Internet provider issues have prompted me to relocate some things, among which is the TIGHAR analysis: https://mffowler.net/tighar_analysis.htm

J Boyle said, “Just keep reusing the same fund raising appeal.. “We’re THIS close…”

Yep. What is curious (or not, if you know Gillespie) is how Gillespie is talking about this latest Newfoundland adventure. On Sept. 12, 2021, on the TIGHAR forums he said, “Weather permitting, it looks like the Expedition Unknown survey is going to happen in late September but this is their show and we don’t get to pick the technology. The drone/magnetometry equipment they’ve chosen is not ideal, but it will be interesting to see what they get. This is not a TIGHAR expedition. I’ll be there as a guide and consultant.”

So it’s, We’re coming along, but it’s not REALLY our show …

But after posting a video about the upcoming trip on TIGHAR’s web pages, he said, “TIGHAR members who want to observe operations at the pond or be part of a small land-search team will pay their own travel and accommodation expenses plus a $500 contribution for each day they come to the pond.”

$500 for what? TIGHAR’s “operating costs”? To defer helicopter costs, which Expedition Unknown is probably paying for? Just because he can?

And this, at the bottom of the page, something I have NEVER seen with any TIGHAR fundraising pitch, ever, in large red type:

“No donation required. No obligation implied.”

Guess that IRS audit really did put the fear of God into him.

Just out of curiosity I clicked around to find the US price for Flypast – $99 USD for a year. Ummm … no.

plough said: “Oh dear, not the ‘Magic Scrap’ again!”

Gillespie seems to have gone quiet on this, uncharacteristically. The last glimmer of progress was announcement some time ago that his photo analysis expert (who also happens to be a TIGHAR board member) was going to peruse some “newly discovered” photos.

Now Gillespie is all excited about … another expedition. To Newfoundland. To explore, once again, whether Nungesser and Coli ended up in a pond in Newfoundland when they tried to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. Magicians would call this a classic case of misdirection – Don’t wonder about what’s going on with this hand, watch THIS hand closely …

Probably not, avion ancien, but on the up side, they Seem to have fixed the log-in dialogue box issues from a week or so ago.

plough said: “No doubt RG is suffering a depleted bank balance and is trying to stir up interest to encourage further ‘charitable giving’ from the terminally gullible.  Shame they don’t ever seem to cotton on to the fact that the ‘charity’ is Ric Gillespie, and not the search for aviation history.

If Gillespie were operating in the UK, he would have undoubtedly been arrested and imprisoned for fraud by now.  It is a swingeing indictment of the US legal system that it appears that he is permitted to continue robbing gullible people with seeming impunity.”

There is some truth in this, in that Gillespie has been insisting that the piece of aircraft aluminum he found more than three decades ago on Nikumaroro Island is from Earhart’s Lockheed Electra – and it’s worth noting, yet again, that not a shred of solid, verifiable evidence has emerged to support his assertion. Just ever more speculation. But as plough correctly notes, that doesn’t see to stop Gillespie from sucking in anyone and everyone he can in his never-ending efforts to prove that he and he alone is right.

And it’s true that the non-profit system is the US is ripe for abuses. TIGHAR was audited by the IRS in 2018, which may help explain the dramatic changes in its IRS 990 tax forms since then, but whatever the IRS found wasn’t egregious enough to pull TIGHAR’s non-profit status. We’ll never know, since Gillespie has never publicly discussed it.

That said, Gillespie and his wife, TIGHAR’s only “employees,” have collected more than $2.4 million in salaries since 2000, an average of $134,000 per year … and have spent an average of $1,248 per day …