Washington (AFP) – The US National Archives published a batch of newly declassified government records on Friday about Amelia Earhart, the American aviator who vanished over the Pacific in 1937, officials said. Earhart went missing while on a pioneering round-the-world flight with navigator Fred Noonan, and her disappearance is one of the most tantalizing mysteries in aviation lore.
President Donald Trump ordered the declassification and release in September of all US government records related to Earhart’s ill-fated final flight. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the documents released on Friday included “newly declassified files from the National Security Agency, information on Earhart’s last known communications, weather and plane conditions at the time, and potential search locations.”
Further documents would be publicly released on the National Archives website on a “rolling basis” as they are declassified, Gabbard said in a statement. Many of the thousands of documents published online on Friday have been released previously by the National Archives or made available to researchers, and aviation experts consider it unlikely that the latest material will shed any new light on Earhart’s disappearance.
Earhart’s final flight has fascinated historians for decades and spawned books, movies, and theories galore. The prevailing belief is that Earhart, 39, and Noonan, 44, ran out of fuel and ditched their twin-engine Lockheed Electra in the Pacific near Howland Island while on one of the final legs of their epic journey.
Earhart, who won fame in 1932 as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, took off on May 20, 1937, from Oakland, California, hoping to become the first woman to fly around the world. She and Noonan vanished on July 2, 1937, after taking off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on a challenging 2,500-mile (4,000-kilometer) flight to refuel on Howland Island, a speck of a US territory between Australia and Hawaii. They never made it.
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