In todays paper, TIGHAR wags its tail again.

The really sad thing is that there is more credibility to the TIGHAR search for Amelia Earhart than there is to the Burma Spitfire hunt.

At least we know it happened. Out there, somewhere, are certainly the remains of Amelia, Fred and one Electra. More than can be said for the Spitfires of Burma.

Drip. Drip. Drip….

What next? Amelia Earhart was inspiration for the Robinson Crusoe novel?…

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2346845/Recently-unearthed-photos-prove-Amelia-Earhart-survived-castaway-remote-Pacific-island-plane-vanished-75-years-ago.html

The wonderful thing about Tiggers
Is Tiggers are wonderful things.
Their tops are made of rubbers
The bottoms are made of springs.
They’re
Bouncy,
Flouncy,
Trouncy,
Pouncy,
Fun, fun, fun, fun, FUN!!!

Echoing (no pun intended) Malcolm McKay’s sensible comment, the Freeman Field Recovery Team have posted the following:

“At the risk of angering fans of TIGHAR and their crusade to find Amelia Earhart, we tend to believe on our team that they may be grasping at straws and forcing the evidence fit their hypothesis. It is understandable and easy to fall into that trap. The latest hype from the group is a sonar anomaly that they claim “may be” from Earhart and Noonan’s Electra. We offer up an alternate hypothesis. We believe that it may be debris from the SS. Norwich City, which ran aground on Gardner Island years before the famous flight and which broke apart only a couple of hundred yards away from this new sonar anomaly.”

Maybe they should turn to that other Lockheed off Britain’s coastline that they “claim” and put together a rescue package if they can find a museum capable and willing to take it? Perhaps a certain redundant lifting frame from another project might be possible to convert? It will soon be surplus to requirements – or is already!

Banned from commenting, and banned from even accessing the forum via my ISP. I have ways however :dev2:

Meanwhile, here’s some music, and a folk-rock classic from 1972:

Its the album In Search of Amelia Earhart by Plainsong (full details on wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Amelia_Earhart)

As one of the legion of people banned by TIGHAR

What exactly does that mean? How has Tighar “banned” you, and from what? Certainly not from public comment. Perhaps from membership?

As one of the legion of people banned by TIGHAR I took that latest claim with the mandatory grain of salt that is required. As is standard for TIGHAR this is the latest in a series of claims that something may be evidence of Earhart’s Electra, or Earhart’s freckle cream, shoes, flight jacket, skeleton, finger etc. etc. etc. and if no firm correlation is found, again as usual, it will be added to the ever growing list of circumstantial evidence that is claimed, when it is all combined, to confirm TIGHAR’s theory about Nikumaroro. The problem with this latest claim is that in all the hype (generated by TIGHAR press releases) everyone is conveniently asked to forget that just a few hundred metres to the south there is a honking great debris field from the wreck of the Norwich City any part of which given the intensity of tropical storms in that part of the world could have been swept up and deposited where the “object” which is subject of that sonar image is located.

Before the July 2012 trip to the sunny shores of Nikumaroro the big publicity item used to raise money was the “Bevington Object”. A speck in a grainy enlargement of a very small snapshot taken by Eric Bevington in 1937 which was massaged by TIGHAR’s image analyst into a claim to be the leg of the Electra’s undercarriage. Mr Gillespie claimed that the US State Department had confirmed that – however the truth as he has admitted on his forum is that there is nothing in writing only that they said it was possible. Possible is not certainty but few people understand that. Then we had more hype about the freckle cream jar which has been shown to be of a type long out of production before the Earhart disappearance which leaves us to ask “If Earhart hated her freckles why was she carrying around a jar of freckle cream nearly 20 years old”. That question is unanswerable as are many of the TIGHAR’s claims because to accept them one is required to make a leap of faith, like those who accept that the famous Betty Notebook which purports to be a garbled record of a radio message from Earhart received on an unlikely harmonic of the original transmission frequency. A record which had been already offered to Fred Goerner years before by the owner and rejected by him as either a fake or the imaginative ramblings of a 14 year old girl.

