It’s been 86 days since we last released an episode for this show. 

I thought I could take some time off. You'd think I’d know by now. 

Back in May of this year, Amelia Rose Earhart made her Chasing Earhart debut as part of this reboot and we covered a lot of ground. What I didn’t know then, but am privy to know now, is that Amelia Rose, had a trick up her sleeve. At the time of our recording, she was being courted by several groups in the case, asking for her assistance in spring-boarding their searches, and the chase for her participation was very, very real. Since that episode, the search for Amelia Earhart & Fred Noonan has, let’s just say, taken a turn and we’re now in the middle of a race to the answer for a mystery that is now as white hot as it’s ever been. 

Amelia Rose has made her decision since that time, and it’s indeed given a boost to a team that’s been conducting one of the longest investigations this case has ever seen. 

Toward the end of August, it was announced that Amelia would join deep ocean exploration company Nauticos in its forthcoming trip out to the Pacific to pick up the search and bring Amelia Mary Earhart home. For good. 

But…..theirs isn’t the only search going on at the moment. Perhaps Amelia’s strongest professional connection at the time of her disappearance, Purdue University, has now also thrown their hat into the ring by pledging their support to Dr. Rick Pettigrew, and the Archeology Channels’ investigation in the lagoon of Nikumaroro Island - a locale that anyone listening will be very familiar with. I couldn’t write this if I tried. 

Oh, and one more thing. In the middle of all of this, our sitting president just called for the United States Government to immediately release the Earhart files. 

Tonight, I’m joined by two men that are making their Chasing Earhart podcast debuts. One is part of my original 25. And the other is at the center of everything Nauticos is doing for their next trip. We couldn’t ask for a better duo to open up all they can, in their efforts to finally finish this story - perhaps once and for all. 

Let's get to work. Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. This is Jeff Morris and Rod Blocksome of Nauticos. 

"Nauticos Reveals Breakthrough Data and Announces New Expedition to Locate Amelia Earhart's Plane" @ PR Wire

"Trump orders declassification and release of Amelia Earhart files nearly 90 years after aviator’s disappearance" @ The NY Post

So much of Amelia Earhart’s story lives in the spaces between facts—the hours unaccounted for, the voices never heard again, the enigmatic whispers of survival. Those unanswered questions keep us chasing, keep us listening for what might still be found.

Over this rebrand, we’ve traced radio logs, scoured sonar scans off remote atolls, sat with the families who watched the world collectively hold its breath in July of 1937. We’ve pushed beyond accepted timelines, challenged the orthodox accounts. Each step has carried us further from the airport in Oakland and closer to the moment when time itself seemed to slip through her fingers.

Today, we shift our focus—not to new sonar anomalies or grid searches—but to the power of storytelling itself, and the women who champion it. We welcome a guest whose entire career has orbited around truth-telling.

She’s a journalist, writer, and documentarian - someone who has long been fascinated by how stories shape us—and how we shape them in turn. Her work spans genres, subjects, decades. Whether she’s exploring women's inner lives or investigating hidden histories, her lens is always clear, and always curious.

In her new book, she turns her attention to reckoning with the unknown—not in search of wreckage or coordinates, but to dig into the emotional fallout, the cultural aftershocks that reverberate long after an airplane ever disappears. She’s been asking questions like, "How do we grieve someone we never knew?" "How does a myth persist when facts remain elusive?"

Over the last season, we’ve heard from explorers, navigators, and forensic experts all alike. We’ve tracked timelines, re‑evaluated eyewitness accounts, and examined cryptic newspaper clippings reeking of both desperation and hope. All the while, we’ve felt the pull of Earhart’s silhouette—her strength, her ambition, her solitude, and the void she left behind.

Tonight, we step back. We step into the stories left untold: letters never sent home, journals never written, and the echo of words like ‘we’re running low’ drifting in static. We’ll talk about mortality, myth-making, and memory. About how the flight of one aviatrix became a collective heartbeat for generations. Tonight's guest journey into that runway of remembrance might just teach us more about our own need to chase—to connect, to understand, to grieve.

It’s part reflection, part excavation. But we’re not chasing debris this time. We’re chasing meaning.

So, whether you’ve been with us since the very first broadcast, or this is your first descent into Earhart’s world, stay with me. Because these are the stories that don’t end in a disappearance. They begin to live anew—in the telling.

Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. From New York City, this is Laurie Gwen Shapiro.

The Aviator & the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon @ Amazon 

‘The Aviator and the Showman’ Review: A Marriage in the Clouds' @ WSJ

When I say the Amelia Earhart/Fred Noonan case is a monster, you know I’m telling the truth. In 2017, I began my journey into this case publicly. And if there’s one thing I discovered right away, it’s that this case? The one we’ve been covering for well over a hundred episodes now? It’s full of misinformation. It’s gotten so bad that it becomes overwhelming when you start to look at it. And if you choose to answer the why to that question, you might find that maybe we’re all partially to blame for where this case currently stands.

