This is the first time I’d ever heard this: Many people heard her final calls for help.
Blogging light, because I’m still at the ISS R&D conference.
11 thoughts on “Amelia Earhart”
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This is the first time I’d ever heard this: Many people heard her final calls for help.
Blogging light, because I’m still at the ISS R&D conference.
Comments are closed.
Interesting and does make some sense. However, could have done without this parting shot at AGW skepticism:
“We’re up against a public that wants a smoking gun,” he told The Post on Tuesday. “We know the public wants, demands, something simple. And we’re also very much aware that we live in a time of rampant science denial. Nobody does nuance anymore.”
Nor should we. Show me the missing parts of the plane, something with a serial number.
One must be careful about these reports – lots of people do not believe a single word TIGHAR says.
So they’ve been to the island, but only found a few bones and other surface level stuff? They do know that ground penetrating radar is a thing, right? Or for that matter, magnetic anomaly detectors, in sizes you can walk along and search. The island is less than 12 sq miles. If they found remains, the search area could be cut to about 3 sq miles. I need more than a make-up case.
Those radio messages were common knowledge when I was a boy. I can recall reading several accounts of the Earhart mystery as early as the late 1950’s that mentioned them. The people who heard them thought the sender was Earhart. The USN denied this, but the USN has a long and inglorious history of lying about embarrassing derelictions – e.g., what happened in turret 2 of the Iowa in 1989 or how those sailors captured by the Iranians rather more recently came to be grabbed.
A couple years ago someone found some old photos purporting to be of Earhart and Noonan on a pier in the Japanese-held South Pacific. Their plane was also in view on the rear of a Japanese naval vessel in the background. If the Earhart-and-Noonan-were-rescued-then-killed-by-the-Japanese scenario is true, no one is going to find anything much on the island where the plane came down. If Earhart’s and Noonan’s remains were dug up and disposed of by the Japanese just before war’s end to preclude an investigation, the truth of the Earhart-Noonan disappearance is likely to remain conjectural.
I too remember reading about the radio transmissions when I was a kid back in the 1960s. I don’t remember which book it was, but it went into considerable detail. I’d like to find that book and read it again.
I read that the photos have been debunked by a Japanese blogger who showed that they had been published in a Japanese periodical a couple of years before her disappearance.
Hadn’t heard about the photos being of pre-round-the-world-attempt vintage. Well, that’s one theory down. And, as you note, that leaves two still in play. Neither is likely to see definitive proof anytime soon. For the nonce we seem to have sufficient billionaires with the bug for space. Seems we could use at least one with a bug for solving old mysteries. As things stand, the enthusiasts have no money and the money has no such enthusiasm.
Actually, Fred Smith is very interested in that. At least he was when I met with him on a different topic in the 90s.
Didn’t know that. Seems to me solving the Earhart mystery would make a nice second line on his tombstone in addition to the founding of FedEx.
I’ve been fascinated by the Earhart mystery since I was a little kid. In recent years I’ve read three books, all of which are fascinating, and all of which point in entirely different directions.
One is “Finding Amelia” by Ric Gillespie. He is the main subject of the linked article, and his theory is that she landed or crash-landed on Gardner Island, now called Nikumaroro. If so, she and Fred Noonan might have survived for a few days, but that island has no fresh water. As Gregg said above, a lot of people are skeptical of Gillespie and TIGHAR. He is long on theories and short on actual evidence, despite several expeditions to the island.
Another is the Elgen Long book which I was glad to see mentioned in the article. It’s entitled “Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved”. Long is a retired airline pilot who analyzed the Electra’s fuel consumption. The fuel consumption tables for various speeds and altitudes were compiled by a young Lockheed engineer by the name of Kelly Johnson. Long also discusses the navigational techniques that Noonan would have used at the time. His conclusion is that she ran out of fuel and ditched in the ocean. He says there is no way in hell she could have reached Gardner Island.
The third one was “The Search for Amelia Earhart” by Fred Goerner, published in 1966. This book is the original one to suggest that she landed on a Japanese-held island and was captured. He cites various eyewitness accounts from natives of a white man and woman who were prisoners of the Japanese. Some say they saw them executed. Goerner claims that he was encouraged in his research by Admiral Nimitz.
All three books are very engrossing and I recommend them. I would say that the only way to settle it once and for all is to find the wreckage of Earhart’s plane. Gillespie says it landed on Gardner Island and was subsequently washed out to sea. Then it should rest on the ocean bottom very near the island. He needs to send a submersible down to look for it. Why hasn’t he?
If Long is correct, the plane is on the ocean bottom in a vague area somewhere in the vicinity of Howland Island. It took over 70 years to find the Titanic, a much bigger target, when its position was given by wireless the night it sank. Finding Earhart’s plane in an area of hundreds of square miles will be much more challenging.
But if Goerner is right, the plane was already found on Saipan in 1944 and ordered destroyed by the U.S. military.
Unless someone with at least Richard Branson/Paul Allen-size deep pockets comes along to bankroll the search effort(s) I don’t see any likely possibility of Earhart’s plane being found in my actuarially probable remaining lifespan (I’m 66). The Yorktown was found in 1996 and the Lexington was found earlier this year. Both are a lot bigger and more durable submerged than a Lockheed Electra. Tick-tock.
The finding of lost shipwrecks and suchlike seems to be almost entirely an Anglosphere enthusiasm. There are plenty of billionaires in Japan but none of the deep-lying capital ships the IJN lost in WW2 have been found or even looked for so far as I know – that notably includes all four of the IJN carriers sunk at Midway. I think a chunk of side plating blown off the Kaga in the first strike led by McCluskey was found quite some time ago but the ship herself continued underway for some time and sank a long way from this bit of scrap metal. Plenty of stuff worth looking for just from WW2.
For whatever it may be worth I don’t give that story about Saipan any credence at all. The Pacific War was getting steadily bloodier in 1944 and the U.S., at the time of Saipan, was already looking at an all but certain amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands that would have made D-Day – or Saipan itself – look like a high school production compared to a Broadway show.
The visceral hatred of the Japanese by home-front Americans, already high, would have been amped up even higher with proof in hand of Japanese fingerprints on the deaths of Earhart and Noonan – just what would be needed to nerve up the U.S. public for the coming Civil War-scale bloodbath. If Earhart’s plane had been found on Saipan it would have been hauled back to the U.S. posthaste and paraded through the streets of every major city on a war bond drive to end all war bond drives.
The A-bomb has still a year away when Saipan was taken and nobody involved in the taking even knew about its development. Destroying such an incandescently useful “bloody shirt” if it was actually found? I don’t think so.
I take the quantum mechanical view that, until someone observes the wreckage, she is both alive and dead, and she both made it to shore and ditched in the ocean.