More than 100 people filled Cornwall’s Munger Cottage on April 24 to hear Stephan Wilkinson re-create “The Mystery of Amelia Earhart” — the pilot who disappeared while circling the globe in 1937.
She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were due to end their historic excursion with a landing on July 4th in Los Angeles. With two days left in their journey, they were heading to the Howland Islands in the Pacific. But they never got there.
Did they run out of fuel and crash into the ocean? Mr. Wilkinson (a Cornwall-on-Hudson resident and veteran pilot) surprised the audience with a different explanation.
He said the plane continued on its navigational path and made an emergency landing on a flat reef on Gardner Island, where the castaways radioed for help that never came.
It sounds like conjecture, but Mr. Wilkinson presented the information as if it was almost a fact. He supported his statement with evidence uncovered by The International Group for Historical Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR).
Just two of the group’s many discoveries are enough to make you wonder. Gardner was not inhabited and had no potable water. But an expedition to the island uncovered a freckle cream remover. Did it belong to the famous pilot? Mr. Wilkinson said she had freckles on her nose that she tried to camouflage.
After the plane’s disappearance, the airwaves were filled with radio messages. Some were bogus. But one caller, who sounded like Amelia Earhart, kept saying something that sounded like “New York City.”
The reference was puzzling because the Big Apple was not on the couple’s flight plan. But the caller was probably saying “Norwich City,” the name of a wrecked freighter that was beached on Gardner Island.
As with any good mystery, the audience had several questions at the end of the presentation. What happened to the plane? The most likely answer is that a wave swept it off the atoll and it was lost at sea.
Amelia Earhart’s husband, George Putnam, promoted the flight and was pushing her to reach Los Angeles by Independence Day. She was already well-known as “Lady Lindy,” because she was a tall, attractive midwesterner like Charles Lindbergh.
But she was not an accomplished aviator like Lindbergh. Mr. Wilkinson said she had several crashes and she always claimed they weren’t her fault.
The Cornwall Public Library hosted the presentation and moved it to another site (Munger Cottage), knowing that Mr. Wilkinson and the subject matter would attract a crowd.
