Very odd, considering Gillespie has already stated that he’s solved the Earhart mystery, and is just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

Full details of this newest so-called development are on the TIGHAR home page, but this separate appeal is interesting in that it is structured to raise a limited amount of money very quickly:

“Response to yesterday’s appeal for help in covering the cost of digitizing the newly acquired film has been encouraging. Thank you to everyone who has kicked in so far. To help us reach our goal of $2,000 a TIGHAR member has offered to match new donations dollar for dollar up to a total of $500.

The digitization is now scheduled to be done on March 11. Please take advantage this new challenge grant and help get the funding done.”

1/31/19 – later afternoon in the US, it’s not indicating which topics I’ve read by changing the title font from bold to regular.

As J Boyle said, I can’t work up any enthusiasm for this yet. There are far too many loose ends that haven’t even been looked at to make a flatly declarative statement that it’s Earhart’s aircraft. The USN lost at least one PV-1 Ventura in the area; the Japanese had their own and license-built copies of several twin-tailed Lockheed products, and we don’t know how many of those may have been lost in that area (the Buka area had numerous Japanese air bases).

The US used a variety of Lockheed twin-tailed craft, including the PV-1 Ventura, PV-2 Harpoon, Hudson, and C-56 Lodestar; there was also the Beech C-45 Expediter. The wreck could be an Australian Hudson or other Lend-Lease twin-tailed Lockheed provided to that ally.

Then there is the small matter of whether Earhart would have had enough gas left to double back that far, after almost making it to Howland Island.

But, as TIGHAR has amply demonstrated, all you need is a “preponderance of evidence” to declare something solved beyond a reasonable doubt.This group says all they need is $200,000 – pocket change compared to the millions of dollars TIGHAR has spent to find, well, nothing.

You can’t fix stupid … but you can gag it with duct tape so it doesn’t make any annoying sounds.

But that’s not going to do TIGHAR much good, if Miller’s trombone now resides with the Glenn Miller Birthplace Society. But we’ll just ignore that inconvenient fact …

I’ll be generous and say, TIGHAR is going to find the correct style of engine. It will have managed to unearth the records with said aircraft’s serial numbers and other identifying marks. The engine will be recovered, examined, and verified by independent experts as from the aircraft that carried Glenn Miller.

At the end of the day … So What?

There is already a new book out that makes a very convincing case that Miller went down in the Channel. We know from prior statements by Gillespie that he thinks little of efforts to find and photograph WWII shipwrecks, saying, “What’s the point in finding and photographing them?” Can’t the same thing be said about this effort?

At the end of the day, what is Gillespie’s purpose in doing this? Finding the airplane isn’t going to solve the mystery of what happened.

Anddddd it starts. The TIGHAR publicity machine kicks into high gear to “solve” one of the “world’s greatest aviation mysteries’ with, waitttttttttt for it – a “preponderance of evidence.”

J Boyle said, “It looks more like a trip to get video footage for fundraising/propaganda.”

TIGHAR has posted its trip diary from the Glenn Miller Research Expedition here, https://tighar.org/Projects/GlennMiller/glennmillerdailies.html, and it looks like J Boyle was spot on. Selected highlights:

We don’t know what this trip cost (except for the presumed $5,000 that one TIGHAR member paid to accompany it), we don’t know how much TIGHAR actually raised for this four-day effort, but we do know a lot of video was shot of various scary-looking things and a few people Important To This Research Project. There has been minimal, i.e. no, interest in any of this on the TIGHAR forums.

It seems like most – if not all – of this “research” could have been done via phone, e-mail, Skype, etc. They could have probably gotten stock video footage of scary-looking Channel waters for less than it cost to fly the three of them over there. So … what was the purpose, if not what J Boyle originally stated?