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Comment by djmips | Hacker News Reader

Archive of linked analysis of photos showing landing gear and 3D rendered / lit landing gear. (Because original server might be overloaded I could not reach it)

https://web.archive.org/web/20190812112844/https://tighar.or...

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That article seems rather tendentious. It claims that 'Jeff Glickman and the State Dept. photo analysts looked at the image and asked, “What does the thing on the reef look like?” They concluded, “It looks like Electra landing gear wreckage.”' but, as told in the article, the only candidate they considered for “what does the thing on the reef look like?” was, in fact, the wreckage of an Electra landing gear, damaged, and adjusted until it was possible to say that the image was "consistent with Lockheed Electra landing gear components" (at least they did not attempt to sharpen the image, on account of the risk of "introducing information that isn’t really there.") (Update: after seeing several other zooms of the object, I get the impression that the one chosen for this article did undergo some form of processing.)

AFAIK, "consistent with" merely means that the hypothesis cannot be ruled out, but that does not seem to be a high bar when the image is very small and blurred.

So what else might they have considered as a candidate for the object? How about anything that might of been swept off the nearby wreck by nearly eight years of storms to start with, not to mention tree stumps, pieces of coral and other natural detritus that storms regularly move around? There seems to be a lot of confirmation bias here.

You've touched on the core problem of everything Earhart-related that TIGHAR does. (And most of what they do is Earhart-related, and most all modern Earhart-related news originates with TIGHAR). They start with the premise that "Earhart and Noonan crashed at the edge of Nikumaroro" and then check every single piece of evidence they find to see if maybe it might support that assertion. This is a completely backwards way to do such an investigation.

The Skeptoid link in the current first reply goes into all this in detail, here it is again if anyone missed it: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4295

And another follow-up from Skeptoid: https://skeptoid.com/blog/2012/03/20/more-amelia-earhart-non...

The island was in fact one of the original suspects when Earhart's plane first went missing but by the time the US Navy arrived several weeks later, storms and natural wave action would have washed most of the plane away.

The point of the analysis was to see if there was photographic evidence to suggest that it might have been the correct island all along.

Yes, it could be a tree trump or some other debris--but it also looks exactly like the wreckage of a particular part of her plane, which is enough to justify a more detailed search.

Like the Bismark's final resting spot, this island has a significant underwater seamount. If the plane landed on the beach and sunk, if could have slid thousands of feet into crevices in the seamount or even all the way down to the abyssal plain surrounding the island.

I agree that there are other factors that make Nikumaroro a candidate for Earhart's final resting place.

Calling the image exactly like an Electra undercarriage leg is quite a stretch, IMHO - even that interpretation's proponents merely called it "consistent".

It does look exactly like a blurry, distant photo of an Electra leg...

That's why they're launching another search. It could be other things, but it could also be debris from the exact same type of plane she was flying.

> It does look exactly like a blurry, distant photo of an Electra leg.

At least for the sake of argument, I will grant that a blurry, distant photo of an Electra leg might look exactly like this one, but in such a case, the exactitude would be in the correspondence of two blurred, small images, and that exactitude does not transfer to the identification of the imaged object as an Electra leg. You have to ask what else could produce a matching photograph, and if it is sufficiently distant and blurred, just about anything of approximately the right reflectivity would work.

I hope you're right and they find it.

But let's also be honest here... the blurry spec smaller than a grain of rice in the original photo doesn't look like anything, specifically. [1]

It doesn't look like an aircraft landing gear at all. Now you can make an aircraft landing gear look like it if you make it blurry, but that blurry grain of rice looks like nothing.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190812112844im_/https://tighar...

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