearms compared with and we have those bones measurements from Dr.

hoodless and they match.

Wow.

It’s called the brochial index and her and his brochial index was exactly what the castaway’s bones were and Jance.

Oh, he then he went we went to Purdue University’s collection.

They have uh some of Era’s clothing and from that especially a pair of trousers we could get her uh leg lengths and general structure from all that.

Jance published a peer-reviewed paper in the journal of forensic anthropology uh published in February of uh 2018.

Mhm.

You see it online where he describes all this and you know it’ll make your eyes glaze over the the whole uh the math involved.

Bottom line is there’s a 99.

28% chance that that castway was a millart.

Wow.

Okay.

So, we’ve got the landing gear picture on the reef.

We’ve got the radio bearings that cross at gardener island.

We’ve got Betty’s notebook and the other people who hear signals that could only have come from there.

Now we’ve got bones.

Come on.

You know, and what we don’t have is a verifiable piece of the airplane.

Okay.

And that’s what everybody wants.

Everyone’s after this airplane.

Everybody’s Well, on that note, there’s been so much conversation about the plane.

Where is it? Where could it have gone? So, let’s talk about that.

And we already know the deep sea vision, the sonar scen that’s been debunked.

We know that it was just a pile of rocks.

Yeah.

Uh, now Purdue University in collaboration, I believe, with the archaeology legacy institute.

They are going out to Nicomorra Island this November actually, to go and find they think they have found information or evidence that there could be a plane through some photo.

What do you think about that? Do you think that’s possible? And if not, where do you think her plane is? Okay.

I do not think that what they see in the satellite images is as an airplane at all.

I think that what they see in the satellite image that they show, I mean, they’ve been very public about their evidence that they present.

I think what their photographs show is a dead pandana tree.

Okay.

That and pandana trees grow along the the shoreline and get washed out by and big storms and get washed through the passage and naturally wash up on the peninsula where this stuff is.

We looked in that area there there was an early report of airplane wreckage being seen in that area.

Mhm.

And so we we checked it out in 2001 and again 2007 people I’ve been there myself with metal detectors stuff waiting around.

There’s nothing there or we’d have found it unless it arrived later somehow.

um they can go out there and if they suddenly discover that there’s a millart’s electra wreckage is there.

I’ll be very surprised, but I’ll be the first one to congratulate them.

But I don’t think they’re going to find anything.

I think what the evidence very clearly shows is that the airplane was washed over the edge of the reef by rising tides and surf.

And the surf had to be strong that day in order to to move it the airplane.

And that reef edge is a violent dynamic place.

And all you have to do is look at the wreck of Norwich City there.

5,000 ton iron and steel ship that was torn in two.

Wow.

By by that surf and the the stern broke off and and fell down thousand feet where we found it in 2012.

It does that to a 5,000 ton freighter.

What happens to a 7,000 lb aluminum eggshell? But we’ve got a couple of pieces that we found that I really do think are salvaged from pieces washed up by the elector.

And we’ve got people that we had one woman who described seeing a piece of a wing on the reflat near the main passage.

This would have been in about 1961.

Mhm.

And we’ve got an aerial mapping photo of the island uh taken in 1953 that shows that area.

And there is light colored metal on the reef in that Oh, wow.

area.

And there shouldn’t be any light colored metal.

All the north city stuff is is rust.

So the the airplane’s torn to pieces.

We desperately wanted it to be there.

In 2012, we spent $2 million looking for it with good technology, nothing.

In 2019, Bob Bellard went back there and he he he looked at the the photograph of the landing gear on the reef.

He says, “Yeah, it’s there and I’m going to find it cuz I’m Bob Ballard.

” Yeah.

And I said, “No, you won’t.

” But yeah, we’re going to do it.

National Geographic funded it.

Didn’t find it.

Um, it’s gone.

Yeah, it’s gone.

I’m afraid nobody’d love to find it more than I would, but they didn’t find it.

And the Archaeology Legacy Institute with the help from Purdue, they’re not going to find it either.

It’s it’s gone.

But the fact and facts multiple that put Amelia the plane and Ameilia on that island are undeniable.

Well, actually on that note to kind of going back, can we talk about why we think the plane was where it was because you guys did a lot of research on exactly the plane’s location and that had a lot to do with the rising tides as well as the radio transmission.

