BEIJING, July 13 (Xinhuanet) -- An expedition made up of 15 members of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) is counting on modern technology to help search a small South Pacific island to find out if famed aviator Amelia Earhart crash-landed and died there 70 years ago.

    Once at the 2 1/2-mile-long island, the group was to spend 17 days searching for human bones, aircraft parts and any other evidence. The trip would mark the group's ninth to Nikumaroro, an uninhabited atoll about 1,800 miles south of Hawaii.

    They are trying to show that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, reached the island on July 2, 1937, crashed on a reef at low tide and made it to shore, where they possibly lived for months as castaways, written off by the world as lost at sea.

    "The public wants it solved. That's why everybody on the street today, 70 years later, knows the name Amelia Earhart," said TIGHAR founder and executive director Ric Gillespie. "She is America's favorite missing person.

    "Most skeptics are not really familiar with the evidence that we've found," he continued, "and they usually have a vested interest in the other theories -- that they crashed at sea or were captured by the Japanese."

    The evidence includes radio distress signals that may have come from Earhart, bones found at a former campsite in 1940, and pieces of airplane parts that Gillespie says could have come from Earhart's plane. One of these is a shard of Plexiglas, the exact thickness and curvature of an Electra window, but with no serial number.

    Metal detectors, digital cameras slung from kites, infrared-equipped surveying devices and even pig bones are among items TIGHAR planned to use for the expedition. The search will concentrate on two locations: the campsite and a site where aircraft parts were recovered.

    Kar Burns, one of two anthropologists on the team, hopes coconut crabs native to the island -- some as big as 2 1/2 feet across -- will carry the pig bones to wherever human bones might have been taken by crabs. DNA from human bones could help solve the mystery, Gillespie said.

    (Agencies)