Long Lost Diaries May Solve Amelia Earhart Mystery

Ancient, worm-eaten diaries from an AP reporter, a partial skeleton, a sextant box and a woman's shoe found abandoned on a South Pacific island are all clues that could now answer one of the oldest aviation mysteries: what happened to Amelia Earhart?

It's the coldest of cold cases, and yet 70 years after Amelia Earhart disappeared, clues are still turning up. Long-dismissed notes of a shortwave distress call beginning, "This is Amelia Earhart ..."

The previously unknown diary of an Associated Press reporter, surfacing after decades.

And a team that has already found aircraft parts and a woman's shoe on a remote South Pacific atoll, hoping to return this year to find more evidence, perhaps even DNA.

If what's known now had been conveyed to searchers then, might Earhart and her navigator have been rescued? It's one of a thousand questions that keep the case from being declared dead, as Earhart herself was a year and a half after she vanished.

It will certainly be good to have closure. I, for one, have always believed her biplane was beamed directly into the belly of a flying saucer.

Was Amelia Earhart a doomed castaway? [CNN]