Amelia Earhart: Island bones 'likely' belonged to famed pilot | Hacker News Reader

Amelia Earhart: Island bones 'likely' belonged to famed pilot

bbc.com

43 pointsRustGirl11 comments

This was posted recently on reddit to much skepticism. Apparently the group who funded the study is known for pushing a specific agenda. More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/82rl2n/bones_found...

I don't see what they gain by "pushing a specific agenda." It's not like they're using this for political gain.

To be fair to TIGHAR, it's more like vigorously researching a particular theory. To be honest, they're the only ones who are sinking actual cash and bringing in actual specialists to investigate their theory, and at the very least they've found some intriguing, circumstantial evidence.

The "non-profit" group is a scam, where the operator of the group gets paid very well from the operating expenses of the non-profit.

An event like this would be leveraged to draw attention to the cause, thereby the group, thereby raising more funding to spend on further self-gaining operational expenses.

"Identified" based on recorded dimensions of the bones from old medical notes? When the original examiner, with actual bones in front of him, determined them to be from a male? I will take a large grain of salt here!

Conversely, anthropology has advanced a wee bit since 1941 when that original examiner looked at them.

I guess* there's been a lot of revision of previous sex determinations for skeletal remains lately. Something about older techniques paying too much attention to the absolute sizes bones, which led to a lot of misclassification of taller-than-average men and shorter-than-average women.

*Based on a conversation with a museum employee, so I've got no citation here.

The article gives little information to trust this source.

> The bones have unfortunately since been lost, and so cannot be analysed.

The actual written paper I hope gives more (though I haven't read through it yet.)

http://journals.upress.ufl.edu/fa/article/view/525/519

For anyone looking for a direct link to the skepticism of TIGHAR, here it is: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4295

I don't have a dog in the fight either way, but I'd have appreciated a link to the criticism :)

In other words, the bones could have belonged to any one of millions of other people the same size as Amelia Earhart.

I nominate my Aunt Olga as the person who died on that island. (Just as possible, just as likely as Amelia Earhart)

I've been avoiding this story, but is there consensus it's legit?

There is no such consensus. As extensively outlined elsewhere (such as the r/science reddit thread posted elsewhere on this HN page), this group seems to have had an agenda other than rigorous scientific exploration.

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