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What Happened to Amelia Earhart? The Full Story | Sleepy History with Rain Sounds · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

0:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Sleepless History.
0:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight's story begins on a grass and gravel airfield on the northern coast of New Guinea, on a warm, overcast morning in the summer of 1937, a silver twin-engine airplane sits at the far end of the runway, so heavy with fuel that its tires have flattened slightly against the ground.
0:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Inside it are two people, a pilot and a navigator.
0:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And ahead of them lies the longest, emptiest and most difficult leg of a journey around the entire world.
0:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The pilot is Amelia Earhart.
0:42
[SPEAKER_00]: At that moment, perhaps the most famous woman in the United States.
0:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The navigator is Fred Noonan, a quiet, weathered veteran of the sea and the air, who had helped chart the first commercial flying routes across the Pacific.
0:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Their destination is a speck of sand and coral called Howland Island, about two and a half thousand miles away.
1:08
[SPEAKER_00]: A place so small and so low that from a few miles out, it can disappear completely into the glare of the ocean.
1:17
[SPEAKER_00]: They never arrived.
1:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And for nearly 90 years, people have been trying to find out where they went instead.
1:25
[SPEAKER_00]: We are going to follow that story slowly from the beginning.
1:30
[SPEAKER_00]: We will meet the girl from Kansas, who was not especially impressed by her first airplane, and follow her silver-electra eastward across South America, Africa and Asia.
1:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we will sit with the radio operators on a Coast Guard ship in the middle of the Pacific, listening to a voice that kept getting louder and then simply stopped.
1:55
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no need to stay awake for any of it.
1:58
[SPEAKER_00]: You are welcome to drift off anywhere along the way.
2:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Before we begin, if you enjoy these long, slow journeys into the past,
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[SPEAKER_00]: It helps this small show reach other people looking for something calm to fall asleep too.
2:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Lastly, sleepless history is independent with no network behind it, just careful research and quiet evenings.
2:28
[SPEAKER_00]: If these stories have become part of your nightly routine,
2:32
[SPEAKER_00]: you can support the show on Patreon linked in the show notes.
2:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Early access, add free listening and your favorite episodes with no background noise are waiting for you there.
2:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And if that's not for you right now, that's okay.
2:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Simply commenting or following the show helps just as much.
2:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for being here.
3:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Amelia Mary Earhart was born on the 24th of July, 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, a busy little town on a bluff above the Missouri River.
3:13
[SPEAKER_00]: She was born in the house of her maternal grandparents, Alfred and Amelia Otis.
3:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Her grandfather was a retired federal judge, and one of the town's leading citizens, and the house was large, comfortable, and full of books.
3:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Her father, Edwin Earhart, was a lawyer who worked for the railroads, settling claims, and her mother, Amy Otis Earhart, came from that prosperous, respectable, actress and family.
3:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Two and a half years after Amelia,
3:50
[SPEAKER_00]: and the two girls would remain close for the rest of Amelia's life.
3:54
[SPEAKER_00]: As a child, Amelia was what people at the time liked to call a tomboy.
4:00
[SPEAKER_00]: She climbed trees, she hunted rats with a rifle, she sled it belly down on her sled, which was considered unlady like, and once with the help of an uncle,
4:13
[SPEAKER_00]: She built a homemade roller coaster that ran off the roof of a tool shed.
4:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The family moved often as Edwin's work changed, spending time in Kansas City, Des Moines, Saint Paul and Chicago.
4:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was in Iowa at the State Fair in 1908 when she was about 10 years old that Amelia saw an airplane for the first time.
4:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It is one of the gentle ironies of her life that she found it entirely unremarkable.
4:43
[SPEAKER_00]: She later described it as a thing of rusty wire and wood and said it looked not at all interesting, her childhood was not always easy.
4:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Her father struggled with alcohol, lost positions, and moved the family from city to city, and the comfortable certainty.
5:03
[SPEAKER_00]: of the Atchison House slowly gave way to uncertainty and money worries.
5:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Amelia kept a scrapbook during these years, filled with newspaper clippings about women who had succeeded in fields usually reserved for men.
5:20
[SPEAKER_00]: She was collecting evidence that a different kind of life was possible.
5:25
[SPEAKER_00]: She graduated from Hyde Park High School in Chicago.
5:29
[SPEAKER_00]: in 1915 and went on to the Ogon School, a finishing school near Philadelphia, but in the winter of 1917, while visiting her sister in Toronto, she saw something that changed her plans.
5:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Canada had been at war since 1914, and on the streets of Toronto she saw soldiers returning from the western front, missing arms, missing legs, walking with canes.
5:56
[SPEAKER_00]: She left school, trained as a nurse's aid with the red cross, and went to work at the Spadina Military Hospital, caring for wounded men.
6:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It was in Toronto during this time that airplanes finally caught her attention.
6:12
[SPEAKER_00]: She and a friend went to watch a stunt flying exhibition at the Canadian National Exhibition grounds, standing in a clearing to see the plane better.
6:22
[SPEAKER_00]: One pilot, perhaps bored, perhaps playful, dove his aircraft directly toward the two young women.
6:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Her friend ran, Amelia stood still.
6:32
[SPEAKER_00]: She later wrote that she did not understand it at the time, but she believed that little red
6:42
[SPEAKER_00]: After the war, she enrolled in pre-medical studies at Columbia University in New York, but left after a year to join her parents, who had moved to Los Angeles in an attempt to save their marriage.
6:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And there, on the 28th of December, 1920,
7:00
[SPEAKER_00]: At an airfield in Long Beach, her father paid $10 for her to take a 10-minute ride with a pilot named Frank Horks, who would later become a famous speed record holder himself.
