An Amelia Earhart Mystery Solved (Not That Mystery)

How the pilot’s long-lost aviator helmet came to spend the better part of a century in a closet somewhere in Minnesota.

The response from the experts was always the same: So, your mom told you this aviator’s helmet belonged to Amelia Earhart? That’s great, they’d say, but we’re going to need a little more proof.

That was the gist of the messages conveyed to Anthony Twiggs, who inherited the leather cap more than 20 years ago when his mother died.

It was still, after all these years, remarkably supple, with the tiniest of tears just below the half-moon-shaped communications pocket on the left flap. The cap looked very much like the aviator’s helmet she wore for her first trans-Atlantic flight, in 1928. It had been missing since an air race in 1929. This was the same race from which Earhart’s leather goggles went missing, later found with lenses missing and donated in 1957 to the Smithsonian.