Regular Key forum readers are probably familiar with The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery’s (TIGHAR) longstanding claim that it found a piece of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra in 1991 on a remote Pacific island where TIGHAR founder Ric Gillespie claims Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan crashed and later died during an around-the-world flight.
Gillespie has tried unsuccessfully to match the piece of aircraft aluminum (colloquially knows as The Patch) to various places on an Electra using numerous photos and movie reel stills of different resolutions and now insists it was the piece of aluminum used to skin over a window just before the 1937 World Flight attempt. A volunteer photo analyzer (who also happens to be a TIGHAR board member) is currently undertaking the latest such attempt, with another “new” batch of photographs.
Despite spending more than $5 million on a dozen expeditions to the South Pacific, and producing numerous “research reports” to support his theory, nothing to date has proven that the aluminum sheet (known as The Magic Scrap to detractors) was even anywhere near the Electra.
Enter Earhart’s flying helmet, the one she wore for her first trip as a passenger across the Atlantic in 1928.
A US man has up for auction a leather flying helmet that his late mother had long insisted was Earhart’s, acquired after she finished the Women’s National Air Derby in 1929. His mother always said a boy who was trying to impress her found Earhart’s helmet on the ground and gave it to her after the race. Not exactly irrefutable provenance … “So your mother says … right …”
Current helmet owner Anthony Twiggs, 67, was told he’d need something irrefutable to prove his late mother’s tale was true. Enter Resolution Photomatch of Seattle, Washington, a leader in side-by-side photo comparison since 2016 and recommended by the auction house Twiggs was using. Resolution Photomatch’s opinions are regarded as expert in the field and have figured in several sales of prominent memorabilia. (Link here, registration required: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/10/nyregion/amelia-earhart-aviator-helm… )
For a mere $2,000, Twigg got his answer – it was a match, and the expected price for the helmet exceeds $80,000.
Just $2,000 … compared to more than $5 million. Maybe if Gillespie simply paid a few experts instead of always using ones willing to work for free, we would all know if The Patch/The Magic Scrap, is or isn’t a piece of Earhart’s airplane. It makes you wonder.
By: J Boyle - 16th February 2022 at 02:37
Leave it to Gillespie to come across churlish in the media.
I suspect it f he had it, it would be sold to the highest bidder, if course all the proceeds would go to his “research”.
It’s sad that the NYT see’s him as a AE expert or source. Then again, the Times isn’t what it used to be.
By: MFowler - 12th February 2022 at 14:23
Gillespie has weighed in, and the churlishness is almost predictable at this point:
“Mr. Twiggs decided it might be better in a museum instead of a closet in Minnesota.” (quoting the NYTimes story).
So what does he do? Give it to NASM, or the Purdue Collection, or the 99s Museum, or the International Women’s Air & Space Museum all of which have professionally curated, publicly accessible collections of Amelia memorabilia? No, he puts it up for auction to the highest bidder. No{w} it will go in somebody else’s closet. (says Gillespie).
By: dhfan - 11th February 2022 at 09:23
More to the point, work for free and guarantee to agree with Gillespie’s obsession.
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February 11, 2022 at 1:16 am