Nearly 90 years after Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific, a presidential order to declassify every US record on her final, ill-fated flight has sparked a fresh surge of interest in one of aviation’s most enduring enigmas.
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US President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he had ordered the declassification of “all records” related to Earhart – but among those who have devoted their lives to the mystery, there was a sense of weary deja vu.
The information the US government has on Earhart “is well-documented in thousands of publicly available, primary-source reports”, said Ric Gillespie, executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, who has spent decades tracing the final journey of Earhart.
Her disappearance in 1937 has inspired countless theories but little in the way of new revelations, he says.
Trump’s declaration, posted to his Truth Social platform, recounted Earhart’s achievements and her journey “almost three quarters around the World before she suddenly, and without notice, vanished, never to be seen again”.
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