【I Want To Be The First Guy】

Amelia Earhart continues to capture the world's imagination from beyond the grave.

The I Want To Be The First GuyAmerican aviator, who mysteriously vanished in 1937, was thought to have crashed her plane into the Pacific Ocean while attempting to circle the Earth.

But a group of historians now say Earhart might have died as a castaway on Kiribati's Nikumaroro island. Their theory, which is far from confirmed, is based on the legendary aviator's lanky arms.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) said this weekthat it got the idea after taking a closer look at a partial skeleton found on Nikumaroro -- a virtual speck of sand in the Pacific Ocean, stretching just 4.7 miles long and 1.6 miles wide.

Nikumaroro, formerly known as Garden Island, was uninhabited the year Earhart disappeared and remains so today. But in 1940, a British official named Gerald Gallagher discovered the partial human remains, which he initially suspected of belonging to Earhart.

A British doctor later determined the bones belonged to a man, ruling out the female icon. Eventually, the bones were lost and the entire incident forgotten. That is, until TIGHAR said it discovered the original British files in 1998.

The files included the doctor's measurements of the skeleton. Karen Burns and Richard Jantz, both forensic anthropologists, determined at the time that the shape of the recovered bones "appears consistent with a female of Earhart's height and ethnic origin."

This week's finding potentially supports that conclusion.

Jantz was recently preparing an updated evaluation of the bones when he noticed a "peculiarity," according to TIGHAR.

The arm bone measurements were slightly longer than the arms of an average woman in the late 19th century. (Earhart was born in 1897, and disappeared at age 40.)

The British doctor's notes showed a humerus, or upper arm bone, measuring 32.4 centimeters long. The radius, or lower arm bone, was 24.5 centimeters. Thus the radius-to-humerus ratio was 0.756.

For women born in the late 1800s, the average ratio was 0.73.

"In other words, if the castaway was a middle-aged, ethnically European woman, she had forearms considerably longer than the average," TIGHAR said in its news release.

So TIGHAR turned to Jeff Glickman, a forensic imaging specialist. He found a historical photo of Earhart where her arms were bare and fully visible.

Working together, Glickman and Jantz identified the spots on her shoulder, elbow and wrist for comparing bone length, and they found that Earhart's radius-to-humerus ratio was 0.76 -- "virtually identical to the castaway's," according to TIGHAR.

Still, this doesn't exactly solve the mystery of where or how our beloved aviator vanished.

"The match does not, of course, prove that the castaway was Amelia Earhart," TIGHAR said. "But it is a significant new data point that tips the scales further in that direction."

xhi

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