MFowlerMark_pilkington said:
“1. The Earhart Project – @30 Years?, >$2MUSD , 9 Trips to Niku? and not 1 piece of undeniable Earhart or Electra evidence.
3. Historic Preservation education and training to museums/restorers – Yet Tighar is the most derided, least respected “Aviation Heritage group” in the world.
In fact, TIGHAR has spent more than $4.5 million on the Earhart Project just since 2008. It’s not possible for the general public, looking at available IRS 990 tax returns, to figure out exactly how much TIGHAR has spent on this effort since it started in 1988, because of the way TIGHAR filed some past tax returns – for whatever reason, TIGHAR combined its costs for the Earhart Project and Project Midnight Ghost (contrary to non-profit best practices guidelines). I have their tax returns for the last 10 years, but TIGHAR doesn’t post past returns on its website and the IRS doesn’t keep them for very long.
TIGHAR has never released the cumulative costs for any of its projects, at least in a readily-accessible form. While Gillespie is always ready to talk about how many times TIGHAR has been to Nikumaroro, and extremely eager to talk about what it has found there, when it comes to talking about how much it has cost to find those things, well, “expeditions are expensive.” Over the course of 30-odd years, it is basically very difficult and time-consuming to know. At least in a way that is relatively easy for potential donors/members to figure out. Most of the data a person would need is probably on the website, buried in the back issues of newsletters or in expedition summary reports, but it is not in any way remotely transparent. Which also goes against best practices for non-profit governance.
As far as historic education and training goes, at one point TIGHAR put on semi-regular “field schools,” where people could sign up for a week or so of getting dirty and sweaty while poking around old aircraft crash sites/airfields, while learning something about archaeology and aviation history and preservation. I participated in the 2005 field school. While it was fun and I learned a lot, there are financial aspects of that experience I have chosen to remain silent about.
The last field school was in 2013 and there have been no plans publicly announced for the next one. I’m not a wreck chaser or hard-core airplane nut, but I’m pretty sure there are an abundance of crash sites in the continental US that TIGHAR could use. I know of at least one in my state, that I told TIGHAR about for possible field school use. Nothing came of it. While Gillespie talks about helping individual kids with school reports, or sometimes working with an entire classroom full for a special effort, is that really enough to meet the educational mission its non-profit status was granted for? Not my call.
The only other thing education-related I know of is TIGHAR’s self-published “Guide to Aviation Historic Preservation Terminology” which first came out in 1991. This is TIGHAR’s – basically, Gillespie’s – opinion of how various aircraft should be categorized and labeled.
To my knowledge, no other museum, group or entity has accepted these definitions as a standard. So it assembled some terms and even had a meeting with a number of aviation-related entities about the topic. Kudos to TIGHAR … but that was almost 30 years ago. What has it done since?
MFowlerbuzzbeurling said, “Amelia Earhart, Glenn Miller, the French Oiseax(sorry for mispellings). Interesting how donations are asked for searches that will take years and never be finished. Sounds like a well paid job for life. Maybe they will get a big government grant as well from various countries.”
buzzbeurling raises two good points, the first of which agrees with how my view of TIGHAR evolved over my 18 year membership – TIGHAR is in the business of looking for things that can’t be found. Or the chance of finding them is, to quote from TIGHAR’s forums, “vanishingly small.” It is a business – make no mistake – regardless of whether it has the IRS’ non-profit seal of approval. It is the only job Gillespie has had for more than three decades, and he has made a very decent living at it, in a succession of houses, which have been supported and/or paid for in part by the very members he says he serves. All of this is public record.
But … all of his many, many, projects – every single one – has been a failure. Every. Single. One. I am at a loss as to how that record can continue to inspire any level of confidence, in the general public or potential donors.
TIGHAR has gotten money from the US government, but only in small quantities, for doing historic or cultural resource surveys from an aviation history perspective – should this or that crash site be preserved?, basic things like that. TIGHAR advertises for these “contract services” the its website.
What is nominally interesting is that the person who has either done or led many of these contracted efforts is a longstanding TIGHAR member, who got their advanced degree through a TIGHAR scholarship program, which was established by a different then-TIGHAR member some years ago, and which apparently only ever awarded this one scholarship, as nothing further was mentioned ever in TIGHAR’s newsletters (that I was able to find. If anyone knows otherwise, please correct). Odd, to say the least.
MFowlerGillespie, TIGHAR’s executive director, said in 2013, “TIGHAR is one of the most efficient, cost-effective, low-overhead, most bang-for-the-buck nonprofits you’ll ever see.” Examination of its IRS 990 tax form filings might raise some questions about that statement. One definition of “efficient” is taking in more donations than you spend on your activities, to keep the organization moving forward. Previous charts in this thread have highlighted some of Gillespie’s other talking points. The ProPublica website has a Non-Profit Explorer that allows you to both download group’s 990 forms, and breaks down each year into basic categories, with analysis. TIGHAR’s is here: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/510282621.
