November 16, 2013

We have been criticized (mostly in private) since Amelia Earhart Betrayed was published. The principal complaint was “Where does fact leave off and fiction begin?” This article will answer those questions and because it will be on our website; hopefully it will spark other individuals to come forward with what they have researched about the greatest mystery of the 20th century. We have already published several articles on the website detailing what we believe happened during the flight, i.e. fuel burn, navigational error and what her mission was. This writing will explain what we used as a basis for our theories in Amelia Earhart Betrayed.

Firstly, an investigation gathers facts, evidence and testimony. The investigator(s) augments these items with knowledge, either their own or someone else’s and if the resulting picture is complete or very near complete they draw a conclusion. Many “investigators” form a theory or “gut feeling” about what happened and then gather facts, evidence and testimony to support their theory. We don’t feel this is investigation, but more along the lines of “script writing”. TIGHAR and other Earhart theorists have been guilty of this activity. Even Fred and I have committed this faux pas. They have formed an opinion and are spending millions of dollars and many man hours of effort to prove their theory. Einstein said, “All it takes to disprove my theory is one fact.”

TIGHAR has set itself up as the current authority on the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and from the looks of things a great many people have accepted this view. This includes the general public along with many Earhart investigators. Those investigators who disagree with TIGHAR appear to be attempting to change the mindset of the TIGHAR “experts”. This only lends credence to their assumption that they are the experts. TIGHAR has a th eory, one that evolved from solid investigation, but they chose one possible conclusion and have rigidly stuck to it. We will use TIGHAR’s conclusion as our first basic “fact”. As with all our theories we invite all of you to agree or disagree with us and give us information that will enlighten us all.

THE GARDNER ISLAND LANDING: TIGHAR has made a good case for Amelia and Fred landing (not crashing) on Gardner Island. They used the radio intercepts from Pan American radio listening stations on Midway, Wake and Oahu Islands. These stations used Direction Finders (DFs) to get a bearing to the transmitting station. On July 4th the station at Mokapu Point on Oahu took a bearing on two signals: 175degrees @ 1512Z and 213 degrees @1515Z. The 175 degree bearing passes 199 miles west of Bora Bora in French Polynesia and the 213 degree bearing passes 45 miles south southwest of Gardner Island. On the 5th of July Mokapu Point recorded a 215 degree DF from 0630Z to 0730Z; this line passes 23 miles north northwest of Gardner Island. Gardner Island is 2112 miles from Oahu on a heading of 214 degrees. That shot in itself is somewhat compelling. But, on the 5th the DF station on Wake Island recorded a DF bearing of 144 degrees at 1223Z and the operator said in his letter, “While no call letters were distinguished in either case” (he had received the same signal the night before but wasn’t able to DF it.),” I was positive at that time that it was KHAQQ, at this date I am still of this opinion.” The letter was dated July 10, 1937. The 144 degree line from Wake Island passes 131 miles west of Gardner Island. Gardner Island is 2085 miles from Wake on a heading of 140 degrees. On July 5th the station at Midway got 2 DF bearings. The first at 0638Z a bearing of 201 degrees and the second at 1105Z of 175 degrees. Gardner Island is 2099 miles from Midway Island on a heading of 185.5 degrees so the 201 degree line passes 572 miles west of Gardner and the 175 line passes 360 miles east of Gardner. I might point out at this point that TIGHAR’s Bob Brandenburg made a very bad error in drawing his chart located on TIGHAR’s website under the title of Analysis of Radio Direction Finding Bearings in the search for Amelia Earhart. The line he drew from Midway that he titled 175degree1105Z/5 is actually on a bearing from Midway of 185 degrees and apparently passes very close to Gardner Island (a little to the east). He drew the line to pass through the 175 degree longitude line at the equator but that isn’t the way one draws a bearing to a broadcasting station. Again, a bearing is a straight line between the receiving station and the broadcasting station! The research paper was written August 15, 2006 over 7 years ago and it is hard to believe that no one has called his attention to the error.

