In today’s fast-paced online world, you can communicate instantly with people on the other side of the world—or the other side of the street. Online communication and collaboration have even enabled us to find new ways to solve some of history’s most challenging mysteries—including the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

Arguably the world’s most famous missing person, Amelia Earhart disappeared without a trace over the Pacific in 1937 while attempting to circumnavigate the world at the equator in her Lockheed Electra. An exhaustive military search at the time of her disappearance failed to find any trace of either her or the Electra, and in the decades since, people the world over have been fascinated with both her life as a pioneering female aviator and her mysterious death. A whole host of theories sprang up about what really happened to her—ranging from the assertion she was captured by the Japanese to more outrageous stories that she and her navigator Fred Noonan were abducted by aliens. But most historians came to the same conclusion that the federal government did in 1937—that Earhart and her plane sank to the bottom of the Pacific, never to be found again.

Ric Gillespie, Executive Director of The International Group for Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), also once accepted the commonly held “crash and sink” theory. That is, he did until two former military aerial navigators who were also members of TIGHAR presented him with a plausible alternative. “Back in 1988, two retired navigators approached me with a theory they had about Amelia,” says Gillespie. “At the time, I didn’t want anything to do with it. I told them she was 18,000 feet underwater in the Pacific, case closed. But these two men had done extensive research, and they were experts in the same kind of aerial navigation that Amelia’s own navigator had used.”

TIGHAR (www.tighar.org) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to searching for and recovering crashed or lost historical aircraft, and via the collaborative work of many volunteers, they have successfully researched many lost aircraft. By the late 1980s, TIGHAR’s membership had been pressuring Gillespie to open an investigation into Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, something Gillespie resisted until presented with the Gardner Island (Nikumaroro) theory.

“These two navigators were retired military, and they knew based on research they had done and their own experience that Amelia was following a certain trajectory,” says Gillespie. “She missed the island she was supposed to land on (tiny Howland Island), but that same trajectory also intersected with another island, called Gardner Island. The Gardner Island theory suggests that Amelia was able to land the Electra successfully there.”

TIGHAR established The Earhart Project in 1989, and it is still ongoing. With a membership that includes navigators, aviation enthusiasts, historians, archeologists, scientists and interested members of the general public, The Earhart Project has used online collaboration to amass and analyze considerable evidence that Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan very likely did land on Gardner (now Nikumaroro) Island and even managed to survive there for a time as castaways. “I honestly don’t know how we ever did any of this before we were online,” says Gillespie.

TIGHAR has launched multiple archeological expeditions to the remote Pacific island, gathering evidence from the site as well as combing through historical archives from around the world. Those expeditions have turned up many artifacts that appear to indicate one or more Westerners from the 1930s set up camp on the island, which was uninhabited at the time of Earhart’s disappearance—including pieces of a woman’s shoe similar to the kind Earhart was known to have worn, 1930s-era bottles and glassware, pieces of Plexiglas consistent with the kind used on a Lockheed Electra, and even a 1930s makeup compact. TIGHAR was able to identify and catalog these artifacts largely due to the online communication forums supported by TIGHAR and its membership. “The ability to have a group of people with a baseline of knowledge and a wide variety of expertise to work collaboratively online allows us to connect the dots in ways not possible before,” says Gillespie. “It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and we’re doing it slowly but surely.”

TIGHAR’s Earhart Project has operated several different forums for online collaboration over the past 15 years or so. “We started out with email in the early 90s,” says Gillespie. “First we just had a list of email addresses for people who were interested in the Earhart Project—navigators, scientists, archeologists, aviation people, others. Then that got too cumbersome, so we created a listserve in the mid-90s, and eventually we branched out to a message board. We got our first website in 1996, and then things really took off.”

As word about TIGHAR and its work on the Earhart Project spread on the Internet, more and more people wanted to help, and technology made that happen. “The first thing IT-wise that made a huge difference in our investigation was a database created by Randy Jacobson, a U.S. Navy oceanographer,” says Gillespie. “He visited archives and read government reports about the disappearance, and was able to reconstruct all the recorded radio transmissions Amelia and the U.S. military exchanged in real time.” Jacobson then shared the database with TIGHAR members online, and it contributed greatly to the collaborative investigation process, and also assisted Gillespie in his writing of the book "Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance" (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2006), which reconstructs and analyzes the failed military search to find the lost Electra. “I never could have written that book without Randy Jacobson’s database,” says Gillespie.

While TIGHAR and the Earhart Project have gathered considerable evidence that Amelia Earhart probably landed on Nikumaroro, they aren’t ready to say so definitively yet. But they may soon have a “smoking gun”—a bone recovered from the archeological site on Nikumaroro is currently being tested against Earhart family DNA at the Molecular Anthropology Laboratories of Oklahoma University. TIGHAR is also reaching out to its online community via its website and on Facebook® for collaborative help identifying a glass bottle recovered on their most recent Nikumaroro expedition. “We suspect it is a bottle of Dr. Berry’s Freckle Cream, which we know Amelia used,” says Gillespie. “But we need to find some bottle experts out there to help us identify it.”

TIGHAR is continuing to explore new Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook for online collaboration. “We’re having good success with Facebook, but I haven’t exactly figured out how best to use Twitter® yet,” says Gillespie. “But we do have a Twitter account.”

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