Earhart Festival doesn't feature TIGHAR

The annual Amelia Earhart Festival kicks off on July 18, 2024, in Earhart’s hometown of Atchison, Kansas, and will among other things feature a symposium discussion what happened to aviatrix Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan, who vanished during an attempted around the world flight in 1937. Panelists include:

• Tony Romeo and his brother, Lloyd Romeo, who last year captured very intriguing sonar images of what looks like a twin-engined aircraft on the deep ocean floor near Howland Island, Earhart’s intended destination. The Romeo’s believe Earhart and Noonan crashed and sank somewhere near Howland.
• Gary LaPook, a director of the Stratus Project, who for decades has been refining his hypothesis that Earhart and Noonan crashed and sank near Howland.
• Rod Blocksome of the deep sea search firm Nauticos, which has done several searches of the seafloor around, again, Howland.
• Liz Smith, proponent of another version of the crashed and sank theory, but again ending up somewhere near Howland.
• The moderator is Dorothy Cochrane, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. She has long maintained that Earhart ran out of gas and ditched somewhere near … Howland Island.

It is significant to note that a respected curator of the Smithsonian Institution is moderating this symposium.

It is also significant to note who won’t be there – neither The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recover or its director, Ric Gillespie, who has long maintained that Earhart managed to land on a remote Pacific atoll and then died there as a castaway.

Romeo is going back this summer and try to get definitive photographic evidence of what the sonar image actually is. Gillespie, in the meantime, is pushing ahead with the publication of his “definitive” what-happened-to-Earhart book in mid-September. Which of course totally supports his died-as-a-castaway hypothesis. You would think Gillespie would adopt the professionally prudent tack of waiting to see if Romeo comes back with the goods or not. You would think.