Well, Sabrejet, I freely admit to being one of those taken in by Gillespie’s showmanship. He’s very, very good at spinning an extremely small and insignificant amount of stuff (of whatever nature) into a convincing-looking pile of … other stuff. It took me a long time to figure that out, but once you start applying critical thinking and normal scientific rigor to Gillespie’s many “facts,” well, they collapse like a proverbial house of cards.

Vahe.D – are you familiar with the phrase, “he drank the Kook-Aid”? The Wikipedia entry is quite instructive, in light of what you just typed.

I’m not going to disagree with anyone on your side of the pond about the pathetic state of non-profit regulations in the USA, it’s been a source of dismay to me for decades.

In fact, TIGHAR was “visited” by the IRS in 2018 or so, after being sued by millionaire Tim Mellon in a dispute over what some underwater video at Nikumaroro did or did not show. TIGHAR’s IRS tax forms suddenly got much more descriptive and verbose about its “educational” mission and “young people” and things like that. But nothing fundamentally changed.

And as for pivoting to be all-in on the Earhart mystery … in 1988 when Gillespie launched his self-styled Earhart Project, you have to remember where TIGHAR was at as far as viability. It has been incorporated and given non-profit status three years earlier. It’s only noteworthy  “project” at the time was the search for Nungesser and Coli in the Maine woods – and that was going nowhere fast. Gillespie recognized that if he was going to make a living at “investigating” something to do with historic aircraft, he’d better find a subject that was a lot more recognizable to the general public.

Enter Amelia Earhart. Despite flatly stating that he had no interest in getting involved in the racier guesses about Earhart’s fate, Gillespie went all on on his Nikumaroro Hypothesis. And the money and media fame have been rolling in ever since – Gillespie is everywhere on the internet, and if you look at total revenues compared to total expenses for 2000-2021, there’s more than $300,000 that’s not accounted for when reviewing the tax forms (which may mean nothing because of the loosey-goosey way things can be reported on said forms).

Vahe.D – with all due respect, you are blindly accepting Gillespie’s contention that he was doing science, and that’s why it took so long to nail down the provenance of Artifact 2-2-V-1. As J Boyle pointed out, the three decade-plus saga of that piece of metal is much more complex. And could have been solved long ago, but that isn’t the way Gillespie works.

For a detailed timeline, please take a look at this page: https://mffowler.net/piece_of_earharts_aircraft.htm

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

Gillespie’s sole focus seems to be getting his new book out there and in the public’s eye before Tony Romeo can come back with the photo that would completely destroy TIGHAR’s 30-year-old “hypothesis.”

Which, to me, says something about TIGHAR’s ultimate purpose and goal. It’s not a good look, but that never seems to deter Gillespie.

Masterful overview, Mark. I’ve watched from afar as Gillespie has tried to trash and and all hope that the sonar image found off Howland Island last year is anything but Earhart’s Electra. After all, he has a retirement plan, I mean a book, to push over the finish line.

I took a hard look at Gillespie’s oft touted “preponderance of evidence,” and as you’d expect, once hard questions are asked, the story looks a lot different: https://mffowler.net/amelia_earhart_archaeology_evidence.htm