Did Amelia Earhart survive her final flight?

Now, investigators believe they have discovered the “smoking gun” that would support a decades-old theory that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were captured by the Japanese, a newly unearthed photograph from the National Archives that purportedly shows Earhart and Noonan - and their plane - on an atoll in the Marshall Islands.

“I was originally skeptical until we could get the photograph authenticated,” Shawn Henry, a former FBI assistant executive director who is now helping privately investigate the Earhart disappearance, told The Washington Post. “The fact that it came out of the National Archives as opposed to somebody’s basement or garage somewhere - that to me gave it a lot more credibility.” The photograph was rediscovered a few years ago in a mislabeled file at the National Archives by a former US Treasury agent named Les Kinney, who began looking into Earhart’s disappearance after he retired, according to previews for a new History channel documentary, Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence , that airs July 9.

The 8-by-10-inch blackand-white photograph went ignored in a stack of 20 or 30 other pictures until Kinney took a closer look a few months later, Henry said. 

In the photo, a figure with Earhart’s haircut and approximate body type sits on the dock, facing away from the camera, Henry points out. Toward the left of the dock is a man they believe is Noonan. On the far right of the photo is a barge with an airplane on it, supposedly Earhart’s. Henry, who was asked to join the investigation about a year ago, said two different photo experts analyzed the picture to ensure it had not been manipulated. It had not been, they found. The experts also compared the facial features and body proportions of the two figures in the photograph with known pictures of Earhart and Noonan. Over the past 80 years, three prevailing theories about Earhart’s disappearance have emerged. Some speculate that Earhart’s Lockheed Model 10 Electra crashed and sank to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, killing her and Noonan.