Ric Gillespie wants one of three things: he wants to find an aircraft part, a recognisable personal effect, or human remains. Ideally, he would like all three - and he is sure they are somewhere on the remote island of Nikumaroro. But after seven trips to the western Pacific location, he would dearly love a single, conclusive artefact that proves Amelia Earhart died 70 years ago on this speck in the ocean.
As executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar) and author of a book on her disappearance and the quest for her remains, Mr Gillespie first visited the uninhabited island, that is today part of the Republic of Kiribati, in 1989. In the past 18 years the group's researchers and archaeologists have amassed a thick dossier of compelling evidence - including official reports of a human body being found and aircraft parts being used by former colonists - to support their theory. All they have to do on their upcoming expedition is find the 'smoking gun'.
'This trip will focus on two specific areas, the section of the abandoned village where airplane parts were found on the 1989 and 2003 expeditions, and the area on the southeast end of the island where the castaway's bones were found in 1940,' said Mr Gillespie from the headquarters of the educational foundation in Wilmington, Delaware.
The 16-strong team will sail from Fiji on July 13 and are scheduled to anchor outside the island's coral reef around July 18. The contingent includes a representative of the government of Kiribati, which has registered the remote Nikumaroro and surrounding islands as the Phoenix Islands Protected Area and introduced a range of environmental regulations. The team will have 17 days on the island to fit archaeological facts with the hypothesis.
Since July 2, 1937, when Earhart and Fred Noonan, her navigator, disappeared over the Pacific on her second attempt to circle the globe close to the equator, there have been dozens of theories as to what happened after they took off from Lae, New Guinea.
For many years, the accepted wisdom was that their Lockheed Model 10E Special 'Electra' had simply run out of fuel and crashed into the ocean as they searched for Howland Island, their final refuelling stop before flying to Honolulu and completing the journey by touching down in Oakland, California. Even Gillespie himself thought that was the most likely explanation, until it was pointed out that even without the benefit of modern navigational technology, Earhart and Noonan did have the equipment to make it to dry land.