1987 Marshall Island stamp Japanese officer gesturing toward Earhart and injured Fred Noonan as their plane is hoisted aboard the Japanese ship, Koshu

Earhart and Noonan at Jaluit, dock in the Marshall Islands in 1937? “Experts” tried to debunk this controversial photo, but the Marshallese government attests to it’s authenticity.

7/24/12

This was sent to us by Phil Van Zandt, a guest blogger. He and Woody Rogers are avid Earhart fans and respected historians.

– Forwarded Message —–

From: Woody Rogers
Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2012

July 10^th, 2011

A compilation of radio messages and eyewitness sightings of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan in the Marshall Islands and on the island of Saipan using Noonan’s injuries as a common thread. This h­­­­as now become a 13 year odyssey, taking me from the halls of the National Archives at College Park, Maryland to the far reaches of the Central Pacific Ocean. I made several trips to the Marshall Islands in 2001, staying at the Outrigger Marshall Islands Resort (now the Marshall Islands Resort). From there I traveled on 3 different occasions the island of Taroa, part of Maloelap Atoll to do an initial site survey of the IJNAF base on Taroa. I learned very quickly that the island is strewn with over a million pounds of unexploded ordinance from World War 2 that has never been removed. In order to do any work there, you must have a defined area to search and do a thorough GPR survey to locate any buried aircraft remains, bombs, etc. It’s not a job for the faint of heart. As recently as last October 2010, while clearing brush with fire, the natives set off a 500 pound bomb. Luckily no one was injured, but it underscores the danger of working in an area that was heavily bombed during WW2. My own experience with bombs came about on my second trip to Taroa. I was climbing up a sand bank from the beach and stepped on something round, covered with sand. I pitched forward on my chest, looked down and realized I had stepped on a Mark 5- 500 pound bomb! Luckily, the triggers are cast iron and rusted together. A few days later, the natives found another bomb in an area where children play regularly. They simply dug a pit around it, filled the pit with coconut husks and lit them on fire, moved everyone to the other side of the island and waited until it “cooked off”! A very loud and exciting explosion and a simple and efficient way to dispose of them.

This article is about creating a time line by going through all of the eyewitness reports and radio messages and only compiling the reports that mention injuries attributed to Fred Noonan. I’m sure that all of those reports are NOT included in here, my principal aim is to show the continuity in the statements from different locations and individuals. One of the great things about the Earhart mystery is that there is a wealth of information contained in all of the interviews and books done by many writers and Earhart researchers over the last 70 years. Fred Goerner, Oliver Knaggs, TC “Buddy” Brennan, D Michael Harris, Randall Brink , Bill Prymak, Joe Gervais and Don Wilson to name a few.

 Since all that any of us know for sure is that Amelia and Fred took off from Lae, New Guinea on July 2^nd 1937 and were never seen officially again, no information that is available should be excluded. Radio messages, eyewitness accounts and historical documents are just a few of the tools available in finding a solution to the most enduring mystery in aviation history.

 Let’s consider those statements that note Noonan’s injuries to create our timeline. Nina Paxton was the subject of a July 9^th, 1937 article in the local Ashland, Kentucky newspaper claiming to have heard Amelia on the radio during the Navy’s search for Earhart. She wrote letters to both Walter Winchell in 1943 and corresponded with Fred Goerner from 1964 to 1968. Her letters revealed to me why TIGHAR characterized her as a “lonely old lady” that pounded on the doors of congressmen for several years to try and get information on Earhart released. Her letters to Fred Goerner are at the Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg, Texas are included in the research archive on the TIGHAR site.. Paxton may not be believable to TIGHAR because of the fact that she heard Earhart give a location on Mili Atoll. For me, she heard two words that put her in the believable column: “Bruised knees”. In all of her documents, three items stood out to me.

On July 3^rd, 1937 at 2:20 PM EST, I picked up Amelia Earhart’s distress signal by short wave. This message contained some 300 to 400 words- in which she described Mille or Mulgrave atoll, Klee Passage, Knox Island and seemed to be located on a small island of 133 acres adjoining Knox, directly NE of a part of Marshall Island. That would be Chirubon Island, north of Knox island.

