9. The object in the Bevington photograph remained hidden for years
The Bevington photograph was well-known among researchers and theorists regarding the fate of Amelia Earhart for decades. Yet the object floating in the water was not. The reason for that seeming anomaly is simple. Most copies of the photograph available were cropped. The commonly used version featured a part of the shoreline and the decaying wreck of SS Norwich City, but did not include the section of the shoreline in which the mystery object evidently floated in the water. Its discovery, and the forensic analysis as to what it was, created a furor among those seeking the answer to the Earhart mystery. Headlines announced its discovery as part of Earhart’s lost Electra. Despite the failure of Niku VII do document specific evidence of Earhart’s airplane at Nikumaroro, the State Department continued to support additional searches of the area.
One of the vocal opponents of the Gardner Island hypothesis was the Smithsonian Institution. Over the course of many years, the Smithsonian expressed skepticism regarding TIGHAR’s research methods and analysis, including their disregarding facts which contradicted their findings. In an email published in part on their Smithsonian Magazine website a curator at the National Air and Space Museum wrote, “Our stance – that she went down in the Pacific Ocean in the proximity of Howland Island – is based on facts”. Calling TIGHAR’s founder and director Richard Gillespie to account, the curator, Dorothy Cochrane, wrote, “Both myself and Senior Curator Dr. Tom Crouch have been debunking Gillespie’s theory for more than 25 years”. Nonetheless, the fervor to locate the remains of Earhart’s Electra off Nikumaroro grew steadily as TIGHAR released more and more discoveries.