What happened to the 39-year-old aviatrix and her navigator, Fred Noonan, has remained a source for speculation to this day. On one of the last legs of a circumnavigation of the globe, the pair left Lae, New Guinea en route to a tiny speck of land known as Howland Island, never to be seen or heard of again.
Of course, the most likely explanation is they simply got lost and ran out of fuel, forcing her to ditch in the sea—a precarious and probably fatal prospect in the heavy, two-engine Lockheed Electra she was flying.
Conspiracy theorists had had a field day ever since, claiming that she was captured by the Japanese when she flew too near the Marshal Islands on a secret spying mission for President Roosevelt, while others think she set down on some other deserted island and played Gilligan's Island with Fred for awhile.
Even as late as 1970 there were those who claimed she was still alive, having somehow survived to make her way to America to live under an assumed name.
