Ric Gillespie
27th Feb 2019, 13:49
Hello. I'm Ric Gillespie, Executive Director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). You may have heard of our investigation of the Amelia Earhart disappearance.
On July 1 & 2, 1937, Sid Marshall took 16mm motion picture film of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan in Lae , New Guinea. His film of their July 1 test flight and dramatic July 2 takeoff for the ill-fated flight to Howland Island was copied and later converted to video. The 30-second clip can be seen on Youtube. The video is of poor quality. We're trying to locate the original 16mm film in the hope that archival film scanning and digitizing technology can produce a cleaner, more informative image.
Sid once said that the original film would never be sold because it is aviation history that belongs to the Australian people. In 1999, Earhart researcher and author Elgen Long believed that the original film was given to the National Library of Australia (NLA) but it is now not in that collection. After the establishment of the National Film & Sound Archive in 1984, most of the audio/visual holdings of the NLA were transferred to the NFSA, but they do not have the Sid Marshall film.
We recently acquired previously-unknown 16mm film of Earhart's July 1 test flight and will soon have it scanned and digitized. We're not seeking to own Sid's original film. We only want to find it and arrange for its scanning and digitizing to preserve it as an historical document.
Can anyone help locate it? Thanks.
On July 1 & 2, 1937, Sid Marshall took 16mm motion picture film of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan in Lae , New Guinea. His film of their July 1 test flight and dramatic July 2 takeoff for the ill-fated flight to Howland Island was copied and later converted to video. The 30-second clip can be seen on Youtube. The video is of poor quality. We're trying to locate the original 16mm film in the hope that archival film scanning and digitizing technology can produce a cleaner, more informative image.
Sid once said that the original film would never be sold because it is aviation history that belongs to the Australian people. In 1999, Earhart researcher and author Elgen Long believed that the original film was given to the National Library of Australia (NLA) but it is now not in that collection. After the establishment of the National Film & Sound Archive in 1984, most of the audio/visual holdings of the NLA were transferred to the NFSA, but they do not have the Sid Marshall film.
We recently acquired previously-unknown 16mm film of Earhart's July 1 test flight and will soon have it scanned and digitized. We're not seeking to own Sid's original film. We only want to find it and arrange for its scanning and digitizing to preserve it as an historical document.
Can anyone help locate it? Thanks.