- After a hectic week of phone calls from the Earhart dig
on Tinian, Bob Silvers and I finally got to meet Friday morning at
Kingís
restaurant in Tamuning, Guam, for breakfast.
-
- He could be a poster boy for adventurous
expeditions.
-
- He's tall, tanned, handsome and blonde in a Robert
Redford
kind of way. And he's attached to his counterpart, Audrey McCurdy.
Together,
they make the perfect couple.
-
- He has a background in construction, marine engineering,
project management, and sailing. He is also a U.S. Air Force veteran and
a licensed pilot.
-
- She is a SCUBA instructor, a computer network
administrator
and experienced in commercial submarine training and piloting as well as
being a Regulatory compliance officer.
-
- They arrived in Guam Thursday night and spent Friday
running around trying to get a phone hook up and dial-up internet service.
On the mainland, this might be easy. But on Guam, it's like a dog chasing
its tail.
-
- Audrey had very limited internet service on Tinian as
the hotel rooms had no phone lines in them. The one phone line the hotel
had could be used to download data to the expedition's website, but for
only 5 or 6 minutes at a time.
-
- She maintains the Tinian Earhart Expedition site at
www.historicalexpeditions.com.
-
- Bob and Audrey left Europe for Tinian during the first
week of November. They had just spent the past 11 months sailing a ship,
the Arctic Lady, from Vancouver BC to Lebanon. The web site is at
www.bandacorp.com\arcticlady.htm
.
-
- Silvers can be considered the Expeditionís
catalyst.
"I knew Jim Sullivan from before he worked for me at a tourist
submarine
company, cleaning boats right after the loss of his own boat at sea,"
Silvers said. "Jim was doing some marketing for me when he started
his radio show."
-
- "Then through the submarine company, I wanted to
try to get a stop at the Naval Station for a historical tour we were
working
on so the tourists could walk up a pier and visit the Military Museum that
Jennings Bunn was director of," he continued.
-
- "And, in 2002, I flew around the world with Joe
Edhlund, from Florida to Guam," he said. "We flew on some of
the same routes that Amelia and Fred took and crossed their paths several
times."
-
- Some of the flight's photos are at:
http://www.bandacorp.com/N700MB%20Frameset.htm
-
- After Bob and Audrey arrived on Tinian the week before
last, they made arrangements with government officials, set up an office
in the hotel and prepared for the four-day dig.
-
- Was the expedition successful?
-
- "Absolutely," stressed Silvers. "We
accomplished
a lot. All leads in the search for Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan's graves
need to be disproved. It's like looking for your keys. You search and find
places they aren't till you find them. The same concept applies
here."
-
- "The top three things that came out of the
expedition
are that first, we were able to get government officials, archeologists,
historians and the expedition all working together. I"d say that 90%
of the people involved believe that what Mr. Naftel saw is there,"
he explained.
-
- "No one is 100% certain Amelia is buried there
because
no one involved actually saw the bodies buried," Silvers continued.
"But Saint John Naftel saw two graves and no one has any reason to
doubt him."
-
- "Second, by digging, we established GPS data for
the digital cartography analysis. We got a lot of valuable data,"
he added.
-
- "Third, we established where she is not buried.
Survey points of all activity will help us on our next trips."
-
- Silver's construction background has taught him about
the chemistry of dirt. "We believe part of the site may have been
napalmed by the Americans as Tinian was the first place napalm was ever
used," he said. ì"The color difference of the dirt that
Naftel saw on the 7 year old graves could have only been seen if it was
defoliated. We could do chemical analysis on the stratified layers to
determine
if the area was napalmed."
-
- The expedition's next steps?
-
- "We do have a sense of urgency," Silvers said.
"Archeology is the study of that which is ancient. In this case
ancient
is only 67 years ago. We have perishable evidence and irreplaceable oral
evidence."
-
- "The real story here is about the process,"
he went on. "And this is all about finding Amelia. Today, we are
trying
to locate aerial pictures of Tinian in 1944 that are supposed to be in
Hawaii. We're also trying to find the newspaper ad that probably ran in
1936 or 1937 that attracted the Hawaiian worker to Tinian; the same one
who showed Naftel the graves."
-
- "We're also trying to find members of the USMC 18th
AAA battalion such as a man named C.C. Hall who drove Naftel and the
Hawaiian
on that day in 1944 as well as witnesses who actually saw Earhart on
Saipan,"
Silvers listed.
-
- "The expedition is far from over," he
concluded.
"Now, we're using high tech mapping programs to recreate the road
using the data we just gathered. We've made great progress and if she is
near where Naftel was shown in 1944, we will find her."
-
- Cassandra 'Sandy' Frost is an award winning e-journalist
and editor who has covered the topics of Intuition, Remote Viewing and
Consciousness from an Athabascan or Alaska Native point of view the past
three years.
-
- More of her articles can be found at:
- http://blogs.salon.com/0003531
- http://blogs.salon.com/0004117
-
-
- =====
- Preview parts of my upcoming book, The Cassandra
- Frost Collection and read my latest at:
-
- http://blogs.salon.com/0003531/
- http://blogs.salon.com/0004117/
-
- Thank you,
- Sandy
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