On the 5^th of July, Nina picked up an SOS giving 177 longitude…. and 58 minutes above the equator. This message was also heard by a Pan Am radio operator on Wake Island. The radio was fading in and out so the coordinates were partial. Just for fun, I took those numbers, bought aerial navigation charts from NOAA, and inserted all of the possible number combinations for coordinates in the Marshall Islands to make a complete set of coordinates. The only place in the Marshalls that I came close to land were the coordinates- 172.07 degrees east, 5 hours and 58 minutes north of the equator, the reef plain on the western shore of Chirubon Island. That area is dry at low tide and has about 5 feet of water at high tide.

Several years later I received a copy of Charles N.Hill’s book “Fix on the Rising Sun” and noted that his redo of the LOP (line of position), page 140, puts the LOP a few miles east of this location. In the article Nina wrote for the Louisville Courier Journal, she noted that Earhart described Noonan’s injuries. In a letter to Fred Goerner, she wrote that Earhart talked about Noonan having bruised his knees during the landing yesterday, saying that was why he wasn’t at the radio with her yesterday. A very important statement!

 Lijon’s story is in Amelia Earhart: Lost Legend, by Don Wilson, pages 65 and 66. It reads in part as follows: He saw a big silver plane coming. It was low down and he could tell it was in trouble because it made no noise. Then it landed on the reef about 200 feet from the small island. A white woman and man got out and walked down the beach. He could tell that one of them was hurt because the man was limping and there was blood on his face. You may read the complete statement in the book.

 There is still another story told by Air Force Major Joseph C. Wright. He had spoken to an old man on Enajet Island, Mili Atoll, in 1967. The old man told him that a plane had crashed there thirty years ago and that when a man and a woman emerged from the wreckage, the man had a towel wrapped around his head from some type of injury. (E-mail from Dan Cheatham 7/6/2006) I personally believe that this sighting was at Barre Island after the plane had become afloat by a high tide, pulled from the reef plain on the west of Chirubon Island into the lagoon on Mili, floating across the lagoon and eventually coming to rest on the leeward side of Barre Island. My reasoning for this versus a crash scenario at Barre is simple. A pilot running low on fuel, coming from the east, wouldn’t fly past miles of available landing sites to crash in the water. They would have landed in the first suitable location, of which there were many available, long before Barre Island. This would also account for the cessation of radio signals and messages after July 9^th.

 Joro was interviewed at Enajet, Mili Atoll in 1989. His story is second hand as related to him by villagers that were pressed into service at Enajet by the Japanese as laborers for the recovery of the plane. Two of the villagers were alive at the time of Joro’s interview, but because of a violation of cultural customs, the interviewer was not allowed into the village again and ordered to leave. In his words: “A Naval ship towing a barge arrived from Jaluit and the local Japanese patrol boat went out to deep water where the Naval vessel anchored and brought the barge into position next to an American airplane that had belly landed in the water off Barre Island. It took the efforts of some 40 men with winches to get the airplane on the barge. For many years the local men talked about the great skill and ingenuity of the Japanese when they were able to sink one end of the steel barge to water level and winch the airplane on. Some of the natives whispered that the American man was injured because he had a bandage wrapped around his head. Both were kept in the local village of Port Rhin until the patrol boat pulled the barge out of shallow water and secured it to the naval vessel waiting offshore. They then picked up the two Americans and went directly to Jaluit.

 Bilimon Amaran stated that he had treated a man and a woman on a ship in the lagoon at Jaluit Atoll. The man had a slight cut on his forehead and an old, inflamed wound on his knee. The head wound required only a bandage. Amaron had been interviewed many times over the years and as he aged there were slight variations to his story, but the core statement above never changed

(Amelia Earhart: Lost Legend Pages 68-73).  Joe Gervais and Bill Prymak had a meeting with Paul Amaran, Bilimon’s brother, on Jabor Island during a trip to the Marshalls in 1997. Paul gave a handwritten statement concerning a conversation with Bilimon a few months before he died. Bilimon had revealed that the man he treated had false teeth and that one of the people, which one he couldn’t remember, tried to give him a ring. (E-mail from Joe Klass 7/10/06). The ring statement will be addressed in another paper!

