Declassified Amelia Earhart records include her last known communications

The U.S. National Archives has published a batch of newly declassified government records on Amelia Earhart, the American aviator who vanished over the Pacific in 1937, officials said.

Earhart went missing while on a pioneering round-the-world flight with navigator Fred Noonan, and her disappearance is one of the most tantalizing mysteries in aviation lore.

President Donald Trump ordered the declassification and release in September of all U.S. government records related to Earhart’s ill-fated final flight.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the documents released on Friday included “newly declassified files from the National Security Agency, information on Earhart’s last known communications, weather and plane conditions at the time, and potential search locations, as well as subsequent inquiries and theories regarding her disappearance.”

Further documents would be publicly released on the National Archives website on a “rolling basis” as they are declassified, Gabbard said in a statement.

The documents include a July 1937 radio log from Itasca, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter that was deployed to support Earhart’s flight around the world. Itasca was the last ship to have radio contact with Earhart and Noonan before their aircraft disappeared. The phrase “Earhart Unheard” appears numerous times in the log.  According to the National Archives, the last communication from Earhart’s plane came at about 8:43 a.m. on Jul 2, 1937: “We are on the line 157 337 wl rept msg we wl rept…” 

The documents also include military reports about the search as well as memos, telegrams and newspaper clippings.

Among them is the July 16, 1960 front page of the San Mateo Times with the headline: “Ex-Serviceman Claims He Saw Earhart Grave.” Former Army Sergeant Thomas Devine told the newspaper that while serving in Saipan, a native on the island showed him an unmarked grave of two white people “who came from the sky.” Devine said believed it to be the grave of Earhart and Noonan.

In a separate newspaper article, dated Nov. 18, 1970, a researcher claimed that a former Pan American Airways employee had records indicating Earhart survived the crash and sent a distress call that was received by the airline.

Many of the thousands of documents published online on Friday have been released previously by the National Archives or made available to researchers, and aviation experts consider it unlikely that the latest material will shed any new light on Earhart’s disappearance.

Earhart’s final flight has fascinated historians for decades and spawned books, movies and theories galore.

The prevailing belief is that Earhart, 39, and Noonan, 44, ran out of fuel and ditched their twin-engine Lockheed Electra in the Pacific near Howland Island while on one of the final legs of their epic journey.

Earhart, who won fame in 1932 as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, took off on May 20, 1937 from Oakland, California, hoping to become the first woman to fly around the world.

She and Noonan vanished on July 2, 1937 after taking off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on a challenging 2,500-mile flight to refuel on Howland Island, a speck of a US territory between Australia and Hawaii.

They never made it.

Efforts to find the aircraft have continued to this day.  Last month, an expedition to try to locate Earhart’s plane on a remote island in the Pacific was delayed until next year.

A team of researchers was planning to travel to Nikumaroro Island in early November to determine whether something known as the Taraia Object — a visual anomaly seen in satellite and other imagery — is Earhart’s aircraft. They are now awaiting additional clearances from local authorities as they work through the permit approvals, and cannot go later this year due to the start of cyclone season.

The underwater object has been visible in photos dating back to 1938, the year after Earhart and Noonan disappeared.

Researchers previously said there is “very strong” evidence that the object, which is in a lagoon on Nikumaroro, a small island in Kiribati about halfway between Australia and Hawaii, is the iconic aviator’s plane. Some, however, have expressed skepticism. “We’ve looked there in that spot, and there’s nothing there,” Ric Gillespie, executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, told NBC News in July.

A team of researchers from Purdue and the Archaeological Legacy Institute plan to take photos and videos of the site, then use magnetometers and sonar devices to scan the area. The item will then be dredged and lifted from the water so researchers can attempt to identify it. 

Last year, an expedition team captured a sonar image in the Pacific Ocean that appeared to resemble Earhart’s plane resting at the bottom of the sea. It turned out  to be a rock formation.