American researchers have claimed that two pieces of bent and corroded metal are evidence that Amelia Earhart crash-landed on a remote Pacific atoll in 1937 and that the famous aviator and her navigator subsequently died as prisoners of the Japanese.
Les Kinney and Dick Spink travelled to barren Mili atoll, part of the Marshall Islands, in January and used metal detectors to carry out a detailed search.
Many of the metal fragments they discovered have been ruled out as having come from Ms Earhart's Lockheed Electra, but two of the shards are now being analysed by Alcoa, which produced the aluminum used for the aircraft, and Parker Aerospace, The Mail reported.
The researchers believe a dented, round piece of metal is the dust shield that fitted over the brake assembly of the aircraft's wheel, while a long, thin piece of aluminum was originally a component in the wheel well.
Ms Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937, as she neared the end of her effort to become the first woman to fly around the Earth close to the equator. Accompanied by Fred Noonan, her navigator, Ms Earhart had taken off from Lae, in New Guinea, and was searching for Howland Island in the Pacific.
Radio signals indicate that she was very close to her destination, from where she was scheduled to fly on to Hawaii before completing the record-breaking journey in California. Cloud cover thwarted her efforts to locate Howland, however, and for many years the accepted wisdom was that the aircraft had simply run out of fuel and crashed into the ocean.
After the end of the Second World War, there were numerous reports about the fate of the flight, with several claiming Ms Earhart and Mr Noonan had been captured by the Japanese after landing on Mili.
Mr Kinney and Mr Spink have invested thousands of dollars of their own money to follow up on the reports and are convinced that the Electra came down on Mili, where the two were captured by the Japanese. They contend the aircraft was subsequently placed aboard a barge and towed by a freighter to the island of Jaluit and on to Saipan, one of the largest islands in the Western Pacific.
Accused of being spies, according to the claims, Mr Noonan was executed and Ms Earhart later died of dysentry.
In 2009, Wally Earhart, Ms Earhart's fourth cousin, claimed that the US government hushed-up the abduction and continues to perpetrate a "massive cover-up".
"They did not die as claimed by the government and the Navy when the Electra plunged into the Pacific - they died while in Japanese captivity on the island of Saipan," said Mr Earhart, who has declined to reveal his sources.
Mr Kinney and Mr Spink are convinced by the legends that continue to float around the western Pacific and say they believe the Electra was buried in a huge pit on Saipan after the island had been recaptured by the US in 1945.
Mr Kinney said the Japanese would have "lost face" if it emerged that Ms Earhart had landed on the Japanese-controlled island of Mili without their knowledge and would also have assumed that she was a spy.
The US, he added, was fully aware that Ms Earhart had been captured because it had broken Japan's military and diplomatic codes. To request the fliers' freedom would have tipped the Japanese off, the theory goes, so the US "decided Earhart would become expendable", Mr Kinney said.
Yet another suggestion is that Ms Earhart had sufficient fuel to reach Gardener Island, today part of the Republic of Kiribati and known as Nikumaroro. A rival expedition by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) is presently returning from a two-week investigation of the island, much of which has focused on an "anomaly" captured on sonar images at a depth of nearly 600 feet that the group believes are the remains of the Electra.
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