Lost

In June 2017, Rachel Hartigan, a writer for National Geographic, boards a small boat bound for Nikumaroro, an uninhabited coral atoll near the Equator in the central Pacific. She is accompanying archaeologists, dog handlers, and four border collies trained to detect human remains on an expedition organized by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) to search for traces of Amelia Earhart. Hartigan accepted the assignment despite having no experience with expeditions or the Earhart mystery. Her account braids together Earhart's biography with the histories of three competing theories about her 1937 disappearance, exploring why one person has compelled so many searchers to such extraordinary lengths.

On July 2, 1937, Earhart, one of the most famous women in the world, piloted a silver Lockheed Electra 10-E down the runway at Lae, in what is now Papua New Guinea, with navigator Fred Noonan aboard. They were attempting to circumnavigate the globe near the Equator, a distance no one had ever flown. Their destination was Howland Island, a tiny coral atoll 2,500 miles away. The flight had been delayed by poor weather, difficulties receiving time signals essential for celestial navigation, and what Earhart described as "personnel unfitness." Over the following hours, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca, stationed at Howland, received intermittent transmissions from Earhart reporting dwindling fuel, but she never acknowledged the ship's messages. Her final transmission placed them on the 157-337 line of position, a navigational line showing all possible locations based on a celestial observation, running north and south. The Navy and Coast Guard searched more than 262,000 square miles with ships and aircraft. On July 18, the official search was abandoned.

Hartigan traces Earhart's life from her birth in 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, where her maternal grandfather was a prominent lawyer and banker. Her childhood was adventurous, marked by a homemade roller coaster and imaginative games played in her grandparents' old carriage. Her adolescence was turbulent: Her father, Edwin Earhart, a railroad claims agent, developed an alcohol addiction that cost the family their stability. The Earharts moved repeatedly as Edwin lost jobs. Her parents divorced in 1924. Through it all, Amelia developed fierce independence and a distrust of financial dependency.

Earhart first felt the urge to fly while watching planes at a Royal Flying Corps airfield in Toronto, where she had volunteered as a nurse's aide during World War I. After the war, she moved to Los Angeles and found Neta Snook, a female instructor who taught at Kinner Field. Earhart proved a natural pilot and bought a Kinner Airster while still learning to fly. She set a women's altitude record in 1922 but returned East after her parents' divorce.

Years of uncertainty followed. Earhart worked as a teacher, nurse companion, and social worker at Denison House, a settlement house in Boston serving immigrant communities. She found purpose there and returned to flying on the side. In 1928, publisher George Palmer Putnam recruited her for a transatlantic flight aboard a Fokker trimotor named Friendship. Pilot Bill Stultz flew while Earhart served as captain in name only. After 13 days stranded in Trepassey, Newfoundland, they crossed the Atlantic and landed in Wales. Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air, though she had not piloted the plane.

Putnam managed her career relentlessly, booking lectures, endorsements, and airline positions. They married in 1931 after Earhart handed him a letter requesting an open marriage and freedom from domestic confinement. By 1932, she was ready to prove herself. She flew solo across the Atlantic in a cherry red Lockheed Vega, battling a failed altimeter, a cracked exhaust manifold, and violent storms before landing in a cow pasture near Derry, Northern Ireland. She became the first woman, and only the second person after Charles Lindbergh, to make the crossing alone. She added more firsts, including solo flights from Hawaii to California and from Mexico City to Newark. In 1935, Purdue University hired her as a visiting professor, and its donors funded the Electra she would use for the world flight. Throughout her career, she championed women's rights in aviation.

Hartigan interweaves Earhart's biography with three theories about her fate. The Japanese capture theory took shape during World War II, fueled by rumors, a 1943 newspaper claim that Earhart had been "liquidated," and a Hollywood film depicting a female pilot sent to spy on Japanese islands. The theory intensified when Josephine Blanco Akiyama, who was 11 years old in 1937 on Saipan, then under Japanese control, recalled seeing Japanese guards surrounding two white people at a seaplane base. Her story reached the public through Navy dentist Casimir Sheft and was amplified by KCBS radio correspondent Fred Goerner, who made multiple trips to Saipan in the 1960s. Goerner's 1966 bestseller The Search for Amelia Earhart proposed that Earhart and Noonan crashed in the Marshall Islands, were captured, and died on Saipan. His evidence consistently collapsed under scrutiny: a generator he retrieved from the harbor proved to be Japanese-made, and key witnesses contradicted one another. Subsequent theorists pushed further. Former Air Force officer Joseph Gervais claimed a woman named Irene Bolam was Earhart living under an assumed identity; Bolam sued for defamation, and the publisher withdrew the book. Former naval intelligence investigator Les Kinney presented a photograph he said showed Earhart and Noonan in the Marshall Islands, but a Japanese blogger found the image in a travel book published two years before Earhart disappeared.

The castaway theory, championed by TIGHAR founder Ric Gillespie, holds that Earhart and Noonan flew south along the line of position, landed on Nikumaroro's reef, and died as castaways after rising tides swept the plane away. TIGHAR mounted more than a dozen expeditions between 1989 and 2017, finding shoe remnants and aluminum pieces on the island but nothing definitively linked to Earhart. Colonial records from 1940 described bones found on the island's southeast corner and shipped to Fiji, where a doctor declared them male. Modern reanalysis of his measurements suggested the remains were more likely female and of European origin, but the bones went missing. During the 2017 expedition Hartigan joined, forensic dogs alerted at the site matching the 1940 description, but excavation produced no remains. Deep-sea explorer Robert Ballard, known for locating the Titanic, searched Nikumaroro's underwater slopes in 2019 using remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and sonar and found no trace of the plane. A search for the bones in Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati, led to a museum where forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle examined a skull fragment, but DNA analysis showed only two of 15 mutational points matching those of Earhart's niece, Amy Kleppner, far fewer than expected.

The crashed-and-sank theory was developed by pilot Elgen Long and his wife, Marie Long, over 25 years of research. Elgen, a World War II Navy radioman who had flown patrols over Howland, approached the mystery as an aviation accident investigation. The Longs concluded that a cascade of errors doomed the flight: outdated charts placed Howland nearly six miles east of its true location, uncorrected compass deviation added further error, and Earhart had removed the trailing wire antenna needed for low-frequency direction finding. A time zone discrepancy meant the Itasca transmitted when Earhart was not listening. Dave Jourdan, founder of the deep-sea exploration company Nauticos, mounted three expeditions to search the ocean floor near Howland but found nothing. In 2023, real estate investor Tony Romeo's company, Deep Sea Vision, captured a sonar image resembling an aircraft on the seafloor. When they returned with high-resolution equipment, they discovered the object was a rock formation.

Hartigan closes with Earhart's surviving family. George Putnam remarried twice and died of kidney failure in 1950. Earhart's mother, Amy Earhart, moved to Berkeley, California, to be near the Pacific in case Amelia returned, and died in 1962. Earhart's sister, Muriel Earhart, lived to 98, treating even the most outlandish theorists with grace. Kleppner told Hartigan she believed the plane crashed into the ocean and that "not one penny" should be spent searching. The book ends with a question: Earhart's closest relatives endured the unresolved nature of her death for the rest of their days. "Why can't we?"