h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070331/ap_on_re_us/search_for_amelia

If you have Google Earth, zoom in on Howland Island. Then scroll South by Southwest about 300-400 miles and you will see a group of islands, including Nikumaroro. When Fred missed Howland, Amelia reported that she was eithor flying in that direction or in the opposite direction or both if she doubled back...

The link above is a well written piece, but it's pretty much a rehash of previously known or suspected information. The idea of a previously undiscovered reporter’s diary is interesting, if true. There's nothing new in the log regarding Amelia's last transmissions. It has been suggested that the Captain of the Itasca falsified the part of pre-dawn transmission from Amelia reporting that the conditions were "overcast". An alternate theory for the post-crash transmissions is that they were hoaxes..

The information below (from Google Earth) would seem to provide an alternative possible source for a European woman's skeleton and period woman's shoe. The German sextant box and plexiglass window have always been of interest, since Fred owned a box of that type, but the serial number on the box cannot be positively traced to Fred. Note the shipwreck below. That ship would also have carried a marine sextant.

Nikumaroro, formerly Gardner Island, is part of the Phoenix Group, a remote, elongated, triangular coral atoll with profuse vegetation and a large central marine lagoon, located at 4.660S, 174.530W. Nikumaroro is approximately 6 km long by less than 2 km wide.

In 1892, the island was claimed by the United Kingdom during a call by HMS Curacao. Twenty-nine islanders were settled there, and some structures with corrugated iron roofs were constructed, but a severe drought resulted in the prompt failure of this project within a year.

On November 29, 1929 the SS Norwich City, a large, empty British freighter with a crew of thirty-five men ran aground on the reef at the island's northwest corner during a storm. There were at least eight fatalities. The remaining crew camped near collapsed structures from the abortive Arundel project and were rescued after surviving several days on the island. The wreck of the Norwich City was a prominent landmark on the reef for seventy years, although by 2004 only scattered heavy debris, including the ship's massive steam engine, remained.

On December 1, 1938 members of the British Pacific Islands Survey Expedition arrived to evaluate the island as a possible location for either seaplane landings or an airfield. On December 20, more British officials arrived with twenty Gilbertese settlers in one of the last colonial expansions of the British Empire. Efforts to clear land and plant coconuts were distressed by a profound lack of drinking water. By June 1939 a few wells had been successfully established and there were fifty-eight Gilbertese settlers on Gardner, including sixteen women and twenty-six children.

The island's early supervisor and magistrate was Teng Koata whose wife, according to local legend, had an encounter with the goddess Manganibuka on a remote part of the island. The British colonial officer, Gerald Gallagher (1912-1941), established a headquarters of the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme in the village located on the island's western end, just south of the largest entrance to the lagoon. Wide coral-gravel streets and a parade ground were laid out, and important structures included a thatched administration house, wood-frame cooperative store and a radio shack.

From 1944 through 1945 the United States Coast Guard operated a navigational LORAN station with twenty-five crewmen on the southeastern tip of Gardner, installing at least one quonset hut and some smaller structures. The island's population reached a high of approximately 100 by the mid 1950s, however, by the early 1960s periodic drought and an unstable freshwater lens had so thwarted the struggling colony that most residents were evacuated to the Solomon Islands by the British in 1963, and by 1965 Gardner was officially uninhabited.