You guys kind of mapped that out pretty active, when she was not active.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um that was one of the things we we’re asking ourselves again.

You you develop a hypothesis.

Okay.

So, she’s landed on the reef and she’s recharging the battery uh by running the engine.

So, let’s compare the times of the credible post-law signals to the water level on the reef.

How do we do that? Well, we got to know the height of the reef.

We’ve got to survey the reef where this happened.

Mhm.

Well, how do you do that? Well, you got to go out there and do it.

Yeah.

And in 2007, we did.

And it wasn’t easy, I can imagine.

But we we did it.

We got the heights.

And when we got back and plotted it all out, hind hide behind casting the tides, knowing the heights of the reef, the whole thing, it’s uncanny.

Just night after night, the tide goes out, the water goes down, the signals start.

The tide comes in, the water comes up.

Too high, the signal stop.

The tide goes back out, the signal starting.

And this is three nights in a row.

Uh and after that less so and the the last one was on the Monday the 5th.

Well, no there there was one on on the early morning hours of the 7th period.

So Rick, I think one of the things we have to talk about are all the artifacts that you found on Gardener Island.

Right.

I’m going to let you go in order.

whatever order you please, but let’s talk about that next.

Okay.

Uh, happy to talk about artifacts.

There’s no way I can accurately convey what it cost to get these little pieces of stuff.

The hours of tedium and frustration and heat and it just there’s no way I can describe it.

But we have them.

Yeah.

Is this the freckle cream? Oh, this the infamous freckle cream.

The infamous freckle cream jar.

Okay.

Now, we didn’t obviously we didn’t find this.

Yeah.

Th This is the um the the kind of box that uh freckle cream ointment came in.

But Dr.

Barry’s ointment.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What we found were the broken remnants of it.

And it all goes back together like a jigsaw puzzle.

M this one which is part of this was 20 m away near some turtle bones that showed marks of of having meat scraped off them.

And we we gave all this stuff to paleontologists who who do do this with like prehistoric tools and stuff so they know what to look for in stone tools and stuff.

And this piece of the freckle cream guar of a shape that you can hold it Yeah.

safely.

And the edge shows that it’s been used to carve.

So Amelia used this piece of glass to carve meat off a turtle bone.

Okay, we don’t have any idea what personal items she had with her on the airplane.

Okay, the only hint we have to that is what was inventoried in the airplane after the accident in Hawaii.

She just walked away from the airplane and got on a ship to go back to California.

It was the US Army that inventoried the airplane and they were really thorough.

I mean, right on every pencil and box of Kleenex and but there was no freckle cream jar there.

But but that’s that’s a personal item.

There weren’t any personal items in the army inventory.

Okay.

Stuff that she would have in her own personal stuff.

Um Amelia had freckles.

Who thought about that? Amelia didn’t like her freckles.

M uh and we have a record of her complaining.

Uh she was in a parade, but she didn’t have a hat.

Well, that’ll make my freckles.

And she was very conscious of her appearance for the press.

Historically, all through her life, you know, she she loved the attention and on the world flight, she paid close attention to looking good for the cameras.

So, it would make sense for her to have a bottle of freckle cream, but that’s all we can say.

Yeah, it would make sense.

But we talked about the um inventory.

So, on one of our expeditions, we find this thing.

What the heck is that? Well, little bit of research tells we found out that that’s part of um Olympia Cutlery Company, Providence, Rhode Island.

Mhm.

Bonehandled double-bladed jack knife.

And there were people who show this.

Oh, I know exactly what that, you know, and they sent us an example.

I Oh, yeah.

Sent us an example.

Yeah, it’s one of these.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s good.

Um, if we’ve got this, the rest’s got to be out there somewhere, but we didn’t find it on that trip.

Two trips later, I’m doing some metal detecting, and I was fortunate enough to be the one who found this.

doing some metal detecting.

got a hit and I poked around with the point of my um trow and it was only like that little bit that was sticking up and I looked at that I said I know exactly what you are and that was one of those moments of discovery in the field that are so oh yes but um uh so we get this out and what’s interesting about this is so we’ve got this We also found um one of the bone handle things here.

What we didn’t find are the blades.

