<h2 class="wp-block-heading eplus-wrapper">Q &amp; A</h2>

It was 2 July 1937 and the most famous female pilot in the world was trying to find Howland Island - a tiny speck of land that was supposed to be one of her last stops on an historic flight around the globe. But she could not see it. Her voice was increasingly frantic.

She gave a rough location to the boat that was supposed to be guiding her landing. But soon her transmissions stopped. The boat, the Itasca, started an immediate rescue operation. In the weeks that followed, the US government spent millions searching for her.

But she, her plane, and her navigator, Fred Noonan, have never been found. In 1939 she was declared dead. The official conclusion was that the plane simply ran out of fuel, crashed into the sea, and was lost.

However, a new History Channel show - which will be broadcast in the USA on Sunday - says it has found evidence that proves a different theory. Its team believes that she and Noonan landed on the Marshall IslandsA chain of islands and atolls in the central Pacific Ocean. , controlled by Japan at the time, and died as prisoners of war.

Their evidence is a photograph, above, which was recently found in the US National Archives. It shows a white man and woman on a dock on one of the islands.

Experts say that the man's distinctive hairline matches Noonan's, and that the woman's body type, short hair and trousers are similar to Earhart's.

The woman is looking to the right, where a blurry shape is being towed by a Japanese ship. The shape is roughly 38-feet long - the same length as Earhart's plane.

"This absolutely changes history," said Shawn Henry, a former executive assistant director for the FBIThe Federal Bureau of Investigation, which investigates crimes on a national level in the USA. and the show's lead investigator. "We proved beyond a reasonable doubt that she survived her flight and was held prisoner by the Japanese on the island of Saipan, where she eventually died."

Earhart fans and conspiracy theorists are enthralled by this new evidence. It matches the stories from local islanders, who have often said that they saw Earhart land nearby. Fragments of metal have been found which supposedly match planes from the 1930s. Finally, after 80 years, this mystery has been solved.

"Not so fast," say sceptics. The photograph is very blurry. Its "Earhart" is not even facing the camera. And we know that the Itasca was hundreds of miles away from the Marshall Islands when it picked up her final radio messages; the captain even went outside to look for her. It is simply not possible that she landed so far away. Without a body, conspiracy theories have thrived for years - but sometimes the simplest answer is true.

What do we know? Earhart's radio messages were received by the Itasca around 20 hours after she and Noonan took off from Lae, New Guinea. The Itasca attempted to respond, but soon realised that she was not receiving its signals. She said she was flying along the sun line 157-337 (imagine the line from north-northwest and south-southeast on a compass) but did not say which direction she was going.

What do we not know? What happened next. There are three theories: that she crashed and the plane was lost. That she was captured in the Marshall Islands. Or that she and Noonan ended up castaways on the island Nikumaroro, southwest of Howland. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery has been investigating this idea for years, and are currently using sniffer dogs to find her body.

Amelia Earhart - The American aviator was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean and disappeared in 1937 in an ill-fated attempt to circumnavigate the world.

Marshall Islands - A chain of islands and atolls in the central Pacific Ocean.

FBI - The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which investigates crimes on a national level in the USA.