Plans to build an enormous 18-foot-tall statue of Amelia Earhart on the island of Saipan are moving forward in the face of considerable consternation from residents.
Announced last September and affirmed as a genuine project earlier this year, the massive monument remains on the drawing board despite a recent study which suggested that Earhart did not, in fact, crash on the island.
The director of the group hoping to build the monument, Donald Barcinas, dismissed the study out of hand, telling the Marianas Variety newspaper, "she died in the Pacific, whether on Saipan or Nikumaroro. It's not bad to have a monument that honors her."
And, in an observation that will no doubt cause an increase in the blood pressure of skeptics, he mused, "it doesn't matter what the truth is or if she really died on Saipan."
That said, Barcinas indicated that he still believes the theory that her story ultimately came to a close on the island, noting that "there’s a lot of eyewitnesses who said she did die here."
It would appear that this opinion is shared by a pair of government agencies on the island which have pledged support in the form of land and possible funding for the project.
As one can imagine, the proposed cost of $150,000 to $200,000 is being seen as a wildly inappropriate amount to spend on such a project when there are many real world issues facing residents of the island.
One commenter on the Marianas Variety website lambasted the project, writing "I guess it also doesn't matter that our hospital needs more funding, our medical referral needs more funding, our roads need fixing!"
Another poster pointed to other areas on the island in desperate need of improvement and lamented that "yet, we have money, time, and resources to devote towards a statue of a person we are not even sure was here."
Whether the cries of the critics will derail the project remains to be seen as the group pushing for the monument seems bound and determined to make it a reality, no matter how much more wisely the money could be spent.
Source: Marianas Variety