Seventy-five years ago this month, Earhart's plane crashed over the Pacific Ocean. After the latest $2.2 million investigation into the disappearance, Travis Okulski urges us to stop looking. Last month, Jesse Zwick profiled Ric Gillespie, the man who won't give up. Gillespie theorizes that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan "had not crashed in the ocean near Howland Island, but instead had managed to land on Gardner Island and, lacking food and water, died there":
Gillespie’s Earhart theory, for all its elaborate implausibility, offers something that [David] Jourdan’s doesn’t: the prospect of an unknowable final chapter of Earhart’s life, a permanent question mark that won’t be tarnished by discovery. "It’s the greatest unsolved mystery of the twentieth century," [Dorothy] Cochrane [a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum] told me. "People want to believe that it has a fantastic and mysterious ending. Not that she just ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea."
The Dish 