NavList:

Howard G, you wrote:
"Here we go again – Purdue Univ spending more money on a wild goose chase …. Chasing down conspiracy theories….. their money but alas the evidence just does not stack up in support of that hypothesis."

It's not clear to me where the big money is coming from on this bit of Pacific "tourism". But certainly Purdue is happy to jump on the media blitz bandwagon, and today the story has hit multiple popular media outlets. Here's coverage from The Guardian. A key sentence in the article:

The expedition builds on an already large body of evidence pinpointing the atoll as the location where the aviators went down. Much of it was gathered during dozens of visits between 1989 and 2019 by teams from the US explorers group Tigher (The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery).

That "large body of evidence" is bullshit and describing it as evidence demonstrate 'press release reporting' --not journalism, just someone copying from the press release. It also demonstrates poor editing, since TIGHER obviously should have been TIGHAR [just look at the expanded name of the group... it's Aircraft, not Earcraft... though that would be funny].

You invoked a principle:
"Occam's Razor continues to provide the most 'logical' hypothesis based on the 'facts' we know."

We have to be careful whipping out that "razor" from our bag of tricks. It's not reliable. It's not a component of the scientific method. And even when popularly applied, its domain is best restricted to attempts to model the laws of Nature. It does not apply to human history. And, Howard, I think I can give you a counter-example that will be familiar to you. We have talked before about air disaster analysis and that long-running tv series "Air Crash Investigation" (or "Mayday" in some markets). As you know from the more intriguing cases analyzed in that program and also from reading official investigation reports, most aircraft accidents require not the simplest of explanations, which would seem to be demanded by Occam's Razor, but the explanation often emerges as a uniquely complex coincidence of two (ore more) causes. Complexity in explanation is key. 

You concluded:
"the simple logic is that they ran out of fuel NW of Howland Island. It aint rocket science."

I agree with that completely. But it's not because that's the "simpler of two otherwise equal theories", which is the choice we are faced with in a real Occam scenario. But rather because the TIGHAR/Nikumaroro theory is bunk, founded on pseudo-evidence and wishful thinking. 

Frank Reed