 The false teeth statement is another telling clue. Dr. Clifford Phillips, D.D.S. of Exeter, California, wrote a letter to Goerner describing Fred Noonan as having fractured four of his upper anterior teeth in a fall in a hotel bathroom in Hawaii in March 1937, after their takeoff attempt resulted in a landing gear failure and subsequent crash. Dr. Philips made an upper removable metal cast bridge for Noonan and was to have made a permanent lower on upon his return from the around the world flight. The lower teeth were removed over the years prior to his fall. (The Search for Amelia Earhart, pages 168-169)

 John Heine, a prominent Marshallese attorney had this to add in 1989. When he was just entering high school in the middle of July, 1937, their schoolmaster took them outside, handed them Japanese flags and told them to parade down the harbor wharf. When they arrived at the waterfront he saw that a ship had just pulled into the harbor towing a barge with an airplane on it. He could tell that it was silver colored with two propellers on it, even though it was partially covered. He couldn’t see the tail, but he wasn’t sure if it was missing or just covered up. The plane was held up by slings coming from the stern of the boat. He did not know what kind of an airplane it was, but later he was told that it was the plane an American woman had been flying when she had crashed. (condensed from Lost Legend, Don Wilson, pages 86-87)

Jim Golden had this item to add in 2008 After the air base at Roi Namur, part of Kwajelin Atoll, had been captured by US Armed Forces in February 1944, “the Marines wrote up a detailed report capturing the info that two white persons, a male and a female were brought by plane to Roi, the man with a white bandage on his head and the woman with short cut hair wearing men’s pants, who were taken across a causeway to the Namur Administration Building. I read the report myself”.

 Statements by Josephine Blanco Akiyama appear in both Goerner’s and Wilson’s books. She related that she had seen a white man and woman on the beach at Tanapang Harbor after they had been brought ashore from a plane in the water in 1937. The man had a bandage on his head.

Thus, we have seven individuals with a story about a man and a woman all brought together in a time line because of the man’s injuries.

Paxton – injured knees, Radio message, July 3^rd 1937

Lijon- head injury and limping, Mili Atoll, no time frame given.

Old man – head injury, told to Major Joseph C. Wright in 1967, Enajet Island, Mili Atoll

Joro – head injury and a description of the recovery of the Electra mid July 1937

Amaran – bandaged head and knee injury, Jaluit Atoll, July 1937

Akiyama- bandaged head injury, Tanapang Harbor, Saipan, July or Aug 1937

Jim Golden- head injury, read in a written military report in Feb 1944 on Roiamur, Kwadjelin Atoll.

Now we have a time line as follows:

Crash at Chirubon Island, Mili Atoll

Recovery of Electra at Barre Island by Japanese Navy personnel and head injury

Mili Atoll, transport to Jaluit Atoll by ship

Medical treatment at Jaluit

Moved to Roi Namur, Kwajelin Atoll

Moved to Saipan by seaplane

My opinion is that one story is just that, a story. Two stories, a coincidence. But seven, all tied together by the injury descriptions? Sounds like history to me. I’m surprised that as long as all of this information has been floating around, no one has attempted to organize and connect it all in this manner.

 The other item that I want to point out is that there were over 90 people in the Marshall Islands and on Saipan that remembered seeing Earhart and/or Noonan or had stories from friends and relatives related to their sightings. The most common statement heard from these folks was that the woman had short hair and wore pants: Earhart’s style of hair and dress. When shown a photo of Amelia and Fred during the interviews, most became excited and said they were sure that was who they saw. Although several investigators have pointed out that eyewitness identifications are often in error, my position is that we are not looking at the commission of a crime where you see the perpetrator for a few seconds or minutes, but people that saw Amelia and Fred for anywhere from a few hours- to accounts where they were seen over the span of two months.

I’m sure that all in these remote islands who made statements about these two wayward adventurers were merely relating events as they remembered them.

There are too many similarities in those accounts made by people that had no contact with each other to be made up stories. Certainly no vast conspiracy!

The mystery of Amelia Earhart can be solved with Ground Penetrating Radar and the search of a small area on Taroa in the Marshall Islands. It can be completed in 90 days.

I am available via emai: woodyrogers1@yahoo.com