So how do we shift the narrative? Where in the world do we begin to dismantle even one of these theories? As it turns out the answer came a couple of months ago, when one of our listeners Becky Ott, posted a photo in our Facebook discussion group for Vanished. The photo was taken outside the St. Charles Missouri County Library and it was of a sign that read Discover the Past Amelia Earhart: Myth & Memory. 

The presenter that night is also tonight's guest. 

I’ve believed in synergy all my life, but I can’t explain how it works. It just does - and it almost always occurs at just the right moment, doesn’t it? Thanks to Becky’s post and her follow up with more information, I was able to connect with a guest that’s making her Chasing Earhart debut right now. And she’s about to pull the linchpin on everything you thought you knew about the Amelia Earhart case. You’re not ready for this, but we’re gonna give it to ya anyway. Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. By way of St. Louis Missouri, This is Amy Lutz.

LINKS: 

Amelia Earhart Myth & Memory by Amy Lutz @ UMSL.edu

Amelia Earhart Lives @ Amazon 

The Search for Amelia Earhart @ Amazon

Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence @ Wikipedia 

The Japanese Government’s Offer of Assistance to Help Find Amelia Earhart, July 1937 @ The National Archives 

Flight for Freedom @ Wikipedia

'Flight for Freedom,' a Film Speculation on Fate of Woman Flier, With Rosalind Russell in Lead, at the Music Hall @ The NY Times

Facts and Fiction in the Search for Amelia Earhart @ Air & Space

We’re 27 episodes into my little experiment with this rebrand now - I never thought we’d still be going. It continues to baffle me. One of the things I really wanted to do when I decided to bring the show back was to make sure I brought new voices into the ongoing conversation that we’ve been having for decades. If you follow the pattern closely though, these last 27 episodes tell a bigger story. And if you’re really keen, you might notice that I like to do my best to manifest guests on this show. My manifesting must have been working overtime, because tonight’s guest has been a long time coming. You might have heard of his blog - It’s called the Ghost of Gardner Island. And there are an awful lot of people that will tell you that the work that’s featured there is nothing short of a master-class in research. 

Tonight, we run through the details of an investigation that began with little more than a follow up question and ended with a reversal in direction for one of Castaway's marquee artifacts - one thought to have belonged to navigator Fred Noonan. 

Some might call him a disrupter of sorts - a man whose own work has rattled the cages of one of this case's biggest summations. Others refer to him as one of the brightest Earhart researchers to come along in decades. And I tend to side with those guys. If we’ve done our best to showcase why castaway makes sense for the ultimate explanation of Earhart and Noonan’s demise, consider tonight a rebuttal of sorts and then, you tell me. 

Say his name, and he shall appear. Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. From New York City, this is John Kada. 

The 1940's Sextant Box Identified? @ Tom King's Blog

Bushnell Sextant Box @ TIGHAR's Official Website

Luke Field Inventory @ TIGAHR's Official Website

Amelia Didn’t Know Radio by Captain Almon A. Gray, U.S. Naval Reserve (Retired) @ The U.S. Naval Institute's Official Website

Several years ago, I started hearing about a man making his way through the Amelia Earhart/Fred Noonan disappearance case. What caught my attention wasn’t just his research—it was the way his name kept coming up.

From the moment I became involved in this story, I’ve been drawn to the lesser-known nuances that make up the towering mystery of Amelia Earhart. As I got to know people in the field, one name surfaced repeatedly. No matter the theory, no matter the angle, everyone seemed to be talking about the same guy. He’s written books, published papers, and contributed to nearly every version of this story—including his appearance on Vanished: Amelia Earhart, where he explored a well-known collection of bones discovered on Nikumaroro. That discovery, made by British colonial officer Gerald Gallagher, remains one of the most hotly debated pieces of evidence in this case. Were those bones the final remains of Amelia and Fred, stranded castaways on a remote Pacific island? Or is the truth something else entirely?

When I looked into his work, I immediately understood why he was so widely respected. He doesn’t care about being right. He thinks bigger. His neutrality has allowed him to move freely across this story, collaborating with some of the most prominent figures in the investigation—people who sit in opposing camps, defending starkly different theories.

How does someone do that? How do you keep an open mind in a case that seems determined to pull you down an endless rabbit hole? Tonight, we find out. It’s time to open your ears and your mind. We’re making stops on Nikumaroro, Orona, and Buka—by way of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. This is Kenton Spading.