The TIGHAR circus goes on – the trained lions are getting old and arthritic, the magician’s tricks are becoming a little transparent and the show is haemorrhaging money. So what is one more claim in this long long saga? just more of the old time rock and roll. Enjoy the show but don’t take it too seriously.

Same story in today’s Daily Telegraph:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/?source=refresh

As a rule of thumb, if a newspaper posers a question in a headline, the answer is usually ‘no’ and you can move on to something a bit more substantial. Note that the Telegraph story is ascribed to ‘agencies’, which means that someone else a long way from the Telegraph (and Daily Mail) has done the fact checking, if any.

a more direct link is at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/kiribati/10091458/Amelia-Earhart-sonar-image-shows-what-may-be-lost-aviators-wrecked-plane.html

If this is a non-story, then both the Telegraph and The Mail have gone to a lot of trouble to illustrate it, and report the story in great detail

But I have to agree the the other posters: anything with TIGHAR involvement is about as credible as that famous “Sunday Sport” headline “WORLD WAR 2 BOMBER FOUND ON THE MOON”. (link at http://www.flickr.com/photos/62440303@N04/5683785190/)

Once lunar travel becomes an economic possibility, you can bet TIGHAR will want to raise funds to investigate…but why are they always looking into crashes on tropical islands? You never hear of TIGHAR trying to raise funds to recover a crashed aircraft off, say, the coast of Lincolnshire. Perhaps “World War 2 Bomber Found off Skegness” is not the sort of thing that newspaper headline writers long for

Those scans look like a twin engine plane, could be a Do17:stupid:

Same story in today’s Daily Telegraph:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/?source=refresh

As a rule of thumb, if a newspaper posers a question in a headline, the answer is usually ‘no’ and you can move on to something a bit more substantial. Note that the Telegraph story is ascribed to ‘agencies’, which means that someone else a long way from the Telegraph (and Daily Mail) has done the fact checking, if any.

The wonderful thing about TIGHAR…

All together now….

Bumping up this thread (rather than starting a new one) since it seems that the Daily Mail (much loved around these parts…or not) has got the story going again quote:

Is this Amelia Earhart’s plane? Sonar image from uninhabited Pacific island could show remains of aviator’s aircraft Electra that disappeared in 1937

Famous aviator disappeared as she attempted an around the world flight

TIGHAR have spent years investigating Earhart’s last, fateful flight

Image showed an ‘anomaly’ at a depth of 600 feet in the waters

By Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED: 16:08, 30 May 2013 | UPDATED: 17:43, 30 May 2013

A grainy sonar image captured off an uninhabited Pacific island could show the remains of Amelia Earhart’s doomed plane which disappeared in 1937.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) say the latest evidence could be a step closer to finding out the mystery behind her disappearance.

Earhart, then 39, was on the final stage of an an ambitious around-the-world flight along the equator in a twin-engine Lockheed Electra when she and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared.

The image was captured off an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati and showed an ‘anomaly’ at a depth of 600 feet in the waters.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2333142/Is-Amelia-Earhart-s-plane-Sonar-image-uninhabited-Pacific-island-remains-aviator-s-aircraft-Electra-disappeared-1937.html

Well…it is the “silly season” with (apparently) a lack of “real news stories”

…anyway I appreciated your apology; no hard feelings. 🙂

Thank you. I had already understood your take on the issue, and then I went a bit grumpy – I can only blame the red mist coming down 😀

The problem, to me at least, is that a lot of people see archaeology as simply digging holes and finding things. I suspect many would be surprised at how little actual digging real archaeologists do – usually all that is done either by students or hired local labour. The qualified people are there for specific specialist tasks and keeping an eye on the work as a supervisor, and intervening if some quite delicate work is needed. Most of the qualified archaeologist’s tasks are examining artefacts, comparing them with known typologies or creating new ones; doing various purely scientific tasks in relation to dating etc.; ensuring that the dig is properly recorded; photography, drawing sections, artefacts etc. etc. The actual digging while careful is really only the start as the real archaeological work starts after the results are in. As far as the Myanmar thing any qualified soil scientist or ground imaging specialist could handle that – it isn’t archaeological work at all. And as for the necessity of overseeing the actual dig there isn’t any need – everything in the ground above the buried Spitfires (if they existed) is disturbed soil with no reliable dating material (something as any person who has dug graves sites, like myself, is aware). All you need is someone who can operate a digger carefully and people who know how to shore up deep pits for safety purpose -experienced council workers could do that at a fraction of the cost. 🙂

