Still more of TIGHAR's Earhart "evidence" – isn't

That wasn’t the main reason, dhfan, but, yeah, the questionable expenditures were a factor.

Hence MFowler’s ire, because some of the holidays were partly at his expense.

“Crashed and sank” wouldn’t justify a holiday each year though: that would be admitting that you don’t have a chance of finding anything. So if you dismiss the crashed and sank idea (with no evidence whatsoever) then you can justify spending cash on going somewhere nice.

And on the basis that you’re making up any hypothesis you like, you can pretty much decide exactly where you want to go. It’s a nice little earner 🙂

What always puzzled me was their reported insistence that “Crashed and Sank” was unlikely or impossible.

How could it be impossible on a flight over water?

For a group whose name indicates their mission is to recover aviation artifacts, they apparently haven’t found any other than that scrap of C-47. There are dozens of Aviation Societies in the UK that have found more for a lot less money.

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With respect to TIGHAR’s investigation of the hypothesis that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan failed to reach Howland Island because they landed their plane on the island of Nikumaroro, I should point out when TIGHAR was founded in 1985, Ric Gillespie himself initially supported the “crash-and-sink” hypothesis postulating that Earhart and Noonan’s disappearance came about because their plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean. By 1988, however, two members of his organization had TIGHAR change its mind about the veracity of the “crash-and-sink” hypothesis promoted by Elgen Long and devise the hypothesis that Earhart and Noonan landed on Nikumaroro. When I took 6th grade class in Lincoln Elementary School in 2003, I got to learn all the hypotheses as to why Earhart and Noonan vanished, including debunked conspiracy theories about the duo being captured by the Japanese and held hostage in the Marianas.

Although the TIGHAR website still lists the Maid of Harlech project as active, the fact that the P-38 with serial number 41-7677 was designated as a protected site by the Welsh Government’s historic environment service in 2019 may prompt TIGHAR to shut down the Maid of Harlech project in the event that wave actions remove layers of sand covering the remainder of the P-38, in which case the Imperial War Museum Museum could save the aircraft from looting by donating it to the museum’s storage room.

https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Overview/AEoverview.html

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/nostalgia/american-fighter-plan…

On the subject of TIGHAR, I doubt any of us really know what we’re talking about. They haven’t really done anything except go on holiday and shout a lot. 

It’s debatable whether TIGHAR should even be a subject of discussion on a serious historic aviation forum!

Interesting in an annoying kind of way that Vahe.D persists in writing about things he (? hard to say) knows little if anything about.

Beau said, “What other projects have TIGHAR been involved in and have any of them come to fruition?”

The two part answer is “Lots” and “Nope!”

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery has never recovered a single complete airframe since its founding in 1985.

It has never recovered a single verified piece of a historic aircraft.

It has spent more than $9.3 million ($2.6 million in salaries alone) since 2000 and has little to show for it. Further discussion is here: https://mffowler.net/tighar_analysis.htm

As Mark Pilkington pointed out a few years ago – The International Group for not one Historic Aircraft Recovery.

They’re still batting on about and professing to spend money on the P.38 which is protected and can’t be touched.

What other projects have TIGHAR been involved in and have any of them come to fruition? I recall a P-38 on a Welsh sandbank that is, as far as I know,  still there,  anything else?

“There are plenty of valuable lessons to be learned from the AES.” …

Yes, it seems he learned them well.

It sounds like his playbook for 30 years.

J Boyle, I’ll take Door No. 3, “another way to keep in the spotlight and make a few bucks?”

I feel that this quote directly from Gillespie might explain a lot: “They are a classic illustration of what happens when a closed circle of true believers makes the facts subservient to the forgone conclusion.  Conjecture that fits the conclusion becomes fact and when facts are shown to be false they are readily explained with new layers of conjecture.  The inevitable result is an increasingly convoluted version of reality that can only survive outside the closed circle if the audience is unable or unwilling to question the foregone conclusion.”

He’s not talking about TIGHAR, although it may sound eerily apt. He was trashing the members-only Amelia Earhart Society … way back in 2004. The quote begins, “There are plenty of valuable lessons to be learned from the AES.” 

A late in life attack of conscience? (It can be such a pesky thing).

Not wanting to be remembered as the Harold Hill of historic aviation?

Or another way to keep in the spotlight and make a few bucks?

Your choice…

Pick one or all three.

I wonder if Rick is trying to implement an “Exit Strategy” so he can retire from ongoing involvement- or to improve his legacy?, ie close down the Earhart / Nikumaroro theory by killing off the main pillars of TIGHARs claims and then claiming he has simply followed the “scientific process”.

