Amelia Earhart was born in 1897 and her death was recorded as “1937?”  Much of her lasting fame is due to the unending question mark behind the date of her death.  no one truly knows what happened to Amelia and Fred Noonan over the Pacific.  The most likely scenario is that the Electra diviated from its course and ran out of fuel looking for Howland Island.  With no land in sight they were forced to crash in the ocean and were lost.  When she vanished a mystery and several legends began as different explanations were created.  The most popular belief for Earhart searchers is that the Electra went down near the island of Nikumaroro.  The soul of a shoe of the same type Earhart was photographed wearing before the flight was found there, leading people to comb the rest of the island to no avail.  Another widely held belief is that the Japanese set out to capture the Lockheed Electra, the most advanced airplane of the day.  Versions of Mitsubishi’s Zero fighter after 1937 carry identical designs to the Electra, which could support this theory.  A different spin on Japanese involvement is that they didn’t attack her, but quite the opposite.  With heightened tensions between the US and Japan, Earhart could have been on a spy mission, and purposely went off course to pass by the most outlying of the Japanese controlled islands.  Before her last take off she had new propellers put on that could have allowed her to go faster and take a longer flight path in the same amount of time as if she’d gone strait to Howland.  Japanese eyewitnesses also have come forward to attest to this theory.  The least likely theory, but still believed by a few, is that something unexplainable happened to her in a phenomena like the Bermuda Triangle, or possible alien abduction.  On an episode of Star Trek Voyager, Earhart and Noonan were discovered four hundred years in the future cryogenically preserved, and were reanimated.  Though this theory seems ludicrous, it shows how her unknown demise lead to an ongoing speculation about what really happened, and increased and maintained her fame.      If we knew what happened, Earhart would have been declared dead with a period rather than a question mark.  Psychologically not having this closure to her death meant, in a way, she did not really die after all.