Why Amelia Earhart’s Disappearance Still Fascinates Us

Amelia EarhartPhoto byWikimedia Commons

In 1937, American pilot Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan, had already completed 22,000 miles of their around-the-world flight when they refueled in and took off from Papua New Guinea, an island to the north of Australia. Their next refueling stop was planned to be on Howland Island, and to aid in their navigation “two brightly lit U.S. ships were stationed to mark the route.”

Earhart and Noonan never arrived.It’s speculated that they ran out of fuel and crashed after Earhart sent her last transmission: “We are running north and south.”

Nearly one hundred years after her flight exploits and her disappearance, Earhart is still making headlines, like this most recent one: “Amelia Earhart’s Lost Plane May Have Been Found.”

Why are we still interested in this story?

Try to remember any news story you heard from 2010, or even 2000. If you’re old enough, cast your mind back to 1990 or anytime in the 1980s.Are you amazed at how long ago those years and the events that occurred during them seem? (Me too.)And yet the story of Amelia Earhart’s flight around the world, and her subsequent and complete disappearance, happened decades before many of us were born.

Clearly, however, the story of Earhart’s disappearance has continued to resonate throughout history and popular culture.In the case ofTony Romeo, a real estate investor and former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who stateshe has personally spent $11 million dollars to look for the missing plane, the search might be considered more of an obsession.

Romeo and the company Deep Sea Vision, that made the announcement about finding Earhart’s plane, did so using a specialized and unmanned undersea drone to scan for anything that might look like Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra plane.They’ve released visuals showing what they believe to be the wreckage, on the seabed about 100 miles away from Howland Island.

Earhart was a fascinating personality, and this is an interesting story about the use of new technologies to clear up old mysteries.But our current news cycles last about thirty seconds, andwhen you say “history,” many people find it difficult to think all the way back to 2020 and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

So how — and why — do many of us still know about and remember this story from 1937?

I believe Earhart’s story (and the story of Romeo’s impassioned search for the aviators and the missing plane) is still making headlines for one very human reason:We never knew, definitively, what happened to her, her navigator, and her plane. And that bothered us.

Mysteries fire our imagination. Mystery novels and TV shows are perpetually popular because they show us lives at their most exciting (even when the surprises described in mystery novels aren’t pleasant surprises), and then, perhaps most importantly,they give us clues and a narrative that we can follow to unravel the secrets of what “really happened.”

It’s not enough for humans, though, to have the pleasure of engaging with and following a mystery’s twists and turns.It’s almost impossible not to read or watch the end of a mystery — even if it’s late and you need your sleep and you just have to skip to the end to find out who was the culprit and how they did it.We can’t help it: we need to know the ending.

Amelia Earhart’s disappearance denied all of her contemporary fans theclosure of knowing what happened to her.I’m convinced that if there had been witnesses at the time who could have seen her plane going down, or if she and her navigator had crashed and been found on land, very few people today would ever have heard the name “Amelia Earhart.”

How many people, for instance, other than film students, still know the name “James Dean”? He was infamous while he was starring in movies in the 1950s, and his life was also cut tragically short (in a car accident) — but how many people now, other than film students, still know his name?

Research on experiencing “endings” in our lives might provide some clues to why the Earhart disappearance or any unsolved mysteries unsettle us so deeply. If it’s true that endings help us “prioritize social connections” by driving us to connect with others while we still have the chance, it follows that we as a society might feel we never got a chance to confirm and mourn the loss of Earhart, one of the twentieth century’s most infamous heroes.Studies suggest thatthe strong emotions around confirmed endings also help us to “find greater meaning” in our lives and others’.

On a personal level, Ifeel that the story of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance stayed with many people for so long because of one of the more charming aspects of the human personality:if we don’t know the worst, we often hope for the best. Many people wanted to believe, in 1937, and beyond, that Earhart and Noonan had somehow survived and might somehow have continued their lives in anonymity.

At a time when people the world over are struggling to define what it means to be human and have human intelligence (particularly how it differs from artificial intelligence),it’s heartening to know that stories — even stories from long ago — can still unite us and remind us that one thing we have in common is the need to know “what really happened.”