AMERICAN television host Josh Gates is keeping his fingers crossed and hopes that the discovery of what is believed to be human bones on Tuesday evening can answer a historical mystery.
Mr Gates is in Fiji on footsteps of a mystery, for which he hopes he gets answers for.
Mr Gates’ show – Expedition Unknown – investigates some of history’s greatest mysteries and this time around he based his travel to Fiji following a theory that female aviator Amelia Earhart’s remains could be in Fiji.
Mr Gates said Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished during the final stages of their daring trans-world flight in 1937.
“The leading Earhart research group, TIGHAR (The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery) has uncovered compelling evidence suggesting that the pair may have crash landed on on an uninhabited atoll in the Pacific known as Gardner Island, today called Nikumaroro,” he said.
“Fiji’s link to the Earhart mystery begins in 1940 when skeletal remains were discovered on Nikumaroro by a British sailor named Gerald Gallagher who placed the bones in a wooden box and shipped them back to Fiji for analysis.
“The bones were interred in the Fiji School of Medicine, examined by several people, and eventually misplaced. The skeletal remains, which are presumed to still be somewhere in Fiji, may be the key to solving the world’s most famous missing persons case.”
The Fiji Times story of a human skull discovery by John Grey in 1968 led Mr Gates to Fiji.
According to Mr Gates, it could be only coincidental that the occupant of 12 Kimberly St before Mr Grey was employed at the Fiji School of Medicine.
“Whether the bones are related to the skull that Grey found may be difficult to establish, but if they turn out to be human, they may help either solve the Earhart mystery once and for all or bring some closure to one of the many leads in the world’s most famous missing persons case,” said Mr Gate.