Where are the blades? That’s right.

Yeah.

But this thing has been beaten apart with a a blunt instrument to break it apart to get the blades out.

Now, why would you do that if you’re a castaway? Yeah.

Because a pocket knife doesn’t do you much good.

But blades can be put as the points of spears to get little fish and stuff like that.

That’s what makes sense, right? But those are lost.

Yeah, because the So, so you got a jack knife.

Looks like castaway behavior, you know.

But what makes it even better is in that inventory we were talking about, there’s a bone handle double-bladed jack knife.

Oh, really? Blade number D.

If we had the freaking blade, we’d have the smoking gun.

Everybody wants the one thing that makes it unique.

But the blade’s gone.

So the serial number is was on the blade.

It’s not on the handle.

Oh, that’s so frustrating.

Yeah.

So jeez.

But this is a zipper pole.

Okay.

When we found it, about all we knew about it was we know who made it because it says so right on the the pole.

It says Talon Talon zippers.

So, we need to find out about zippers.

Okay.

Well, we found out a lot of interesting things about zippers.

First of all, they weren’t called zippers until much later.

Zipper was actually a trade name uh trademarked by Goodyear who used it to describe the closures on the oversho galashes that they made.

Mhm.

The thing we call zippers now were called hookless fasteners.

I didn’t know that.

Okay.

Nobody knows that.

Um back in the days when women’s shoes were hooks and buttons, um which were a pain.

Hookless facet.

A hookless facet.

Okay, makes sense.

Yeah.

And so Talon started producing these and what they really wanted was to get men’s trousers manufacturers to um stop putting buttons on the front of pants and put hookless fasteners.

The trouble was the early hookless fasteners tended to slide down and men weren’t nuts about that.

So they went to work and they created something called the autolock hookless fastener.

And this is an autolock hookless fastener.

It won’t slide down.

And they they patented patented the autolock in 1933.

Okay.

So this can’t be earlier than 1933.

But in 36 they started to export them.

When they started to export them, they stamped USA on the back of the slider.

This one has no USA.

Okay.

So, it can’t be later than 36.

I see.

Okay.

So, we’ve got this thing sandwiched between 1933 when Autolock was patented and 36 when USA started to be put on it.

And it puts it in the perfect time period to be associated with Airheart.

my wife Pat who uh was poking around there and she says, “Rick, there’s something over here you might want to look at.

” And come over there and laying there uh maybe 2 mters toward the beach among the coconuts and palm frrons was a piece of aluminum.

One of the first things we wondered about is, okay, this is a piece of airplane skin, but this I’ve seen a lot of wreckage from airplane accidents because of what I used to do for a living.

This doesn’t look like wreckage from an airplane accident.

Uh, aircraft skin from accidents tends to be accordioned, you know, impact.

This thing has been bowed out from this side.

This boom, you know, really bowed out.

I wonder if we have debris from an airplane that exploded.

Who can we ask? Well, Walter Korsgard was the lead FAA investigator on the Panama 103 Lockerby bombing and he was their explosives expert.

So, and he lived in DC.

So, we took this to see Walter Cororskard and he looked at it and he says, “Well, you’re right.

I mean, this this thing was it’s called area loaded from this side.

” Mhm.

uh very severe blow, but it wasn’t an explosion.

I said, “How can you tell?” Because if it was an explosion, it would be pockmarked with places where the molten metal hit it and melted a little bit.

Very telltale.

Now, this was not in an explosion.

I don’t know what blew it out, but it wasn’t an explosion.

Okay, this edge has been hacked with a sharp edge tool.

So that’s human work.

Gosh.

Okay.

Now you’ve got a fracture, a fracture up here, a tear along here.

So this thing is free on three sides.

And this has failed from metal fatigue for being back and forth and back and forth and back and forth until it failed against a straight underlying structure right there.

The um the actual font of this has been an issue of controversy long time.

Uh there were World War II airplanes that had that use that font.

Mhm.

Right there.

The aluminum that Lockheed used to build Electrus used a different font.

Okay, which would indicate that this would not be if it’s from Airheart’s airplane, it wouldn’t be from original construction of Airheart’s airplane.

But Airhearts airplane was severely damaged and there were a lot of repairs made and we don’t know for sure what the aluminum was labeled with there.

