Travel
TIGHAR’s “Beast of Bombay Hook I” expedition took me into the Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge near Dover, Delaware in April 1992. Our team found, excavated, and evaluated the remains of a World War II P-47 fighter that crashed there.
Between September 1992 and September 1994, I assisted TIGHAR with four “Project Midnight Ghost” expeditions into the wilderness of Newfoundland, Canada. The teams searched for “The White Bird,” a French aircraft that in 1927 nearly beat Charles Lindbergh’s historic solo flight across the Atlantic.
TIGHAR invited me to join the “Amelia Earhart Project Expedition, NIKU III” in February and March of 1997. We sailed from Fiji to Nikumaroro Island, Kiribati, in the South Pacific, searching for Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, the aviators who disappeared in 1937.
A year later came “The Kanton Mission Expedition.” In February 1998 the team flew to Kanton Island, Kiribati, by way of Hawaii and Palmyra, to investigate a report that an engine from Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10 had been carried there in 1971 by Space and Missile Test Center (SAMTEC) workers from another island in the Phoenix Group.
That November took me to Hanslope, England, to retrieve records from the Western Pacific High Commission archives. I was after one report in particular: a human skeleton discovered on Gardner Island (now Nikumaroro Island) in 1940, and what it might have to do with the Earhart mystery.
My father Fred joined me in July 2000 on TIGHAR’s “The Lady of the Lake Expedition,” a journey into the Payette National Forest wilderness in Idaho to investigate the 1943 crash site of a Douglas B-23 “Dragon” military aircraft.
Nikumaroro pulled me back in June and July of 2017. I joined Tom King, PhD, and many other team members on the “Search for Amelia Earhart Expedition,” sailing from Fiji with Betchart Expeditions alongside a team from the National Geographic Society. The search for Earhart and Noonan continued.
India was a different kind of travel. Each May from 2016 through 2019, through the University of Minnesota’s Acara program, I co-instructed a three-week study abroad class centered in Bangalore. Every session included two journeys into rural India.
India tilted my world view. I am either there or reminiscing about being there.
More about these trips, with photographs, is on the way.