Jennifer Foster Online

I originally saw this on an A&E special and thought it was very interesting. They now think that Amelia Earheart crash landed on Gardner Island, an atoll in the middle of the Pacific, on a reef that is exposed at low tide.

This is the link to TIGHAR’s website (The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery) where they go into all the details about why they think this is the final location for Amelia Earheart and Fred Noonan: http://www.tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/AEhypothesis.html

This is the Wikipedia site for Gardner Island (now known as Nikumaroro): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardner_Island. It seems to have a history of being a rough place to live.

Just as a side note, when I was reading about this topic and researching where in the world Gardner Island is, I stumbled across the Wikipedia entry for Coconut crabs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_crab

I believe there was a theory that Fred Noonan was injured in the crash and may have been attacked by these. According to Wikipedia “The Coconut Crab (Birgus latro) is the largest land-living arthropod in the world” and its pincers are strong enough to crack open a coconut, hence the name. I don’t know about you, but coocnuts in my experience are pretty darn hard to crack open. If you look at the pictures these things are probably the creepiest things I have ever seen, even before you know that they live in trees, weigh up to 9 pounds, and have a leg span of up to three feet. Ewww! Hermit crabs are scavengers and these have been known to attack animals as big as rats or sea turtles. They may attack humans who are too sick to escape. Again, ewwww!