There’s something about a good mystery that just gets under your skin, isn’t there? The kind that makes you sit up a little straighter when it shows up in a documentary at 11:30 p.m. and suddenly you have to know what happened. Amelia Earhart is one of those mysteries. Maybe the mystery.
You probably know the basics: 1937, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappear over the Pacific during their around-the-world flight. Poof. Gone. Cue 85+ years of wild speculation, fuzzy photos, sonar blips, and more theories than you can shake a sextant at.
Then, back in 1940, bones were found on Nikumaroro Island—along with what sounds suspiciously like a list of Amelia’s travel gear: a woman’s shoe, a bottle of Bénédictine, and a sextant box. The bones were originally deemed male, but decades later, a forensic anthropologist named Richard Jantz re-examined the old records using modern science and declared, hey—these bones are way more likely to be Earhart’s than anyone else’s.
The catch? The bones are gone. Misplaced. Lost. Tossed in a box somewhere next to the Ark of the Covenant, maybe.
Fast forward to 2024, and another “Eureka!” moment—a sonar scan that looked like a plane wreck. Hope soared. And then… it turned out to be a rock. Womp-womp.
Now here’s where I start wondering: Do we really want to solve this?
Sure, closure is nice. But there’s something powerful about the not-knowing. Like the Mary Celeste drifting with dinner still on the table. Amelia’s mystery keeps her in the conversation, keeps her fascinating. It lets us imagine all kinds of endings—some heroic, some tragic, some so wildly romantic they belong in a time-travel novel (not that I’d know anything about that, of course).
And let’s not forget: she wasn’t just “the woman who vanished.” Amelia was a trailblazer. The first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. She broke records, broke barriers, and did it all in a field where women were mostly expected to be spectators, not pilots.
Maybe we don’t need to know how her story ends. Maybe what matters more is that it started in a way that inspired generations of girls (and boys) to think a little bigger, dream a little wilder, and not let anyone tell them they can’t.
So here’s to Amelia. Still flying free, still making us wonder.
What’s Your Favorite Mystery?
What about you—are there other unsolved mysteries that keep you up at night? Lost colonies, ghost ships, secret codes, time slips? (You know how I feel about those.) Drop your favorites in the comments—I’m always up for a bit of a rabbit hole. And who knows? One of these tantalizing not-quite-true tales might just worm its way into a story I haven’t written yet. After all, mystery is fertile ground for fiction…
Tracy Cooper-Posey
SRP Author