The analysis is interesting in that it summarizes total functional expenses and net income for the year, so you can get a quick read on how the group does business, and has fared over the last five years. The bottom line at TIGHAR is, it has spent $4.45 million, with a net income of minus $415,377. The chart makes for an interesting pattern:
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MFowlerJantz got the data for his bones reanalysis from TIGHAR. His reanalysis is only as good as the data he got.
TIGHAR – Gillespie – has a vested interest in getting as much mileage out of the Earhart mystery as possible.
Gillespie has a history of overselling various items as having “solved” the Earhart mystery, or if they a proven to have nothing to do with it, with minimizing or ignoring them. Gillespie has a history of only using one photoanalyst, and has never, to my knowledge, submitted that analyst’s results to outside, third-party analysis for verification or disapproval.
Which removes yet another important safeguard in the process, and, to me, calls into question this entire exercise on TIGHAR’s part.
MFowlerJ Boyle said, “I wonder if this claimed success isn’t a ill-considered scheme of the group?
Simply, if they’ve told everyone they’re right (and the soft-quoted “case closed”) why would anyone stick around to make estate and horse feed payments?”
I had not thought of it that way, but you’re right – Gillespie may well have shot himself in the foot in his single-minded desire to always, always, always be right. If people consider 99.9% “case closed,” why would anyone give him another penny to go back to Nikumaroro? There would no longer be a logical or reasonable, let alone sane, reason to do so. Hmmmmm …
MFowlerJBoyle said, “Let’s hope this thread is seen by journalists and the public when the group starts it’s next round of PR/hype/fund raising for their announced search for Miller.
Too many writers have just accepted the group at face value and forwarded their claims/theories unchecked to the public.”
After almost two decades as a TIGHAR member, once I started questioning how things work there, it became obvious, to me, that TIGHAR is in the business of looking for things that can’t be found.
Granted, their projects to date have all been a challenge from the get-go, but if you step back and take a dispassionate look, and don’t let yourself get swept up in the excitement of the hunt, there’s really, well, very little to nothing to base most of these projects on. Let alone giving them the remotest chance of any kind of success. It’s all about showmanship and marketing, both things Gillespie is very, very good at.
MFowlerBruce said, “What it essentially says is that IF Earhart can be shown to have been on the Island, there is a high probability that these were, indeed her remains. But the devil is in the detail.”
And that neatly sums up this latest Earhart revelation. TIGHAR has a vested interest and large financial stake in proving that the bones found on Nikumaroro ARE Earhart’s – or else 30 years worth of expeditions and research will collapse like a house of cards. Gillespie is already talking about another “real” TIGHAR expedition to Niku, and I would assume this latest report would be used to help promote fundraising for it.
The main problem with Jantz’s reanalysis I have is that the data for it came solely from TIGHAR – the single entity that has the most to lose if the bones are NOT Earhart’s. No matter how “scientific” you try to make said data collection and analysis, you’re going to have some inherent confirmation bias because YOU desperately want the results to favor YOUR desired outcome … no matter how detached you try to make things. That’s just basic human nature, among other things (not to mention being a sound business strategy).
To my way of thinking, TIGHAR’s data would be genuinely useful only if it had first been submitted to several other analysts or analytic methods, BEFORE Jantz ran his reanalysis, and they all agreed on the bone measurements extrapolated from the clothing and photos examined.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and this, to me, doesn’t rise to anywhere near Jantz’s 99.9% claim.
MFowlerI have the utmost respect for Dr. Jantz – he is an internationally-recognized expert in his field. The key question for this “new” assessment of the Nikumaroro bones is where Jantz got the data that he re-analyzed to come to a new conclusion.
The data was provided by TIGHAR, which has an abiding interest in proving that the bones ARE from Amelia Earhart, and cannot by any stretch be considered a disinterested third party, seeing as how they considered it “an attack” on Jantz’s original work, when another well-qualified professional questioned it.
MFowlerJ Boyle said, “To answer the question of how they spend £100,000 a year on legal costs? Perhaps writing letters to forums as suggested on post 84?”
I went back and looked at previous year’s legal expenses, and except for 2013-2015, they were either $0 or minimal during the last 15 years, so that $134,459 over three years was all, or mostly, due to the Mellon lawsuit. That’s not an insignificant amount for a non-profit to have to spend to defend itself from federal fraud and racketeering charges, but …
… there was the TIGHAR Legal Defense Fund established to help take care of that. In June 2013 Gillespie announced the fund in the same forum posting announcing Mellon’s lawsuit. Other than requests for money for the defense fund, until Mellon had exhausted his appeals, TIGHAR members were never given a full accounting of how munch money the Legal Defense Fund raised, how much the lawsuit ultimately cost (other than saying “we still have a huge legal bill to pay,” or how the entire episode impacted TIGHAR’s overall fiscal health (and for some reason a link for the Legal Defense Fund is still active on the TIGHAR website).
