Film may be the last surviving footage of Earhart but while leader of team hunting for aviator’s remains says it looks authentic he disputes its dating

Footage published for the first time shows Amelia Earhart just before she attempted to fly around the world, and not long before she vanished and set investigators on a search that has yet to conclude.

Earhart, who had become the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in the late 1920s, met photographer Al Bresnik and his brother John in 1937 at an airfield in Burbank, California, to document her first “round the world” attempt. A few months later, after another attempt, she disapperared.

At the time, Earhart was already a celebrity – a hero during the Great Depression, a lecturer who endorsed products and hobnobbed with Herbert Hoover, and a pioneering woman in the male-dominated world of aviation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amelia Earhart in the cockpit. Photograph: Paragon Agency

What may be the last surviving footage of Earhart sat on a shelf for more than 50 years until John Bresnik’s death in 1992. His son, also named John, unearthed it while going through his father’s things after he died – only to put the film into his desk for another two decades, not realizing what he had.

“It just always sat it in a plain box on a shelf in his office, and on the outside it said, ‘Amelia Earhart, Burbank Airport, 1937,’” Bresnik told the Associated Press. “I didn’t even know what was on the film until my dad died and I took it home and watched it.”

Bresnik is unsure whether his father manned the 16mm camera that day, although he knows his uncle didn’t because he appears in it. Al Bresnik can be seen in the film taking dozens of photographs of Earhart.

Earhart’s first attempt to circumnavigate the globe by air ended in abrupt failure when she crashed during a takeoff, and was grounded at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Her second attempt several months later began from Miami, and ended with her disappearance somewhere over the south Pacific.

In the film, Earhart grins and clambers around on her aircraft, showing it off to the people nearby in an apparently upbeat and energetic mood. Bresnik gave the footage to the publisher Paragon Agency, whose head Doug Westfall digitized the film. Westfall said that he plans to donate the original film to an archive or a museum, telling the Guardian: “It belongs in public hands.”



The publisher is releasing the film, titled Amelia Earhart’s Last Photo Shoot, this month alongside a book charting her journey out over the Pacific.

The film looks authentic, according to Richard Gillespie, executive director of a team that has hunted for Earhart’s remains and wreck for decades, the International Group For Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tigher).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Earhart next to the propeller of her Model 10E Electra. Photograph: Paragon Agency

Tigher disputes the dating of the film, saying that the lack of repair plating on the plane proves the film was taken in March, before Earhart’s abortive first flight rather than in May before her second flight.

“The video and the stills were all taken in March of 1937, as she made her preparations for the first attempt where she ended up wrecking her plane,” said Pat Thrasher, president of Tigher.

Gillespie and Thrasher believe they have located wreckage of Earhart’s twin-engine Electra, and hinge their theory on the evidence of an aluminum sheet and a sonar streak found at the tiny, uninhabited Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro.

Thrasher said that Gillespie is “a couple hundred miles north of Fiji” and en route to the atoll for a search expedition that will investigate a sonar anomaly in the 180 meter-deep water. They believe that anomaly could be the fuselage of Earhart’s plane, and have a remote-operated undersea vehicle and an expert to pilot it to investigate the object.

Gillespie has elsewhere admitted that the anomaly could also be a sunken ship or unusual reef, but maintains that Nikumaroro is Earhart’s likely final destination. Tigher has previously produced an “ointment pot” and some small bones of unidentifiable origin as possible evidence that Earhart or her navigator John Noonan made it to the speck of land.

Some historians object to Gillespie’s decades of searching for Earhart, saying he lacks evidence to support his theories. His expedition will search the atoll and the waters nearby for two weeks in June before returning to the US in July.

The video provides no clues as to Earhart’s fate, but the investigators appreciated it nonetheless. “It’s kind of cool that things like this keep surfacing,” Thrasher said,

and all because somebody was cleaning up a father’s or great uncle’s attic.”