Utahn delves into mystery of Earhart's disappearance

It was just a piece of a woman's shoe that Dr. Tommy Love found near the grave of a stillborn infant on an island in the Pacific Ocean. It would turn out to be one of several pivotal clues in the search for the remains of Amelia Earhart.

Love, a physician who works in Layton and lives in Park City, belongs to a group that recently purchased on eBay a typewritten copy of a reporter's notebook that gives more insight into Earhart's final hours before her plane's radio went silent in 1937.

On that trip, Earhart, 39, had seemed destined to become the first female pilot ever to circumnavigate the globe. Born in Kansas, Earhart had made a name for herself in the 1930s by setting several aviation records. She had married "master promoter" and publicist George Palmer Putnam in 1931, and her fame had grown.

By 1937, she was ready to tackle the more than 28,000-mile trip that was supposed to begin and end in Oakland, Calif. But at some point during the 2,556-mile leg between Lae, New Guinea, and Howland Island, the dream abruptly ended. It's reported she ran out of gas, became lost over the Pacific Ocean and couldn't receive radio transmissions.

Different ideas have been proffered on where her plane may have gone down and whether she actually landed and lived for a while or died in a crash.

Love's own theories stem from his involvement in The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, a nonprofit foundation "dedicated to promoting responsible aviation archaeology and historic preservation," according to its mission statement.

TIGHAR has narrowed the list of possible places where Earhart's plane came to rest to the island of Nikumaroro (formerly Gardner Island), in the Phoenix Island chain. The island is about 350 miles south of her planned destination, Howland Island, where she was going to refuel before continuing on to Honolulu.

The group believes that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, may have actually lived for a while as castaways on the atoll, which was uninhabited at the time. In 1938, the British colonized the island with people from the Gilbert Islands, but by 1963, it was once again uninhabited and has remained so since then.

To support the castaway theory, TIGHAR members point to parts of a woman's shoe and measurements of bones found on the island, along with a section of a plane's windshield and a piece of aircraft aluminum that were consistent with the type used in civilian planes in the 1930s. Other clues come from recollections of transmissions by Earhart that were overheard by people with shortwave radios in the United States.