Why Amelia Earhart’s Disappearance Still Fascinates Us
Humans just have to know the rest of the story
In 1937, American pilot Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan, had already completed 22,000 miles of their around-the-world flight when they refueled in and took off from Papua New Guinea, an island to the north of Australia. Their next refueling stop was planned to be on Howland Island, and to aid in their navigation “two brightly lit U.S. ships were stationed to mark the route.”
Earhart and Noonan never arrived. It’s speculated that they ran out of fuel and crashed after Earhart sent her last transmission: “We are running north and south.”
Nearly one hundred years after her flight exploits and her disappearance, Earhart is still making headlines, like this most recent one: “Amelia Earhart’s Lost Plane May Have Been Found.”
Why are we still interested in this story?
Try to remember any news story you heard from 2010, or even 2000. If you’re old enough, cast your mind back to 1990 or anytime in the 1980s. Are you amazed at how long ago those years and the events that occurred during them seem? (Me too.) And yet the story of Amelia Earhart’s flight around the world, and her subsequent and complete disappearance, happened decades before many of us were born.
