RateItAll: The Opinion Network

Obviously, she was abducted by aliens.

During many years a volume of facts and evidence was collected that thoroughly discredits the "repatriation theory" about Amelia Earhart .
Two certified forensic professionals, Dr. Walter Birkby (Arizona) and Dr. Todd Fenton (Michigan), after studying the "photograph overlays", came to a negative conclusion about the credibility of the theory (yet in 2005), refusing to support it.
In 2006, another professional - criminal forensic expert Kevin Richland - was hired by National Geographic to study photographs of Earhart and Bolam. He cited many measurable differences between them, eliminating any possibility that Bolam was Earhart.
The same was the conclusion of many long-time serious researchers who studied Bolam's personal life history for years and found that her life is a matter of public record, thoroughly documented and not "mysterious" in any sense. Some results of these studies are summarized, for example, here:
http://www.ameliaearhartmovie.com/lostflightgrouplfg/irenebolamessay.html
The claim about "several" Irene Bolams was made but was never substantiated. Actually there was no any mysterious "gaps" in Bolam's life. On the contrary, the massive evidence was presented to prove that Bolam was always the same person during all her life, well known by many credible and respectable people since her youth years till her deathbed. The amount of facts collected and established about her completely eliminates any reasonable possibility to speculate that she as if somehow "disappeared", or could be somehow "substituted" by other person, ect.
Thus, the whole idea about Amelia Earhart's "secret repatriation" is a completely unsubstantiated speculation, not only based on nothing real and factual but contradictive to the well established facts. There are the real enigmas - and artificial ones... The disappearance of Earhart is a real one... but the proposed "repatriation theory" alas is certainly an "articifial" one - just an unsibstantiated guess built on sand and unable to stand against the hard factual reality...
Respectively submitted - Alex V. Mandel, PhD, Earhart researcher and historian for 25 years

Not much of a mystery at all.She's dead by now,whether or not she survived the crash.If our Government can't (or doesn't really WANT to) find Osama BinLaden with all of this modern technology at their hands,how can we expect people to have found one tiny airplane & it's pilot way back then?

Look at the following website: www.electranewbritain.com/ It is my project for the last 11 years, give me your opinion. The website contains all the details except where the aircraft wreck seen in 1945 rests. David Billings Australia.

Minor mystery at best. The Pacific is a big place and as others have said, a minute deviance from course translates to several, perhaps hundreds of miles.

There is much speculation about what happened to Amelia Earhart. There are three popular theories and while none of them seem to have definitive proof, they all have some measure of credibility depending on who you believe. The first theory is that she crashed in the Pacific Ocean. At its height, the search effort involved 3,000 people, 10 ships and 65 planes all turning up empty handed. The second theory is that she and Fred Noonan crashed on an island and died. Numerous searches over the years to the island of Nikumaroro have turned up a number of man made parts some of which could have been from the missing Lockheed Electra. So far they have discovered a navigator's bookcase, a sheet of aluminum with red paint, a cut strip of aluminum, an aluminum plate, a dado (protective plate to shield wiring from passenger's feet) rivets, airplane skin manufactured before 1940, a channel assembly, electrical cables, plexiglass, aircraft safety wire, a broken thermometer, threaded metal cap, and a woman's rubber shoe heel and shoe string eyelet manufactured in the US in the mid 1930s. In the event that they did crash land on the island that theory leads to even further speculation. Some say that she and Noonan died of exposure. Some say they were captured by the Japanese and executed as spies. The third theory is that they spent the war years in a Japanese prison and survived. Once the war was over they returned to America under assumed names, with Amelia taking the name of Irene Craigmile, then marrying a man named Guy Bolam and living as Irene Bolam, a New Jersey housewife until her death in 1982. Mrs Bolam denied being Amelia Earhart and after her death her body was cremated so there can never be any fingerprint or DNA analysis. While the bones of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan may be lost forever a Lockheed Electra is another story. It took 70 plus years to find the Titanic so I have hopes that within my lifetime enough wreckage will be discovered that at least a crash site can be determined.

I heard her trip was actually a spy mission.

Her last name is spelled with an E you idiots