It all seems very obtuse now.
MFowlerCreaking Door said, “Pretty ironic for Gillespie to be criticising the 1940 investigation into the skeletal remains… “
It is, on several fronts. The thing that bothers me the most is Gillepie’s constant and unbending “must be Earhart’s” bias towards anything that might possibly be used to support his theory. The initial TIGHAR “paper” about the bones documents discovered in the English archive was never vetted or peer-reviewed by outside, independent sources – it was basically a “table paper” made available at a conference; they put a stack on a table and passerby could pick one up if they wanted to. But Gillespie has generally treated it as much more than that.
When Cross and Wright came out with their peer-reviewed paper published in a recognized academic journal, Gillespie immediately went on the offensive, called it an attack on a cornerstone of the Nikumaroro hypothesis … and spent the next few years desperately trying to goad the chief US author of the original TIGHAR “paper,” Dr. Richard Jantz, to do a rebuttal with a “real” scientific paper in a “real” scientific journal.
Anything that remotely threatens his livelihood gets attacked through the information sources that he, alone, controls.
MFowlerInteresting read, that BBC story, which, again, points out very clearly TIGHAR’s “must be Earhart’s” worldview on ANYTHING it has found on Nikumaroro. It took me a long time, and many, many examples, to drive that lesson home. And longer still for me to realize that, scientifically, it was a crap view.
Malcolm, Gary LaPook actually FOIA’d some State Department e-mails that paint a very different picture than then one Gillespie paints. That whole episode degenerated into farce at the end. All the State Department photo guys were willing to admit was, “We think we can see how your expert arrived at his conclusion.” Without actually agreeing with it in the slightest.
MFowler~Alan~ said, “A very intereting read. You have to wonder though, how as he go away with it for so long ?”
To which Sabrejet replied, “It’s like bad restaurants in tourist locations: plenty of new customers and no repeat business. In this case I think the new customers are snared by a constant drip-feed of ‘new’ projects.”
After spending almost two decades as a TIGHAR member, I really have come to believe that is Gillespie’s business model – it’s how he operates. There has never been any kind of systematic plan or organized research protocol at any time for any of his projects; one bright shiny thing was discarded the second a newer, brighter shiny thing with more fundraising potential came into the picture. I doubt it was even a conscious decision on his part, it was more along the lines of, “This worked the last time …” when a new cash infusion was needed for whatever purpose. Human nature being what it is. Which is why he has been so denigrating towards the “tourist trips” to Nikumaroro – he didn’t think of it, therefore he can’t control it, spin any findings for maximum media exposure, or rake off 20%-plus in “operating costs.”
One thing that eventually started to gnaw at me was how some shiny things could be praised to the skies, touted as The Earhart Mystery Answer, and then vanish into obscurity, only to be resurrected years later with a new Earhart Mystery Answer attached to them. The Patch comes immediately to mind in that regard. There are some ex-TIGHARs who have never publicly stated all that they know about that entire convoluted episode.
MFowlerJ Boyle said, “Their obsession with finding “celebrity” aircraft…AE, Glenn Miller or Nungesser and Coli certainly indicates that they are more interested in headline making rather than doing unheralded (by the general public, if not the historic aviation community), unglamorous work of saving aircraft.”
That is something that gradually became apparent to me as well. Along with Gillespie’s tendency to be roundly dismissive of anyone who disagrees with him in the slightest, about pretty much anything. With the closing of the TIGHAR forums, he has a virtual bully pulpit for espousing his views, and his alone. Dissent, or even questions – as I found when I started asking them – are not tolerated. Same for their Facebook page and his blog.
All of which might make one wonder, after raising – and spending – millions of dollars over the past three decades, what has TIGHAR actually done?
MFowlerSabrejet said, “It’s a long game, aiming always to gather more cash.”
I won’t disagree with that, especially if you begin to appreciate the fact that Gillespie seems to regard certain items/artifacts/reports more from their fund-generating potential than from any value they have towards actually solving the mystery. I was exposed to that attitude more than once when I was a TIGHAR member.
MFowlerThat’s the main thing I fail to understand in all of this – TIGHAR’s … well, Gillespie’s – outright hostility to any theory other than his own. Characterizing academic papers that disagree with his theory as “attacks.” Denigrating professionals of longstanding who at least have the education, training and experience to back up their opinions (he has a bachelor’s degree in history).
And then he trashes the English colonial officials, including the revered doctor who established the native medical practitioner program? Last I checked, TIGHAR has a lot it still wanted to do in Fiji, and I’m pretty sure that’s where they usually stage out of when they go to Nikumaroro. Seems to me Gillespie has thoroughly burned THAT bridge. And to what end?
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