Howdy folks and greetings from the Great Plains of North Texas!
Recap
In yesterday's post we talked about what caused Emelia's plane to be so far off course.
Researchers believe it was part error on her navigator's calculations but also cloudy weather which prevented him from using the stars to correct their path and lastly, the radio signals were not getting to the ship which was waiting for her on Howland Island and their's were not getting to her.
They ended up being 100 miles off course and close to running out of fuel.
Today's story
Emelia landed on the first island she saw which was Nikumaroro. Actually it is technically an Atoll which is an outcropping of coral. Apparently they were not seriously hurt even though the landing had to be a rough one.
She kept broadcasting, trying to reach the Coast Guard ship Itasca, at Howland Island. They weren't receiving her transmissions but a girl in Florida was!
Betty was 15 at the time and loved listening to her father's radio, he'd put a 60 foot antenna up and the radio had abilities to receive short wave transmissions.
Betty was sitting in front of the radio when she heard a female voice come over saying, "This is Emelia Earhart. This is Emelia Earhart." source
Well, Betty was a big fan of Emelia like so many girls and women of the time so she excitedly grabbed a school notebook and began taking down every word she could make out.
The transmission was faint, scratchy, fragmented and intermittent. It kept breaking up so she didn't really get sentences but one or a few words at a time. This went on for an hour until they stopped.
When her father got home Betty told him about it and showed him the notebook and he rushed out and called the Coast Guard. But they blew him off. They told him that they had ships in the area and everything was under control.
Obviously they didn't take him seriously. If they HAD, they would've been able to find her in quick order!
No one believed her
Betty kept the notebook and tried for decades to get someone to listen to her about it but no one would until the research group that I talked about in previous posts, TIGHAR...which stands for The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, took notice.
Those guys did indeed listen to her and went and sat down with her and her notebook 60 some years after the event. They determined that her dad's radio which was a Zenith Model 1000Z, was very capable of receiving signals from the South Pacific.
You can read TIGHAR'S technical analysis on how this is possible here
Here are the three pages of notes that she took... in her handwriting and also printed out so they're easier to read.
Page 1:
Page 2:
Page 3:
According to these notes, obviously they had landed on a beach and not crashed in the ocean as the government has always stated. It sounds like they had some minor injuries, especially Fred.
According to the timeline she had landed at low tide so the plane filling with water was the high tide coming in a few hours later.
She was telling them exactly where she was
The TIGHAR researchers couldn't understand why she would be repeating the words "New York" though.
They think she was actually saying Norwich. Because on Nikumaroro is a well known ship wreck of the Norwich City, a steamer that ran aground in 1929.
They believe she was telling everyone where she was because she knew they were aware of that ship.
Here's a photo of Nikumaroro taken in 1938 which clearly shows the grounded Norwich:
In the next post we'll talk about more evidence and the ongoing search being conducted by Rober Ballard, the man who found the Titanic.
Thanks for reading folks, God bless you all!
-jonboy
Texas
PS- A special shoutout to the 9th Grade class of 