Strangest fact
Earhart's last logged message on July 2, 1937 reads 'we are on the line 157 337.' Bones found on a Pacific atoll in 1940, now lost, were reanalyzed in 2018.
Why it is odd: We have her final words in a radio log and measurements of possible remains, but no confirmed piece of her plane.
Amelia Earhart was the most famous woman pilot in the world when she set out from Miami on June 1, 1937, to fly around the world with navigator Fred Noonan. One of the hardest legs was a long flight across the Pacific to Howland Island, a tiny island far from any other land. The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca waited near the island to guide her in by radio.
The Itasca's radio log for July 1 and 2, 1937, now held by the National Archives, records the calls through the night and morning. At various points the plane's crew reported trouble with the radio, that they were flying low at 1,000 feet, and that they were 200 miles from Howland. The last message logged, at about 8:43 a.m. on July 2, reads: we are on the line 157 337 wl rept msg we wl rept.
Then nothing more was heard.
The U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ran what the National Archives calls the largest air and sea rescue search up to that time, and found no plane and no survivors. The simplest explanation, held by many researchers, is that the plane ran out of fuel and sank in the deep ocean near Howland. Others think Earhart and Noonan flew south along that line and landed on Gardner Island, now called Nikumaroro, a remote coral atoll to the south.
In 1940 part of a human skeleton was found on Nikumaroro. A doctor, D. W. Hoodless, measured the bones in 1941 and decided they were a man's. The bones were later lost, leaving only his notes. In 2018 anthropologist Richard Jantz of the University of Tennessee ran Hoodless's seven measurements through modern forensic software and compared them with Earhart's likely size from photographs and clothing. He concluded the bones were more similar to Earhart than to 99 percent of people in a large reference sample.
In September 2025 the President ordered the release of government records about Earhart, and the National Archives published the material in November 2025. News reports said the files included her last known communications, weather details and possible search areas, but aviation experts did not expect them to solve the case, since many had been public for years.