Editorial: Did we find Amelia Earhart? Will we ever stop looking?

The decades-old black and white photo, pulled from obscure files at the National Archives, shows the back of a woman sitting on a dock on an atoll in the Marshall Islands, wearing pants and sporting tousled hair. Off to the side is a blurry figure of a man with a distinctive hairline. Maybe. As evidence that Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan survived a crash in the Pacific Ocean, it’s hardly compelling. But the fascination with the legendary aviator is.

Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, was already famous when she vanished on July 2, 1937, while attempting a grueling round-the-world flight in her Lockheed Electra 10E. But the unsolved mystery of her disappearance over the Pacific has made her mystique endure. She has become a story, alternately researched and romanticized. Was she on a spy mission for the U.S. government? Did she survive and live out her days in the captivity of the Japanese? (The Japanese have always said they have no record of this.)

Researchers will cite this latest photo as possible proof of her survival in a History Channel documentary this coming weekend, just after the 80^th anniversary of her vanishing. That may just exchange one mystery about her fate for another, however. And Earhart deserves to be remembered simply for who she was: a pioneer who set off on dangerous flights at a time when flying itself was rare, popularizing the notion of air travel and inspiring generations of girls and women. About this, there is no mystery.

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