…as an archaeologist all this silliness in Myanmar in the name of “archaeology” when in fact it is no more than chasing unsubstantiated rumours so the principals can make money is really beginning to irritate me…

I can understand your frustration. I don’t know if it has been mentioned on the ‘Spitfires from Myanmar (or not)’ thread (and I’m not reading the whole thing to find out) but the ‘backer’ of the whole venture surely wanted some return on his investment (not gift); if the backer invested, paid effectively, for publicity then that was what he’ll have been expecting…

…and those he invested the money in will have to provide it (if nothing else)! 😉

The whole thing reminds me of that scene in ‘The Right Stuff’ when the astronaut asks the rocket-scientist if he knows what makes the rocket fly; before the rocket-scientist has time to answer the astronaut says ‘funding!’

I hope you realise that I do have an appreciation for proper academic archaeology and I apologise for my rather heavy-handed attempt to start a debate about the merits of proper archaeology versus ‘popular archaeology’. Maybe this thread isn’t the right place for that debate…..anyway I appreciated your apology; no hard feelings. 🙂

Malcolm,

Sane as thou art…. Thee…. of all people, having participated and contributed, vented thy spleen, having been curtailed in thy explanatory endeavours and finally banned and unemcumbered of that tribe of solons….well know and, is beknowst to all that enter the den and peruse the epistles from The Striped Ones…. We, of that knowledge, are bestowed forever in our hearts and minds, that those guardians of the portals of Nikumaroro can never face their maker and be declared of sane mind.

Let it be so.

RPM…

Thank you David – perhaps I was overstating the case 😀 I suppose these things go on because there is nothing on TV to divert people.

Surely the archaeologists have just been brought in for their equipment and expertise in locating items underground and interpreting images and the age of the strata pure and simple. I do not think anybody is suggesting they are there on some sort of historical dig it is just a job which they have the expertise to do. The merits of this actual job are no reflection on their capabilities or any future historical work they may be involved in.

Oh and TIGHAR is wagging its tail, something about a P38.

…I might add…

Malcolm,

….especially the one from Liverpool….

RPM

…Somehow in the face of this ongoing silliness even TIGHAR manage to look sane.

Malcolm,

Sane as thou art…. Thee…. of all people, having participated and contributed, vented thy spleen, having been curtailed in thy explanatory endeavours and finally banned and unemcumbered of that tribe of solons….well know and, is beknowst to all that enter the den and peruse the epistles from The Striped Ones…. We, of that knowledge, are bestowed forever in our hearts and minds, that those guardians of the portals of Nikumaroro can never face their maker and be declared of sane mind.

Let it be so.

RPM…

I have been interested in these last few exchanges. I had assumed that archaeology had become vey broad based in the past few decades and you will find many varied definitions of traditional archaeology. Surely aviation archaeology is a proper subdivision of the discipline? I found this definition which seems to encompass the valid work which many knowledgable people undertake.

“Aviation archaeology is a recognized sub-discipline within archaeology and underwater archaeology as a whole. It is an activity practiced by both enthusiasts and academics in pursuit of finding, documenting, recovering, and preserving sites important in aviation history.”

Well I know I sounded a little terse, perhaps grumpy, but as an archaeologist all this silliness in Myanmar in the name of “archaeology” when in fact it is no more than chasing unsubstantiated rumours so the principals can make money is really beginning to irritate me . This is the 21st century and most of us are from countries with fine education systems and every opportunity to learn how to assess the veracity of things. Yet there seems to be a large number of otherwise normal people willing to believe that a large quantity of aircraft buried in wooden crates under many tons of earth, in one of the wettest countries on the planet, are somehow going to defy nature and be miraculously preserved. Now I don’t mind that so much but attaching the concept of archaeology to what they are doing is to me about as relevant as calling a haircut brain surgery. So please accept my apology if I appeared rude. 🙂

Somehow in the face of this ongoing silliness even TIGHAR manage to look sane.