7:15
[SPEAKER_00]: She wrote afterward that by the time the plane was two or 300 feet off the ground, she knew she had to fly.
7:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Within days, she had found a teacher.
7:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Anita Snook, known to everyone as Netter, was one of the very few women flight instructors in the country, and she agreed to teach Amelia in an old Curtis training by plane known as a Jenny.
7:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Her first lesson,
7:41
[SPEAKER_00]: came in early January of 1921.
7:45
[SPEAKER_00]: By the summer of that year, with help from her mother and her sister, she had bought her own airplane, a small, second-hand bright yellow by plane called a Kina Aster.
7:57
[SPEAKER_00]: She named it the Canary.
8:00
[SPEAKER_00]: In October of 1922, flying the Canary, she climbed to 14,000 feet, setting an altitude record for women pilots.
8:10
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1923, she became only the 16th woman in the world to receive a pilot's license from the international aeronautical federation that certifies such things.
8:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, for a while, life intervened.
8:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Her family's finance is collapsed, her parents divorced.
8:31
[SPEAKER_00]: She sold the Canary and moved east to Boston.
8:35
[SPEAKER_00]: There, she settled into a steady, unglamorous life, as a social worker at a settlement house called Denison House, teaching English to immigrant families and organizing programs for children by her late 20s.
8:52
[SPEAKER_00]: It seemed that flying might simply become a pleasant hobby.
8:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, one afternoon in April of 1928, she was called to the telephone at Dennis' house.
9:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The caller was a man named Hilton Rayleigh, and he asked her a strange question, would she like to fly the Atlantic?
9:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The arrangement was this.
9:13
[SPEAKER_00]: A wealthy American woman living in England, Amy Fipp's guest, had bought a three-engine soccer airplane fitted with floats and wanted an American woman aboard for an Atlantic crossing, ideally one who was also a pilot.
9:29
[SPEAKER_00]: A New York publisher and promoter named George Palmer Putnam had been asked to help find her, and Amelia Earhart's name had come up.
9:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The airplane was named Friendship.
9:42
[SPEAKER_00]: the pilot was Wilma Stoltz and the mechanic was Louis Gordon.
9:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Amelia would be the commander in name, but in practice she would be a passenger, keeping the flight log and doing no flying at all.
9:56
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 17th of June, 1928, friendship lifted off from the Harbour at Trappesy in Newfoundland.
10:05
[SPEAKER_00]: and after 20 hours and 40 minutes in the air, much of it in fog, it came down on the water of burry port in Wains.
10:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Amelia Earhart had become the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air.
10:21
[SPEAKER_00]: She was honest about it from the start.
10:23
[SPEAKER_00]: She told reporters that stults had done all the flying and that she had been carried along like a sack of potatoes.
10:29
[SPEAKER_00]: But the public did not much care about the distinction.
10:32
[SPEAKER_00]: When she returned to the United States, there was a ticketate parade in New York, a reception at the White House and a flood of offers.
10:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Putnam signed her to write a book about the flight.
10:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Newspapers noticed her resemblance to Charles Lindberg
10:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Lady Lindy, a name she disliked.
10:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the next few years, Putnam managed her career, arranging lecture tours, product endorsements, magazine columns, and flights.
11:04
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1929, she helped found an organisation of women pilots, called the 99s.
11:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Named for the number of its charter members, and later served as its first president.
11:16
[SPEAKER_00]: and in February of 1931, after turning him down several times, she married George Putnam in a small, quiet ceremony at his mother's home in Connecticut.
11:30
[SPEAKER_00]: On the morning of the wedding, she handed him a letter explaining that she would keep her own name, her own work, and her own freedom, and that she hoped he would understand he did.
11:43
[SPEAKER_00]: But one thing still bothered her,
11:46
[SPEAKER_00]: She had crossed the Atlantic, yes, but as cargo, she wanted to do it herself.
11:51
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 20th of May, 1932, exactly five years after Lindberg had taken off on his famous flight.
12:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Amelia Earhart climbed into a red-locked Vega at Harbour Grace in Newfoundland and took off a loan into the evening.
12:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The flight was difficult, her altimeter failed, so she could not be certain of her height above the water she flew into storms.
12:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Ice formed on the wings, and the plane went into a spin before she could recover it in warmer air near the sea.
12:26
[SPEAKER_00]: A welled in the exhaust manifold cracked, and she could see flames through the gap.
12:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Few began leaking into the cockpit.
12:34
[SPEAKER_00]: She had intended to fly to Paris.
12:37
[SPEAKER_00]: but she decided sensibly to land the first safe place she could find.
12:43
[SPEAKER_00]: After about 15 hours, she brought the vega down in a sloping pasture at Colmore near London Derry in Northern Ireland.
12:51
[SPEAKER_00]: According to the story she liked to tell, a farmhand walked over.
12:56
[SPEAKER_00]: and asked if she had come far from America, she told him.
13:00
[SPEAKER_00]: She was the first woman and only the second person after Lynberg to fly solo across the Atlantic.
13:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Congress awarded her the Distinguished Flying Cross.
13:13
[SPEAKER_00]: President Herbert Hoover presented her with a gold medal.
13:18
[SPEAKER_00]: She went on over the next three years to set a string of further records.
13:25
[SPEAKER_00]: She flew nonstop across the United States.
13:29
[SPEAKER_00]: In January of 1935, she became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the mainland, landing in Oakland, California after about 18 hours over the Pacific by the middle of the 1930s.