So that’s where the the reasoning on this.

Yeah.

Why why can it not be from the C47 where it there’s a place where the um rivet pattern matches? Well, this is a C-47.

Great airplane by the way.

But uh and the place where the rivet pattern matches is just outboard of the engine the cell.

Right.

Right in there.

How do you blow that out from the inside? Yeah.

Like can’t happen.

And then once it’s blown, how do you get the rivets to fall out from stress grow? It Oh, and and how do you get the the flexing? It doesn’t h It just doesn’t work.

Yeah.

And now So I’ve written a book.

One more good flight.

The Amelia Heheart tragedy is the summary really of the 34-year investigation.

And it’s it’s not all in here because the book would be that thick if it was all in.

But this is a pretty good summary of it.

And there’s over 1,200 endotes in it.

So you don’t have to believe anything I say.

you know, the the documents are in there and the descriptions of what we did to make sure our conclusions are right are all in here.

It’s being called the definitive work on the heart disappearance.

Um, and I think it is in all humility.

One more good flight is a reference to a comment she made to journalist Ed Allen, worked for the Herald Trabune.

uh before she set off on her attempt to fly around the world and she told him, you know, I think there’s about one more good flight left in my system and I hope this trip around the world is it.

Well, be careful what you wish for.

Yeah.

And as we dug into this, we said we we’ve we’ve got to address not only what happened, how it happened, but also why it happened.

And that has to do with who Amelia Heheart was really.

And to know that we can’t rely on what Amelia Heheart said about herself or what her husband said about her.

We have to go back to the contemporary records, the letters, the messages and everything.

And we did that.

And it turns out that an awful lot of what everybody knows about Amelia Hart is just wrong.

you know, very different person than the person that has emerged from the legend.

And the legend has done so much good, inspired so many people, the fact that it’s really not that accurate.

That’s not as important as the fact that it helped these people.

You know, there has long been the accusation that what happened to really what really happened to Amelia Hart has been cover was covered up by the US government.

Mhm.

You know what? There really was the secretary of the treasury at that time the Coast Guard was under treasury.

Um Henry Morganthal.

So Morganthal is in a meeting in Washington with staff.

They’re talking about the WPA or something.

Now, Airheart and the phone rings.

Well, these meetings are being transcribed by a stenographer.

So, it’s all being written down.

Phone rings.

Morganthaw answers it.

It’s Ellaner’s secretary, Tommy Woman, and we have a transcript of Morganthaw’s end of the conversation.

We don’t know what Tommy said, but it’s easy to figure out.

So M Morgan thought this and I I could read you.

I’m going to paraphrase, but he says, “Oh, Tommy, we can’t do that because if we release this report, Amelia Heheart’s name reputation is finished.

” And you know how closely she’s associated in the public’s eye with the Roosevelt administration.

You know, she’s campaigned for it.

The president’s already taken all kinds of hate for the $40 million spent on a fruitless search and we’ve got elections coming up.

We can’t do this.

Oh yeah.

Okay.

Well, see what you can do for him.

So they kept that report classified and that report remained classified until like 1982.

Oh wow.

which gave Putnham, her husband, a chance to edit and publish the book that was going to be World Flight and ended up being Last Flight, much of it written by Airheart, but heavily edited by Putnham, which portrayed her as the great pioneering aviator that mysteriously disappeared through bad luck and so forth.

Whether you need to want to believe it or not, the documented truth needs to come out so that the only way we can know our past and therefore chart our future.

Is to have the truth.

And to finish off, I think we have to talk about what do you think her last days would have looked like? Because from when we’re talking about this the records from the plane or a part of it, it sounds like they were mostly trying to be in the cockpit was there.

But eventually someone whether that’s just Amelia on her own or with Fred Nunan, they ventured eventually to the island.

Oh yeah.

Oh no.

She she she definitely Now whether Nunan ever got ashore or not, I don’t know.

Okay.

There’s been no evidence of him of his body there.

But we we know where Hehart died and it was 2 and a half miles away down at the other end of the island because she was looking for a spot where it was good to survive.

Mhm.

And the spot where the airplane was landed was not a good spot.

That’s that’s a miserable part of the island.

It’s sheltered from the trade winds.

