The ongoing search for Amelia Earhart’s final resting place will soon involve dogs specially trained in sniffing out human remains.
The ongoing search for female flight pioneer Amelia Earhart’s final resting place will soon involve dogs specially trained in sniffing out human remains.
National Geographic is reporting that four dogs from the Institute for Canine Forensics, or ICF, will be sent on an expedition with the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR, which has been investigating Earhart’s disappearance for at least three decades.
The targeted search area continues to be a remote island in the Pacific called Nikumaroro where they suspect Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan landed in 1937 and ultimately died.
The team plans to deploy the dogs around the island in the hopes that the canines will be able to detect the scent of human remains and lead archaeologists to areas where bones can potentially be excavated and analyzed.
This isn’t the first time the group has turned to dogs for help in trying to determine what happened to Earhart; in 2015, TIGHAR announced on its Facebook page that one of their archaeologists, Dawn Johnson, had brought back various soil samples from Nikumaroro so a group of ICF dogs could examine them.
The post states, “The results of the initial test, although somewhat inconclusive, suggest the presence of residual human decomposition scent” at one of the potential sites that had previously been identified.
Overall, TIGHAR believes that Earhart and Noonan safely landed on the island after failing to find their intended destination of Howland Island. The group suspects she survived for a period of time as a castaway before dying there; it is unknown what may have happened to Noonan.
CNN notes that despite her disappearance decades ago, Earhart remains a legend as the first female pilot to complete a flight over the Atlantic.
