President Trump announced on Friday that he has ordered the declassification and public release of all government records about aviator Amelia Earhart, noting on social media that her disappearance in 1937 as she attempted to fly around the world has "captivated millions." Trump called her fate an "interesting story" and said people have been asking him about declassifying and making public everything the government has on her. Trump returned to office earlier this year promising to declassify and release government records on several high-profile figures, though Earhart's wasn't among the names mentioned, per the AP.
The Republican president's administration has since released thousands of pages of records about President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. All were assassinated during the 1960s, and the files revealed no blockbuster information. Both the FBI and the National Archives already have released batches of documents about Earhart. Some who've doggedly researched her disappearance nearly 90 years ago doubt there's much more the government has on her that it can release.
Earhart was an aviation pioneer and the first woman to pilot a solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. She disappeared in the South Pacific while trying to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished while flying from New Guinea to Howland Island as part of her attempt to become the first female pilot to fly around the world. She'd radioed that she was running low on fuel. The Navy searched but found no trace. The US government's official position has been that Earhart and Noonan went down with their plane, and she was declared legally dead in 1939.
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Since then, theories have abounded, with some veering into the absurd, including abduction by aliens or Earhart living in New Jersey under an alias. Others speculate she and Noonan were executed by the Japanese or died as castaways on an island. Ric Gillespie, head of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, who has studied Earhart for decades, doubts that much more information on the famed aviator remains to be released. But Mindi Love Pendergraft of the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum says that "if these records shed any light on Earhart's fate, it is a welcome action for Earhart historians and enthusiasts."
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