 Celebrated as the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, Earhart is also the center of one of the most well-known historical mysteries, one that has rivetive enthusiasts since that fateful day in 1937 when her Lockheed Electra 10e vanished from all radar. On July 2nd of that year, Earhart along with her navigator Fred Nune took off from Papua, New Guinea during an attempt to circumnavigate the world, but the pair never landed at their destination, Howlin Island in the Central Pacific Ocean. During the flight, Earhart made contact with the Coast Guard ship Atasca, apparently experiencing radio and instrument trouble and unsure of her precise location. Earhart, Nune and her Electra were never found. In 1991, Earhart enthusiast Richard Gillespie found an aluminum panel and washed up storm debris on the Pacific Island of Niku Maruru about 300 miles from Howlin. Gillespie has said he suspects the paddle may have come from Earhart's plane and now a Penn State team is using a neutron beam to, they hope, uncover hidden clues that might support that hypothesis. Gillespie is the executive director of the International Group of Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGAR, which in 1988 launched a project to solve Earhart's disappearance. A nuclear engineer professor at Penn State said in a statement, we've had inquiries about these kinds of things before, but we had an extensive call with Richard Gillespie, who was clear that they're interested in whatever data we might be able to provide. Even if it proves that the patch couldn't possibly belong to Amelia Earhart's plane, we agreed to see what we could see. The researchers hope that a technique called neutron radiography might reveal otherwise invisible clues as to the aluminum's origin. Researchers have already determined that it was hacked at with an axe along its edge, except for one side that was repeatedly flexed to snap it off of its source. Firing neutron beams from the campus' Brazil nuclear reactor should reveal any features of the panel that are made from something other than uniform aluminum, the researchers said. If the metal were just plain aluminum, the neutrons would pass through cleanly, but any carbon or hydrogen containing molecules on the surface, perhaps bits of coral that had filled in a serial number etched into the metal, for instance, would scatter the neutrons, and the pattern of scattered neutrons would form an image of the coral or other material, in the same way an x-ray image reveals the bones inside your arm, but what do you guys think about this anyway? Comments below and as always, thank you for watching.