Or perhaps he thinks there is a new series of books and talk back show opportunities on “how I debunked” the “castaway” theory?

J Boyle said, “I seriously considered joining, in fact a friend gave me a “collectable” Lockheed Vega metal (note the irony)  bank with their logo…presumably an early fundraiser.”

Funny you should mention the Vega bank. If you search “TIGHAR” on Ebay, a lot of those show up … along with TIGHAR patches and pins, project T-shirts (pre-owned), and Gillespie’s previous Earhart book. Seems like some former (I assume) members might be trying to recoup some of their investment.

It is a shame the media has let them get away with it.

One credible aviation author I know dismissed him as a charming rake, pretty much harmless which he would be if credibility didn’t matter.

At any rate, I think he figured it was a good story, truth (and science) be d@mned.

J Boyle said, “instead it became essentially a one topic group with pretty much one theory.”

Very true, and it’s a theory that Gillespie is apparently willing to defend to the death, because it has, among other things, gotten him the most media attention and the biggest fundraising hauls (at least $2.7 million in salary alone) over the years – We solved the Earhart mystery!!!!! – except, well … no.

As J Boyle succinctly points out above, none of TIGHAR’s “preponderance of evidence” has ever been shown to be directly tied to Earhart. None of it has ever been independently analyzed by a disinterested third party. None of it has been accepted by a competent or qualified outside agency as credible.

As is made painfully clear by the new timeline analysis of The Magic Scrap (link above), TIGHAR repeatedly failed to follow the scientific method when new facts indicated a new line of inquiry should be pursued. That’s not the way “science” is supposed to work, and you have to wonder why TIGHAR repeatedly failed to seriously look at anything that disagreed with their Earhart contentions. Saying, “Well, that’s science at work!” when some bit of their evidence is decisively proven to be not-Earhart’s isn’t letting the scientific method work – it’s more like grudgingly admitting you were totally and completely wrong after these little things the rest of us call “facts” make no other conclusion possible.

I’m not sure what they’d put in a “Research Center”, other than the bits of debris from its various “expeditions”…NONE of which have proven to be the “smoking gun”.

I have lost count of the times they have changed their preferred theory…

The magic scrap, (complete with a side trip to the very remote Idaho crash site of a NWA Electra to examine its wreckage to see if  they could make the scrap fit. Of course the wreckage was removed well before the war…as anyone who knew Idaho aviation history could have told them…

Radio transmissions that only a kid heard, last I heard they were finally determined to be a hoax

a blurry photo allegedly showing a gear leg sticking above the water, 

the found/lost/found bones (with a detour to smear the reputation of the first doctor who examined them when he said they were from a male). IIRC, after being lost for years they were found again and determined they were what the (first) doctor said they were 80 years ago.    Did they ever take back their remarks about the competency of the first doctor (who was well regarded in his day).

Have any of these panned out?

Did I miss any?

Now they seem to be hanging their theory on Google Earth-type photos that someone at home said he saw wreckage.

​​​​​​At this point how can anyone give them any credibility?

When they started, I had high hopes for the group. I seriously considered joining, in fact a friend gave me a “collectable” Lockheed Vega metal (note the irony)  bank with their logo…presumably an early fundraiser. It could have been a well funded, recognized group recovering historicairframes, instead it became essentially a one topic group with pretty much one theory.

And despite the millions in donations, it hasn’t recovered (or found) anything.

J Boyle said, “I’m not sure a well-reasoned post like your would make him change his mind.”

It won’t. Gillespie can’t quit because after almost 10 years of trying, he still hasn’t raised enough money to buy his Pennsylvania horse farm. Hence the new book, and now renewed chasing of Nungesser and Coli in Newfoundland.

As far as I know the horse farm is still owned by the “anonymous TIGHAR benefactor,” although the original deal was for TIGHAR (which is basically Gillespie and his wife) to buy the farm from the benefactor within five years and turn it into the TIGHAR Research and Conference Center. Needless to say, there have been no conferences … or lectures … or anything else besides a few TIGHAR board meetings … makes you wonder.

Well, what will his book say.. “I was wedded to a unsubstantiated theory for 30 years (despite a lot of evidence to the contrary) but now I’m coming clean”?

If he ignored and publicly belittled critics (which he seemingly did in my opinion), for those 30 years, I’m not sure a well-reasoned post like your would make him change his mind.

Likewise, it seems awfully late for him to have a  ” Road to Damascus” moment to clear his conscience or rehabilitate his reputation among all but the most fervent disciples.