13:49
[SPEAKER_00]: There was very little left that she had not done and so she began to think about the largest flight of all.
13:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 2, the Flying Laboratory.
14:03
[SPEAKER_00]: In the autumn of 1935, Amelia Earhart took a part-time position at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
14:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The university's president Edward Elliott was a forward-thinking man who wanted his female students to see that careers in science, engineering and aviation were open to them.
14:28
[SPEAKER_00]: and he invited Earhart to join the faculty as a visiting advisor on careers for women and as a technical advisor to the department of aeronautics.
14:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Purdue was one of the few universities in the country with its own airfield and Earhart threw herself into the work.
14:47
[SPEAKER_00]: It was at Purdue that the money for her final airplane was found.
14:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Through the Purdue Research Foundation, a fund was established
14:57
[SPEAKER_00]: called the Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research, supported by donations from the university's friends and from businesses connected with aviation.
15:08
[SPEAKER_00]: The fund paid for most of the purchase of a brand new airplane, a Lockheed Electra 10E, which was officially described as a flying laboratory.
15:18
[SPEAKER_00]: In principle, she would use it to study things like the effects of long distance flight on pilots.
15:26
[SPEAKER_00]: the performance of instruments.
15:28
[SPEAKER_00]: and the behaviour of fuel and engines.
15:31
[SPEAKER_00]: In practice, everyone understood what it was really for.
15:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The Electra was a beautiful machine.
15:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It was an all-metal twin engine monoplan, gleaming silver, with two Pratt and Whitney Wasp engines of about 550 horsepower each and a distinctive double tail.
15:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Airharts' version was heavily modified.
16:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The passenger seats were removed, and the cabin was filled with additional fuel tanks, giving the plane a capacity of more than 1100 gallons in a range, under ideal conditions of something like 4,000 miles.
16:17
[SPEAKER_00]: A small navigator's station was built at the back of the cabin.
16:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Airhart took delivery of the airplane in July of 1936, around the time of her 39th birthday.
16:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The plan was to fly around the world, and to do it, as far as was practical, near the equator.
16:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Others had circled the globe before, but by shorter northern routes.
16:43
[SPEAKER_00]: A route near the equator would be the longest ever attempted, roughly 29,000 miles, and it would have to cross the entire width of the Pacific Ocean where landing places were few and far between.
16:56
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the central difficulty.
16:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Between New Guinea and Hawaii, there was simply nowhere for a long-range land plane to come down.
17:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The electric could not carry enough fuel to cross the whole distance at once.
17:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It needed a stepping stone and the stepping stone that was chosen was Howland Island.
17:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Howland Island is very small.
17:20
[SPEAKER_00]: It is about a mile and a half long and about half a mile wide, and its highest point rises only a few feet above the sea.
17:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It sits almost exactly on the equator, a little to the north, in the central Pacific, roughly 1,600 miles southwest of Honolulu.
17:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It had been claimed by the United States in the 19th century,
17:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It was home to a small group of young men from Hawaii.
17:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of them students from the Kamehameha schools in Honolulu who had been placed on Howland and several neighboring islands in rotating shifts to establish an American presence in a part of the ocean.
18:10
[SPEAKER_00]: that was becoming strategically important.
18:14
[SPEAKER_00]: For air-harts flight, the government agreed to build a runway on howland, workers from the Works Progress Administration.
18:23
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the great public works programs of the era.
18:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Cleared and graded three crossing strips of crushed coral and sand.
18:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The Coast Guard agreed to station a ship near the island to provide weather reports, radio communications, and help with navigation.
18:41
[SPEAKER_00]: She would need a navigator for the Pacific.
18:44
[SPEAKER_00]: and ideally someone who understood radio as well.
18:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Two men were chosen.
18:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The first was Harry Manning, a captain in the merchant marine who had met air-heart years earlier.
18:56
[SPEAKER_00]: When he commanded the ship that brought her home from her first Atlantic crossing, he was a capable navigator and a skilled radio operator.
19:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The second was Fred Noonan.
19:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Frederick Joseph Noonan was born in Chicago in 1893.
19:15
[SPEAKER_00]: He went to see as a teenager and spent most of the next two decades on sailing ships and steamers rising through the ranks and serving on merchant vessels during the First World War.
19:28
[SPEAKER_00]: When several of the ships he sailed on was sunk.
19:31
[SPEAKER_00]: In the early 1930s, he moved into the air, joining Pan American airways as it prepared to open service across the Pacific with its enormous flying boats, the famous clippers.
19:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Nounen became one of its senior navigators, helping to plot the roots from California to Hawaii and from Hawaii to Midway, Waik Island, Guam and Manila.
19:57
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the navigator aboard the China Clipper on its first trans-Pacific air mail flight.
20:05
[SPEAKER_00]: He was, by any measure, one of the most experienced aerial navigators in the world.
20:12
[SPEAKER_00]: He had left Pan American in 1936, and he was looking for something new.
20:18
[SPEAKER_00]: There was also a technical advisor, the Hollywood stunt pilot Paul Mans, the first attempt began on the 17th of March 1937.
20:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The plan was to fly westward from Oakland, California, to Honolulu, and then onward across the Pacific to Howland, Australia, and beyond.
20:40
[SPEAKER_00]: aboard the Elector for the first leg, were air-heart, manning, noon and mants.
20:47
[SPEAKER_00]: They took off from Oakland in the late afternoon and landed in Hawaii about 15 hours and 47 minutes later, a new record for the crossing.
20:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Three days later, on the morning of the 20th of March,
21:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The Electra roll down the runway at Luke Field on Ford Island, in the middle of Pearl Harbor, heavily loaded with fuel for the flight to Holland.
21:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Partway through the take-off, the plane began to swing to one side.
21:16
[SPEAKER_00]: air-heart tried to correct it.
21:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The airplane swung the other way, and then went into what pilots call a ground loop spinning around on the runway.
21:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The right landing gear collapsed, then the left, and the electric slid along the ground on its belly in a shower of sparks.
21:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Remarkably, there was no fire, and nobody was hurt.
21:41
[SPEAKER_00]: But the airplane was badly damaged.
21:46
[SPEAKER_00]: has been debated ever since.
21:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Some witnesses blamed a blown tire, others, and overcorrection on the throttles.
21:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever the cause, the flight was over, at least for the time being, the broken electorate was shipped back to California by sea and returned to the Lockheed Factory in Burbank for repairs, which took about two months and cost a considerable amount of money.
22:12
[SPEAKER_00]: During that time, Harry Manning left the team.
22:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Nune and stayed.
22:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And because the seasons and the weather patterns along the route had shifted, while the airplane was being repaired.
22:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Earhart decided to reverse the direction of the flight.
22:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead of flying westward, starting with the Pacific, she would fly eastward, crossing South America, Africa and Asia first, and saving the Pacific for the very end.
22:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a decision that made sense at the time.
22:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It also meant that the most difficult part of the entire journey, the long flight to a tiny island in the middle of the ocean.
22:53
[SPEAKER_00]: would come after more than a month of exhausting travel when the pilot, the navigator and the airplane would all be worn down by tens of thousands of miles of flying.
23:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 3 Eastwood Around the World
23:13
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 21st of May, 1937, with very little public announcement, Amelia Earhart and Fred Nunan took off from Oakland in the repaired electorate and flew east across the United States, stopping at Tucson and New Orleans and arriving in Miami, there for about a week, mechanics
23:40
[SPEAKER_00]: and air-heart told the newspapers that this would be the real start of the flight around the world.
23:47
[SPEAKER_00]: One decision made around this time would later seem important.
23:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The Electra had been fitted with a long, trailing, wire antenna, which could be reeled out behind the airplane in flight.
24:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It was useful for transmitting and receiving on the lower radio frequencies, which were the frequencies used by many ships and shore stations for direction finding.
24:11
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was cumbersome, it had to be reeled in and out by hand.
24:15
[SPEAKER_00]: and neither air-heart nor noonon was an expert in Morse code.
24:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The system of dots and dashes in which much of that low-frequency radio traffic was conducted.
24:25
[SPEAKER_00]: At some point before or during the stop in Miami, the trailing antenna was removed.
24:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It seemed at the time like a sensible simplification.
24:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The airplane would rely instead on voice radio on higher frequencies and on a small direction finding loop antenna mounted above the cockpit.
24:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Early on the morning of the first of June, the electric took off from Miami and turned south.
24:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The first stop was San Juan in Puerto Rico.
24:56
[SPEAKER_00]: From there, the airplane flew on to Caripito in Venezuela, then along the northern coast
25:06
[SPEAKER_00]: in what was then called Dutch Guyana, and today is Surinam.
25:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Then came the long flight down to Fort Eleza on the northeastern bulge of Brazil where the plane was serviced and then a short hop to Natal, the closest point in South America to Africa.
25:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The crossing of the South Atlantic from Natal to the coast of West Africa was about 1900 miles
25:36
[SPEAKER_00]: between the pilot and the navigator over open water.
25:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It went well with one small exception.
25:44
[SPEAKER_00]: As they approached the African coast in Haze, Nune and passed air heart and note with a heading correction toward the south for Dakar.
25:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Ear heart.
25:55
[SPEAKER_00]: looking at the coastline below and judging by her own instincts, turn north instead.
26:02
[SPEAKER_00]: They landed at St. Louis in Senegal about 160 miles from where they had intended to be.
26:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Earhart later admitted in her notes that Nunan had been right and she had been wrong.
26:17
[SPEAKER_00]: From Senegal, they flew eastward across the wide band of Africa just south of the Sahara.
26:25
[SPEAKER_00]: on the Niger River, in what was then French West Africa, then at Fort Lami near Lake Chad, then at Elfascha and Cartoon in the Sudan.
26:35
[SPEAKER_00]: They flew to Massawa on the coast of the Red Sea and then to a sap near the mouth of the Red Sea.
26:42
[SPEAKER_00]: From a sap, they flew nonstop across the Arabian Sea to Karachi, then part of British India and today in Pakistan.
26:52
[SPEAKER_00]: a flight of nearly 2,000 miles that no one had made before.
26:56
[SPEAKER_00]: At each stop, the routine was much the same.
27:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Earhart wrote up her notes, which were sent home to Putnam to become newspaper articles.
27:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Mechanics checked the engines.
27:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Noonan checked his chronometers, the precise clocks and navigator needs to calculate longitude from the stars.
27:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, after a few hours of sleep, they took off again, usually very early in the morning.
27:23
[SPEAKER_00]: From Karachi, they flew across India to Calcutta.
27:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, in monsoon rains, down the coast of Burma, to Akhyab and Rangoon.
27:34
[SPEAKER_00]: They continued to Bangkok and then on to Singapore.
27:37
[SPEAKER_00]: From there they crossed to the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies, landing at Bandung where there were good repair facilities.
27:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the long-distance instruments on the Electra were not working properly, and the mechanics there spent several days making adjustments.
27:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Then they went on, across the island chains of the Dutch East Indies to co-pan on the island of Timor, and from there, across the Timor Sea to Darwin
28:07
[SPEAKER_00]: In Darwin, they lighten the airplane, shipping home their parachutes, since, as air-heart reasoned, there would be no point in jumping out over the Pacific Ocean.
28:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And from Darwin, they flew northeast across the Arafuracy and over the mountains of New Guinea.
28:26
[SPEAKER_00]: To the small town of Le, on the hue and gulf, arriving on the 29th of June, they had now flown about 22,000 miles.
28:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Only about 7,000 remained, and almost all of them were over water.
28:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The next stop was Howland Island.
28:44
[SPEAKER_00]: After that Honolulu, after that, home, lay was a gold mining town and its airfield was operated by a company called Guinea Airways, which flew supplies and men up into the gold fields in the mountains.
29:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The runway was about 3,000 feet long, made of grass and packed earth and
29:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Earhart wrote in one of her last dispatches that she was weary of the long journey and was looking forward to being home.
29:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The airplane needed work.
29:24
[SPEAKER_00]: and there were problems with the radio time signals that no one needed to set his chronometers precisely.
29:32
[SPEAKER_00]: An era of even a few seconds in an navigator's clock can translate into miles of error in a position.
29:40
[SPEAKER_00]: They decided to wait an extra day.
29:43
[SPEAKER_00]: They spent part of that time removing every piece of unnecessary weight from the electorate and filling it with fuel.
29:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Roughly a thousand gallons of high octane aviation gasoline, enough.
29:57
[SPEAKER_00]: According to the calculations of the day, for something like 20 hours of flying, with a reasonable margin, for a flight that was expected to take about 18.
30:09
[SPEAKER_00]: On the morning of the second of July, 1937, a little before 10 o'clock
30:20
[SPEAKER_00]: A cameraman from Guinea Airways filmed the take-off.
30:23
[SPEAKER_00]: In the grainy footage, the silver airplane rolls forward, slowly at first, heavy and reluctant, using up almost the entire runway.
30:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It lifts off just at the edge of the bluff, and then sinks out of sight below the edge towards the water, and the people watching held their breath.
30:44
[SPEAKER_00]: A moment later,
30:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It appears again, very low over the sea, slowly climbing, its propellers throwing spray, heading out towards the east.
30:54
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the last time anyone would see Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.
31:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4, the line 1, 57, 337.
31:08
[SPEAKER_00]: For the first several hours of the flight, the radio operator at LAY
31:13
[SPEAKER_00]: a man named Harry Balfour, received occasional position reports from the electorate.
31:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Later that afternoon, a report placed the electorate near the Nucamanu Islands, a small atoll east of the Solomon Islands, roughly on the planned course, but somewhat behind schedule likely because of stronger headwinds than had been forecast.
31:37
[SPEAKER_00]: After that, the reports from lay stopped as the airplane moved out of range and on into the night over the open Pacific.
31:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Far to the east at Howland Island, the United States Coast Guard Cata Itasca was waiting.
31:52
[SPEAKER_00]: She was a white painted ship of about 250 feet, commanded by Commander Warner Thompson, and she had been sent to Howland specifically to support this flight.
32:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Her radio operators were to communicate with the Electra to send weather reports and to transmit signals that the airplane could use to find its way to the island.
32:16
[SPEAKER_00]: On howland itself, there was also a high frequency direction finder borrowed from the Navy, which was meant to take bearings on the Electra's transmissions and tell the airplane which way to turn.
32:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Further along the route, other ships waited,
32:34
[SPEAKER_00]: midway between Lay and Howland, and the C-plane tend to swan between Howland and Hawaii.
32:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing here to understand the problem of finding Howland Island from the air.
32:47
[SPEAKER_00]: because it lies at the heart of everything that followed.
32:51
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1937, there were no satellites, no radar, no global positioning system.
32:58
[SPEAKER_00]: A navigator over the open ocean found his position mostly by looking at the sun and the stars, measuring their angle above the horizon with a sextant, noting the exact time.
33:10
[SPEAKER_00]: and working out from tables where on the earth's surface he must be.
33:15
[SPEAKER_00]: This method, called celestial navigation, could be remarkably accurate in skilled hands.
33:23
[SPEAKER_00]: But it depended on clear skies, a stable platform, an accurate clock, and time to do the calculations.
33:31
[SPEAKER_00]: In a small airplane, bouncing through the night at about 150 miles an hour, with clouds coming and going.
33:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Even an expert like Fred Noonan could easily end up a few miles off, or more than a few.
33:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And a few miles was enough to miss Howland, from an airplane flying at a thousand feet.
33:53
[SPEAKER_00]: A small low island on a hazy morning might be visible from perhaps 15 or 20 miles away in good conditions and much less in poor ones.
34:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Cloud shadows on the water look very much like islands.
34:09
[SPEAKER_00]: That was why the radio arrangements mattered so much.
34:13
[SPEAKER_00]: If the electric could be guided in by radio, it would not need to rely entirely on celestial navigation.
34:21
[SPEAKER_00]: but the radio arrangements.
34:23
[SPEAKER_00]: as it turned out, were muddled in ways that no one fully recognized until it was too late.
34:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The Electra's transmitter was set up to broadcast voice on two frequencies, about 3,105 kylicycles at night, and about 6,210 kylicycles during the day.
34:53
[SPEAKER_00]: worked on much lower frequencies.
34:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind, the trailing antenna, now left behind in Miami, would have made possible.
35:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Messages about schedules and frequencies had passed through several intermediaries in the weeks before the flight and some of them contradicted each other.
35:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And on the iTasca, the radio operators were working in their own time zone, which differed by half an hour from the time zone that air-heart had been told to use.
35:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The night passed slowly on the iTasca.
35:25
[SPEAKER_00]: By the clocks aboard the ship at about 245 in the morning, the radio operators first heard Earhart's voice, faint and broken by static.
35:37
[SPEAKER_00]: They could make out only a few words.
35:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Something about cloudy weather, they replied, and asked for her position.
35:45
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no answer that they could hear.
35:47
[SPEAKER_00]: At about 345, they heard her again, again faintly, saying that the sky was overcast and that she would listen on the hour and the half hour.
35:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The Atasca, transmitted weather.
36:02
[SPEAKER_00]: and asked again for her position in voice and in Morse code.
36:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, the Electra did not seem to hear them.
36:11
[SPEAKER_00]: At about 6-15 in the morning, as the sun was rising, her voice came in more clearly.
36:17
[SPEAKER_00]: She asked the Attasca to take a bearing on her and said she would whistle into the microphone so that they could find the signal.
36:26
[SPEAKER_00]: She said she was about 200 miles out, but her transmission was too brief, and the Atasca's equipment could not get a bearing on it.
36:36
[SPEAKER_00]: At about 645 she spoke again, loud and loud.
36:41
[SPEAKER_00]: She asked them, please, to take a bearing on her and report in half an hour.
36:47
[SPEAKER_00]: She would make a noise in the microphone.
36:49
[SPEAKER_00]: She was, she said, about 100 miles out.
36:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The transmission was too short, and again, no bearing could be taken.
37:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The directionfinder on Howland Island, meanwhile, had fallen silent.
37:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Left switched on all night, its batteries had run down.
37:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Out on deck, men were scanning the sky to the west.
37:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The ship began to pour out black smoke from its boilers.
37:17
[SPEAKER_00]: A thick dark plume meant to be visible to an airplane from many miles away.
37:25
[SPEAKER_00]: that morning, there was a band of cloud and schools, and the smoke drifted lower across the water.
37:31
[SPEAKER_00]: At 742, her voice came in very strongly, so strongly that the operators rated it at the highest level on their scale.
37:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The radiolog records her words, we must be on you, but cannot see you.
37:48
[SPEAKER_00]: But gas is running low, been unable to reach you by radio, we are flying at 1,000 feet.
37:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The operators replied immediately on her frequency, in voice and in Morse code.
38:01
[SPEAKER_00]: They had no way of knowing whether she heard them.
38:05
[SPEAKER_00]: At 758, she spoke again.
38:07
[SPEAKER_00]: We are circling, but cannot hear you.
38:10
[SPEAKER_00]: She asked them to transmit on a different frequency, 7,500 kph, so that her own direction finder could take a bearing on them.
38:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The Etasca did so at once, sending a long series of the letter A in Morse code, a steady pattern of dots and dashes.
38:32
[SPEAKER_00]: and at 8 o'clock for the first and only time, there was evidence that she had heard them.
38:39
[SPEAKER_00]: We are receiving your signals, she said, but unable to get a minimum.
38:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Please take a bearing on us and answer with voice on 3, 1, 0, 5.
38:50
[SPEAKER_00]: A minimum in the language of radio direction finding is the point at which a signal fades as the loop antenna is turned.
39:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The point that shows which direction the signal is coming from.
39:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Her direction finder could hear the atasca, but it could not tell her which way to fly.
39:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The atasca, in turn, still could not take a bearing on her.
39:14
[SPEAKER_00]: because her transmissions were too short and on a frequency that its equipment was not set up to handle well, 43 minutes passed.
39:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, at 8.43, her voice came in one more time.
39:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Strong.
39:30
[SPEAKER_00]: But with a new tone in it that the operators later described as anxious or even frantic.
39:37
[SPEAKER_00]: We are on the line 157, 337.
39:42
[SPEAKER_00]: We will repeat this message.
39:44
[SPEAKER_00]: We will repeat this on 621O killer cycles.
39:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Wait, and then a moment later, more words, we are running online north and south.
39:58
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the last transmission that the attacker ever heard from the electorate.
40:05
[SPEAKER_00]: the line 157, 337 have been studied more closely than almost any other phrase in the history of aviation.
40:16
[SPEAKER_00]: They referred to a line of position, a technique from celestial navigation.
40:22
[SPEAKER_00]: When a navigator takes a sighting on a single body, like the rising sun, he cannot fix his position at a single point.
40:30
[SPEAKER_00]: What he gets instead is a line, somewhere along which he must be.
40:37
[SPEAKER_00]: On that morning, a sighting of the sun rising in the east would produce a line running from the north west to the southeast, along the compass directions of 337 degrees and 157 degrees.
40:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Nounen's plan it seems was to aim the airplane to reach that line, adjusted so that it passed through howlons.
41:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And then to fly along it, first one way, and then the other, until the island came into view.
41:09
[SPEAKER_00]: But she did not say where, along that line, they were.
41:14
[SPEAKER_00]: She did not say whether they were north of Howland or south of it.
41:20
[SPEAKER_00]: and she did not say how far.
41:23
[SPEAKER_00]: On the atasca, the operators kept calling again and again for hours.
41:28
[SPEAKER_00]: No answer came by about 10 o'clock in the morning by the ship's reckoning.
41:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Commander Thompson concluded that the Electron must have run out of fuel and come down in the sea.
41:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Judging from the strength of her signals, he believed she must have been very close.
41:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Because of the clouds and squalls to the north-west, he decided that was where she was most likely to have gone down, and the Atasca turned and steamed north-west to begin the search.
42:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 5 The Long Search
42:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the next two and a half weeks, the United States carried out what was at the time, the largest and most expensive search for a missing aircraft in its history.
42:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The Atasca search to the north and west of Howland, the battleship Colorado sailed south from Hawaii with three sea planes aboard, catapulted from its deck to fly low over the ocean and the scattered islands.
42:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The aircraft carrier Lexington steamed down from the west coast, with dozens of airplanes flying back and forth in long parallel lines across the sea.
42:42
[SPEAKER_00]: All together.
42:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The search has covered something like 250,000 square miles of ocean, at a cost estimated at around $4 million and enormous sum for the time.
42:55
[SPEAKER_00]: They found nothing.
42:57
[SPEAKER_00]: No wreckage, no oil slick, no floating debris, no life raft.
43:03
[SPEAKER_00]: On 19 July 1937, the official search was called off.
43:09
[SPEAKER_00]: George Putnam would not give up.
43:11
[SPEAKER_00]: He paid for further searches by private boats.
43:14
[SPEAKER_00]: He followed every lead and he wrote to anyone who might know something.
43:19
[SPEAKER_00]: But after 18 months, he petitioned the court to have his wife declared legally dead, so that her affairs could be settled.
43:29
[SPEAKER_00]: On 5th January 1939, a court in Los Angeles granted the petition.
43:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, the story might have ended, but it did not, in the decade since, three main explanations for what happened have emerged, along with a few stranger ones, and each has its devoted supporters.
43:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The first and the simplest is that the Electra ran out of fuel somewhere near Howland Island came down in the sea and sank.
44:03
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the conclusion of the Navy and the Coast Guard in 1937.
44:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And it remains the most widely accepted explanation among historians and aviation experts today.
44:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Her final message said her fuel was running low and her strong signals suggested she was close.
44:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And the ocean around Howland is extraordinarily deep, in places more than three miles deep, with a floor of soft sediment and steep undersea mountains.
44:34
[SPEAKER_00]: An airplane that sank there would be very hard to find.
44:38
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the most dedicated champions of this theory was a man named Elgin Long.
44:45
[SPEAKER_00]: a veteran airline navigator who spent decades together with his wife Marie working through the fuel calculations, the radio logs and the navigation data.
44:58
[SPEAKER_00]: They concluded that the electromust have gone down within a relatively small area.
45:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps several dozen miles west and northwest of Holland.
45:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Their work inspired a series of deep sea searches by a company called Norticos, which used sonar toad far below the surface to map thousands of square miles of the ocean floor near Holland.
45:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Across several expeditions in the early 2000s and again in later years.
45:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Those searches found many things on the bottom, but not the electorate.
45:31
[SPEAKER_00]: In early 2024, a company called Deep See Vision, using an underwater drone, released a so-nar image taken about 16,000 feet down, west of Holland, showing a shape that some people thought looked very much like an airplane with a double tail.
45:51
[SPEAKER_00]: It caused a brief sensation around the world, but when the company returned to the site later that year with cameras, the shape turned out to be a natural rock formation.
46:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The sea floor had played a trick on everyone, as it so often does.
46:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The second explanation is called the Nicomaroro hypothesis.
46:13
[SPEAKER_00]: It holds the air-heart and noonan, failing to find howland, flew southeast along that line of position, the line 157, 337, and eventually came to a different island, about 400 miles away.
46:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Then called Gardner Island, today it is Nicumaroro and it is part of the Phoenix Islands
46:41
[SPEAKER_00]: a name that is pronounced by the people who live there as Kiribas.
46:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Nikumaroro is an atom, a ring of coral and sand around a central lagoon, about four miles long.
46:55
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1937, it was uninhabited, covered in scrub and coconut palms and home to sea birds and large land crabs.
47:04
[SPEAKER_00]: On its reef, lay the rusting wreck of a British freighter, the Norwich city.
47:10
[SPEAKER_00]: According to this theory, air-heart landed the electric on the flat reef at low tide.
47:17
[SPEAKER_00]: and she and Nunan survived there for some time, perhaps days, perhaps weeks, sending radio calls for help whenever the tide was low enough for the engine to be run to charge the batteries.
47:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, in the days after the disappearance, many people around the Pacific and beyond reported hearing radio transmissions that they believed came from air hard.
47:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of these reports were dismissed as hoaxes or mistakes, but some were taken seriously at the time.
47:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Radio-direction finding stations operated by panamerican airways took bearings on some of these weak signals, and some of those bearings appeared to point toward the Phoenix Islands.
48:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Far away, in St. Petersburg, Florida, a teenage girl named Betty
48:14
[SPEAKER_00]: leading for help and wrote down fragments of what she heard in a notebook.
48:20
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 9th of July, a week after the disappearance, three sea planes from the battleship Colorado flew over Gardner Island.
48:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The pilot leading the flight later reported seeing signs of recent habitation.
48:34
[SPEAKER_00]: but no people, and no one waving, and the planes moved on.
48:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, in 1940, a British colonial officer named Gerald Gallagher, who was overseeing a new settlement on Gardner Island, reported that a work party had found a partial human skeleton on the south-eastern end of the island.
48:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Nearby, were the remains of a campfire, bird and turtle bones.
49:01
[SPEAKER_00]: part of a shoe that appeared to belong to a woman, and an empty wooden box of the sort that had once held a navigator's sextant, Gallagher sent the bones to Fiji for examination.
49:14
[SPEAKER_00]: A doctor there, David Hoodless, measured them and concluded that they belonged to a man, probably of European descent.
49:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The bones themselves were later lost and have never been found.
49:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The most persistent investigators of the Nicumaroro hypothesis have been the international group for historic aircraft recovery.
49:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Led for many years by a former aviation insurance investigator named Rick Gillespie.
49:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Beginning in 1989,
49:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The group has mounted more than a dozen expeditions to the island.
49:48
[SPEAKER_00]: They have found pieces of aluminum, fragments of plexiglass, and pieces of a glass jar that may once have held a freckle cream of a type, sold in the 1930s.
50:02
[SPEAKER_00]: None of these objects has been conclusively linked to air heart.
50:07
[SPEAKER_00]: In 2018, an anthropologist at the University of Tennessee, Richard Jance, reanalyzed the measurements that Dr. Hoodless had recorded in 1940, comparing them with estimates of air-heart's own body proportions taken from photographs and clothing.
50:25
[SPEAKER_00]: He concluded that the bones were far more consistent with air-heart than with most people.
50:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Others have disputed that analysis.
50:34
[SPEAKER_00]: In 2019, the famous oceanographer, Robert Ballard, who had found the wreck of the Titanic, searched the waters around Nicarroro with a ship and underwater robots, and found nothing.
50:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The third explanation is darker, and it has a long history of its own.
50:54
[SPEAKER_00]: It suggests that Airhart and Nunan came down not near Howland, nor on Nicumaro, but far to the northwest in the Marshall Islands, which were then controlled by Japan, and that they were taken prisoner by the Japanese military and died in captivity, perhaps on the island of Saipan.
51:15
[SPEAKER_00]: This theory was popularised in the 1960s by a radio reporter named Fred
51:23
[SPEAKER_00]: who travel to Saipan several times and interviewed island residents who said they remembered an American woman flyer being held there before the war.
51:33
[SPEAKER_00]: In 2017, a television documentary presented a photograph taken on a dock in the Marshall Islands that it suggested might show air-heart and noonan after their capture.
51:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Within days, a Japanese military history blogger found the same photograph in a Japanese travel book that had been published in 1935, two years before the disappearance.
52:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Most historians regard the capture theory as unproven, though it still has its believers.
52:06
[SPEAKER_00]: In more recent years, the story has taken a few new turns.
52:10
[SPEAKER_00]: In late 2025, following an order from the president,
52:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The national archives began releasing thousands of pages of government records related to the disappearance, including radio logs, search reports, weather data, and newly declassified intelligence files, with more to be released over time.
52:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Most experts did not expect them to change the overall picture.
52:37
[SPEAKER_00]: but they gathered the record together in one place, open to anyone.
52:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And at the time this episode was being written, in October of 2026, a new expedition was crossing the Pacific toward Nicumororo.
52:52
[SPEAKER_00]: It was organized by the Archaeological Legacy Institute, based in Oregon.
52:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Together with the Purdue Research Foundation and Purdue University, the same institution
53:05
[SPEAKER_00]: that had helped airharp by her airplane nearly 90 years earlier.
53:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Its target is a shape in the island's lagoon.
53:14
[SPEAKER_00]: First noticed in satellite photographs in 2020.
53:18
[SPEAKER_00]: which the researchers named the Tariah object after the nearby Tariah peninsula.
53:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The team believes the shape is about the right size to be the fuselage and tail of an electorate, and that it can be seen faintly in aerial photographs of the lagoon, taken as far back as 1938.
53:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Other long time investigators, including Rick Gillespie, are skeptical.
53:44
[SPEAKER_00]: After a post-poment while permits were arranged, the team set out by ship in early October from the island of Taroa, carrying magnetometers, sonar and underwater excavation equipment.
53:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The researchers have been careful to say that their goal
54:02
[SPEAKER_00]: is simply to find out what the object is and that learning it is not the electorate would still be a useful answer.
54:09
[SPEAKER_00]: This story began with a girl in Kansas who did not think much of her first airplane.
54:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It continued through a red Vega coming down in an Irish pasture.
54:20
[SPEAKER_00]: and a silver airplane crossing deserts, rivers and monsoon rains and dipping low over the water at late before climbing away toward the east and it continues still through a small white ship rolling gently on the swell of Howland Island.
54:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It's radio operators, leaning close to their receivers on a cloudy morning.
54:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Listening to a voice that said, we must be on you, but cannot see you.
54:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere out there, on the floor of the depotion, or beneath the sand of a coral reef, or in a place no one has yet thought to look, a silver airplane is resting.
55:01
[SPEAKER_00]: It has been resting there for a very long time.
55:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps someone will find it one day.
55:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Either way, the Pacific is very large, and it does not seem to be in any hurry to tell us.
55:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Howland Island is still there, too.
55:18
[SPEAKER_00]: A few years after the disappearance, a small stone day beacon was built on the island.
55:24
[SPEAKER_00]: A squat, striped tower, meant to guide ships and airplanes in daylight.
55:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It was named the Air Heart Light.
55:31
[SPEAKER_00]: nobody lives on howland anymore.
55:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The sea birds have the island to themselves again, and the beacon stands alone in the sun and the wind.
55:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Looking out over the empty water, toward the west, where she was supposed to come from.
55:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending this quiet time with sleepless history.
55:52
[SPEAKER_00]: If you are still awake, let the sound of the rain carry you the rest of the way.
55:57
[SPEAKER_00]: If you have already drifted off, then the story has done what it was meant to do.
56:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Rest now.
56:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Let tomorrow wait until morning.
56:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Sleep well and I will see you next time with another long, slow story from the past.