On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart took off from Lae, New Guinea, on a 2,556-mile (4,113-kilometer) flight to tiny Howland Island where the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca was waiting to guide her landing. She never made it. Why? What happened to her?

Earhart had completed three-quarters of her attempt to circumnavigate the globe at the Equator in a flight that had been bungled from the beginning and mismanaged by an ever changing team of advisers. She had averaged five hours of sleep a night, most of it in stifling heat, and suffered from frequent nausea. Unable to operate a Morse code key, she had left essential radio equipment behind in Miami and instead was using a telephone radio ill-suited to the receiver on the Itasca. The navigational chart Earhart was using was faulty. She was behind schedule after frequent stops for repairs to her Lockheed Electra, and she was in a hurry.

Her press agent-manager-husband, George Palmer Putnam, wanted her to arrive home on July 4 for a celebratory nationwide broadcast he had arranged. Earhart had faded from the headlines during the lengthy flight. Putman figured that by completing yet another record flight on the very birthday of the nation, she would zoom back into the public eye where he had kept her ever since she first crossed the Atlantic in 1928.

From the time the U.S. Navy launched its most intensive search ever for a single pilot, one theory after another has been offered on Earhart’s fate, each claiming to solve the mystery definitively. She landed on an uninhabited island and died undiscovered. She came down at Truk or Saipan or in the Marshalls while on a spying mission for the government. She was captured by the Japanese and brought to Saipan, where she died of dysentery or was executed. Or she was held as a spy or a prisoner of war until the war ended and an embarrassed government sneaked her home with a forged new identity.

Not one of these theories can be proved. After six years of research I am convinced that Earhart lost her way and, when her fuel ran out, ditched in the Pacific, probably very near Howland Island.

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