It’s hot.

It’s clammy.

It stinks of bird manure.

But you go down to the um the place where her campsite was.

It’s the best place on the island.

It’s narrow enough so you can get to the lagoon easily for getting clams.

Mhm.

Turtles.

You can easily get to the reef where you can get fish that are trapped in little tidal pools on the the reef flat.

At that time there were trees there called Koa trees.

They’re fairly easy to climb.

good place to watch the horizon for a ship because what you want most is to be rescued, right? So, yeah, it makes all the sense in the world for for her to be there.

But what were her last days like? From what we found, uh, first of all, she didn’t die a violent death.

Uh, because her body was found lying under what it’s called locally a ren tree according to Gallagher who described where the partial skeleton was found.

So, she apparently died fairly peacefully or at least didn’t move around a lot.

Well, you were saying previously from the radio transmissions that she may have hurt her ankle.

Hurt hurt her ankle.

So, that that would inhibit her ability to move around much, but she was able to move around enough to get little fish and birds and some clams.

The problem with that, you can live on that stuff, assuming she got enough water from the system we talked about.

Yeah.

And uh she’s getting little fish and birds and stuff.

There’s no carbohydrates in that.

And you live on that long enough, try to live on that long enough and you can die of something called protein poisoning.

It’s also called rabbit starvation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And um that may be what or for some reason it just didn’t rain enough and she died of dehydration.

or suns.

There’s lots of ways to die on that island, but I’ve tried a couple of them, but uh the there’s it is true and there’s been a lot of talk about this.

The island is home to the world’s largest land crab, Burgess Latro, the coconut crab.

The infamous coconut crab.

And it’s it’s a favorite on Reddit.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And coconut crabs are really cool.

They get a bad rep.

Um I’ve known a couple of them pretty well, but they don’t uh and and they’re they’re scavengers like all crabs.

Uh and and they will um go off with with bones.

But the aggressive guys are the little strawberry hermit crabs.

M they they live in a shell, borrowed shell about the size of a baseball and they’re the color of a strawberry and they got little pinchers, but they’re they can be very aggressive.

When we’re when we’re down there working in that castaway campsite area and we’d break for lunch, as soon as you open the lunch cooler, scuttle, scuttle, scuttle, here they come down out of the trees across hundreds of them.

So scary.

and you have a sandwich in your hand, they’ll crawl up your pant leg to get to your sandwich.

And if you lay down to take a nap, here they come.

And if you don’t stop them, they will start taking little pieces out of you.

Now, you can only hope that she was dead before that happened.

It’s not a good thing to even think about.

Yeah.

I don’t.

So, people talk about the coconut as not the coconut crabs, it’s the strawberry hermits that I worry about.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it’s possible what you even said is if she did hurt her ankle and she got a cut of some sort, she could have been had sepsis or anything.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, like there’s it’s um not a good place to be a castway.

No.

Is there anything that I haven’t asked? I know there’s millions of things that we could talk about, but I was going to ask you, what was that biggest discovery, that biggest Eureka moment for you that really made you think, okay, we’ve got this? We got the right place.

Yeah.

What What was the thing that made you be like definitively Amelia Heheart was on this island? She did die here.

It was 1997.

I get the email from Peter McQuary who says, “Oh yeah, I was just in Terara and uh yeah, there are telegrams here from Gallagher and uh yeah, he’s he says that uh um might be a millart.

” And I thought it really happened.

All this rumor about bones being found that nobody believed and all this other stuff.

And I said to Pat at the time, “We’ve got this.

” You know, this is real.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Was incredible.

Yeah.

40 years.

Oh, yeah.

What’s next? Oh, I’ll tell you exactly what’s next, but you don’t have time to Okay.

We’ll save that for another Do another episode.

Yeah, we’ll do another episode.

Yeah.

Thank you so much, Regless.

It was amazing as always to speak to you.

Well, I I like talking about this stuff.

I I want people to buy my book.

I want people to join Tiger and help support the work we do because it’s important, not because of lost airplanes, but it’s important because we we teach people how to figure out what’s true.

And God, if there was ever a time that that needed, do it, it’s right now.

Absolutely.

And all the scientific progress that has come out of it as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Really important work.

Yep.

Thanks so much.

Thanks.