Professor believes bones found on Pacific island belong to Amelia Earhart

A professor thinks he's finally discovered what happened to Amelia Earhart, the pioneering pilot who vanished in 1937.

"Amelia Earhart and the Nikumaroro Bones," a dry academic paper with a bombshell headline.

"I am 99 percent sure that these bones belong to Amelia Earhart," said professor Richard Jantz.

Amelia Earhart was an aviation pioneer and the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. But in 1937, her Lockheed Electra disappeared without a trace.

Some believe she crashed into the Pacific, somewhere in the vicinity of New Guinea. Others, including the History Channel, have investigated the theory that she and her navigator somehow managed to land on the Marshall Islands, only to be captured by the Japanese military on the eve of World War 2.

But professor Jantz doesn't buy that.

"The Rosetta Stone that broke it open was our ability to actually measure Amelia Earhart's bones from photographs and from her trousers," Jantz said.

He measured her bones against records of 13 human bones that turned up on the remote atoll of Nikumaroro, also known as Gardner Island, a few years after her disappearance.

"It's a mystery and there was an opportunity for me to go ahead and test a hypothesis and I was prepared going into it to accept the idea it was not her," Jantz said.

Also found on the island according to the professor were part of a woman's shoe, a surveying kit similar to the one used by Earhart's co-pilot and a Benedictine bottle. Jantz says it's something Earhart was known to carry.