A Lost Sailor or Amelia Earhart? Lost Norwich City Crewmen: Potential Sources of the Human Remains Discovered on Gardner Island (now Nikumaroro Island) in 1940 @ Academia.edu

St. Paul employee part of team searching for Amelia Earhart @ US Army Corps of Engineers

Amelia Earhart's Shoes: Is the Mystery Solved? @ Amazon

Vanished: Amelia Earhart "Left for Dead" (Part Two) @ Spotify

The Chater Report @ TIGHAR's Official Website 

If you’ve ever heard me guest on other podcasts or in media of any kind, you’ve heard the story of how this podcast all started for me. But just in case you haven’t, here it is. The Chasing Earhart project (which this podcast is a part of) officially launched in 2017. But nine years before that, I started what I often refer to as the pre-research phase - a part of the project that lasted a little bit longer than the time we’ve been public. During that time, I made a list of 25 original guests that I felt I needed to convince to come on board and help me tell the most robust version of this story that, at that time, I felt I could. When we decided to go public, I began sending out emails, making cold calls and trying to pull strings as a nobody with no experience and no recognizability in relation to the case. 

I contacted everyone on my list with basically the same request. Come on my show, talk to me about your research and give me an opportunity to give you a platform that I felt would end up being unique once we gained some traction. Of all the people I reached out to, perhaps one man stood out more than most when it came to his approach and his notoriety in the case. He’s a decorated archaeologist with one of the most impressive resumes that I’ve ever seen. And we had a connection through the University of California Riverside, from which he earned his PhD in anthropology in 1976. In his teens, he organized the Society for California Archaeology and he’s the former senior Archaeologist for the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, better known to this audience by its famous acronym TIGHAR. 

He’s authored countless papers, written a pair of books - both fiction and non fiction and is perhaps the most well versed authority on the island of Nikumaroro. He was also the very first guest I ever featured on this podcast, over seven years ago. When I reached out to him initially, I remember telling my wife that we’d likely never hear back. After all, what business did someone like me have, in having a conversation with a man of his stature for a case I was so fascinated by? To my surprise, he said yes and we went on to have what is still the most listened to episode of this entire podcast. 

Since then, he’s gone on to guest on the show a couple more times, and he was also the first guest I asked to appear on our Chasing Earhart Discussion panel in Atchison, Kansas in 2018. When I came calling again for Vanished, he was in, and he gave some of the most important testimony that, that series has ever seen. I owe a lot to him. And tonight, after six years away from the show, he’s returned to catch up with me in what I’m referring to as a career retrospective when it comes to his involvement in the Amelia Earhart/Fred Noonan disappearance case. I didn’t know it when I started this rebrand 25 episodes ago, but coming full circle has become a dominating theme throughout. Tonight, in perhaps one of the most special conversations I’ve had on this show, I welcome him back into the fold to discuss his thoughts on castaway, and gain some surprising insight into his feelings on the case to be made for Nikumaroro. He’s one of the most highly respected people in his industry and his name will forever be synonymous with Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan. Listen to the following conversation closely - you’re all about to learn something valuable. And I hope you take it to heart. Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. From Silver Spring, Maryland, this is Dr. Tom King.

"The Continuing Search for Amelia Earhart: An Interview with Tom King" @ The Archaeology Channel

Amelia Earhart Unrescued @ Amazon 

Amelia Earhart's Shoes: Is the Mystery Solved? @ Amazon

Thirteen Bones @ Amazon

Amelia Earhart on Nikumaroro: A Summary of the Evidence @ Academia.org

Castaway: A Conversation with Dr. Tom King @ Chasing Earhart

Niku IX Recap: A Conversation with Dr. Tom King & Andrew McKenna @ Chasing Earhart

Amelia Earhart Unrescued: A Conversation with Dr. Tom King @ Chasing Earhart

In 2021, I had a conversation with brothers Mike and Robert Ashmore regarding a highly curious satellite image they’d discovered in a lagoon on an island that’s gotten a lot of play in this Earhart investigation over the years. It’s been some time since that interview and the wheels of this case turn slowly……but they do turn. 

Tonight, in a follow up to that episode, I welcome a man that has been on my radar for years, and over those years, we’ve talked off and on about him being a project guest but we wanted to wait until just the right moment for him to make his debut. Fortunately, now is that moment, and we owe it to that conversation with the Ashmore brothers from over 3 years ago. That satellite image they stumbled across? Now has a name and a true blue expedition out to Nikumaroro to investigate it. It’s called the Taraia object. 

He’s been named dropped for years by multiple guests. Tonight, one of the most decorated archeologists we've ever had on the show makes his Chasing Earhart debut to discuss a brand new expedition out to a very familiar place with an entirely new goal. 

This case has a way of bringing things full circle, and boy are we completing one of those tonight. 

Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. From Eugene Oregon by way of the Archeology Channel, this is Dr. Richard Pettigrew.

