Found Amelia Earhart at Last?

Here's where DNA testing can really do something worthwhile.

Amelia Earhart is once again in the news, long after her disappearance. This time, researchers have found a few bones on a deserted atoll in the Pacific that, along with a few other clues, would seem to paint the picture of Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, spending the ends of their lives on land, alone, slowly running out of food and fresh water, undiscovered by the massive search team sent to look for them.

The other clues are perhaps more intriguing than mere bones: Among the findings are the mirror from a woman's compact, a pocket knife of the kind that was listed on Earhart's plane's inventory, and small travel-worthy bottles made in New Jersey (which, incidentally, is a long way from Nikumaroro, the atoll on which these things were found).

Earhart and Noonan went missing in 1937, so it's conceivable that the remains of small fires found on the atoll point as well to the missing pair's presence there. Also among the findings was a group of empty oyster shells laid out in a row, as if they had been cast down as water collection devices.

The findings were released by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, which has long been looking for clues to Earhart's fate.

Among the more outlandish theories were that she was captured by Japanese soldiers and executed as a spy or that she returned to the U.S. under a new identity and lived in secret the rest of her life. (Born in 1897, she would be very old if still alive.)

Finding the plane underwater would put to rest those outlandish theories, to a certain extent. But if the DNA testing on the bones that is now planned matches that of Earhart, then it's moreso an open-and-shut case of what happened on that grim July day in 1937.