"New Expedition Hopes to Find Amelia Earhart's Plane" @ Inside Edition on YouTube

"Oregon archaeologist to embark on expedition to find Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane" @ The NY Post

"The Last Flight: Local Organization Searching for Amelia Earhart" @ KLCC

"The Continuing Search for Amelia Earhart: An Interview with Tom King" @ The Archaeology Channel

"The Road to Amelia: A Conversation with Mike & Robert Ashmore" @ Chasing Earhart

If you’ve ever attended the annual Amelia Earhart festival in Atchison Kansas, then you're familiar with an event that’s been a staple of that weekend every year since its inception. It’s called Breakfast with the Books. An event that brings Amelia Earhart authors to the town where the legend began to present their stories and discuss AE’s enduring legacy. A couple of years ago, while I was holding my event for Rabbit Hole, my next guest was there as a featured author for Breakfast with the Books in presentation of a story that we’ll be discussing tonight. 

She’s crafted one of the most clever ideas for a work of fiction that I’ve ever read and if you’re an Amelia Earhart fan, you’ll be absolutely thrilled at the way it’s presented and the attention she’s paid to all the little details that have helped make Earhart’s legend grow for almost 90 years. 

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like for Amelia Earhart to meet Nancy Drew or Clue, get ready, because this is a mystery within a mystery, and it’s set in one of the most iconic Earhart landmarks in the entire world. Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. This is Kristin Gray and The Amelia Six.

The Amelia Six @ Amazon

Discover Amelia Earhart's Goggles @ Google Arts & Culture

In August of 2017, I helped introduce the world to a man that had been quietly working on an idea that could blow the wheels off the Amelia Earhart/Fred Noonan story. He’d recently put out a book via the Paragon Agency called Tracking Amelia Earhart: Her Flightpath to the End. I happened to know the publisher of that book, Doug Westfall, who I’d met just a few months earlier and it was at that meeting that I first learned of tonight’s guest.

Once I got his number, I gave him a call, and then I read that book. There aren’t too many moments in this whole thing that I can remember my exact thoughts at an exact point in time. But this one? I know because I wrote it down. A singular question. And here it is. “Why doesn’t everybody know about this?!”

At the end of tonight, you’ll know two things. One - we have an aircraft off the coast of Buka, sitting a little over 100 feet down with a remarkable set of similarities to the holy grail of aviation. That’s a fact. And it’s inescapable now. And two - we’re gonna go get it. And in doing so, we’re going to mount the most incredible cross theory expedition this case has ever seen. They do say it takes a village.

You’ve heard from everyone around him, some of the key names involved in Buka III, and you’ve even heard from some detractors who’ve certainly shared their skepticism on what’s become a very curious wreck site in an area of the world that nobody had ever looked in, until he started looking over 15 years ago.

Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. From Salisbury, Maryland, this is Bill Snavely.

Tracking Amelia Earhart: Her Flightpath to the End @ Specialbooks.com

Lost in Flight: Amelia Earhart Giving Cover as a Decoy for a Spy Plane @ Specialbooks.com

Tracking Amelia Earhart: Her Flightpath to the End @ Chasing Earhart

Buka III: Bill Snavely, Chris Williamson & the Dependable Engines Association @ Chasing Earhart

Nearly a year ago, the Amelia Earhart story was rocked by a mysterious and compelling sonar image produced by ocean exploration company Deep Sea Vision. The suspiciously plane-shaped image taken in an area out in the Pacific near Howland Island, rattled the case to its core, and forced a full investigative stop while the world anxiously awaited a confirmation. 

As history was potentially unfolding, I welcomed Deep Sea Vision’s CEO, Tony Romeo to the podcast in his Chasing Earhart debut - and we discussed the possibility of his find being the beginning of the end for the Amelia Earhart/Fred Noonan disappearance case. 

Well, you know how that goes. 

Tonight, 10 months after that episode was recorded, Tony returns to look back in retrospect on that conversation, and discuss the most recent developments in the deep ocean search for the holy grail of aviation. You know, people say this case is cursed. You think there’s something to that? 

Just when you think the investigation may be over, it throws us yet another curve ball and puts us all right back where we were before.

The plot thickens, indeed. Let’s get to work. Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. Fresh back from deep in the Pacific Ocean, this is Tony Romeo.

Is This Amelia Earhart’s Long-Lost Plane? @ The Wall Street Journal

Ocean exploration company's possible proof of Amelia Earhart's wrecked plane nearly vanished: report @ Fox News

Researchers Thought They Found Amelia Earhart’s Missing Plane. It Turned Out to Be a Plane-Shaped Pile of Rocks @ Smithsonian Magazine

The Beginning of the End: A Conversation with Tony Romeo @ Chasing Earhart