Finally, the NNW/SSE reading from Baker Island on July 5th at 1105Z: This reading would correspond to 337.5/157.5 degrees, a line which runs through Gardner Island but if extended 1079 miles it passes 24 miles east of Tutuila on American Samoa. The US Navy had a base there at that time and also a radio listening and broadcasting station. It is quite possible that Baker Island was listening to Tutuila Radio; it is further reinforced by the fact that the 175 degree line from Midway passed 147 miles east of Tutuila much closer than the 360 miles it gets to Gardner Island. That kind of error at 2700 miles in those days wasn’t uncommon.

If we throw out the 175 and 201 degree bearings from Midway, the NNW/SSE bearing from Baker Island, and the 175 bearing from Oahu as irrelevant, we are still left with 3 bearings (the 144 degree bearing from Wake Island and the 215 and 213 degree bearings from Oahu. They point to the possibility that someone was broadcasting on frequency 3105, in the vicinity of Gardner Island on July 4th and 5th, 1937. We admit that it isn’t proof that it was Amelia Earhart or Fred Noonan doing the broadcasting, but it is hard to turn your back on that kind of evidence that came from several different people in different places who were doing some very important work that required a great degree of skill. That is why we do believe that TIGHAR’s scenario of Amelia landing on Gardner and spending some time there is perfectly plausible. They will probably one day find evidence that she and Noonan camped there due to finding what they term the “any idiot artifact”, but that is all it will prove. Their own research shows very powerful evidence that the rest of their theory is worthless. This is in the form of Lt. John O. Lambrecht’s report of the aerial search of Gardner Island on the morning of July 9th. The island was overflown several times at an altitude of 400 feet (you can recognize people’s faces at that altitude). We believe that Lt. Lambrecht was correct in his conclusion that “Most of this island is covered with tropical vegetation with, here and there, a grove of coconut palms. Here signs of recent habitation were clearly visible but repeated circling and zooming failed to elicit any answering wave from possible inhabitants and it was finally taken for granted that none were there.” Lambrecht and his fellow aviators didn’t just make a one- time pass and go on; they made repeated efforts to elicit a response. They saw signs of recent habitation in groves of coconut palms , but no sign of life. Did Amelia and Fred Noonan die of hunger and thirst in 7 days? They were on an island with crabs, rats, coconuts and fish. Food and liquid (coconut milk) were available! What did they die of? No, we think not. So hats off to TIGHAR for some first class research in the area of Radio Direction Finding, but that’s as far as we can take it.

THE MILI ATOLL LANDING: This scenario is very believable as first presented by Fred Goerner in his book The Search for Amelia Earhart and has been built on by many people such as Woody Rogers. Mr. Rogers has obviously done years of thoughtful research and this is only one of his very compelling articles.

“July 10th, 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 from Lae, New Guinea on July 2nd, 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 9th, 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 and 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 3rd, 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 [they] 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 5th 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. As 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 later [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 9th.

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 has 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. Phillips 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 Kwajalein 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 Tanapag 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 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, Tanapag Harbor, Saipan, July or August 1937

Jim Golden- head injury, read in a written military report in February 1944 on Roi Namur Kwajalein 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, Kwajalein 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 either on my phone (805) 878-4863 or via email: woodyrogers1@yahoo.com”

We don’t disagree with the scenario that Amelia Earhart, Fred Noonan and their aircraft were at Mili Atoll and that the Japanese put their aircraft or one that looked like theirs on a barge and took it out to another ship in the lagoon. The radio records show that Noonan had a head injury; they don’t say anything about a leg injury, but a leg injury as Woody described would be probable in a hard landing sequence. On most occasions when an individual isn’t strapped in tightly they “submarine” under the seat belt and their knee or knees hit the instrument panel. A head injury is quite common in that type of hard landing especially for a tall individual not strapped in tightly. They could hit their heads on part of the overhead console. We applaud Mr. Rogers’ research into the injury aspect. The eyewitness accounts of those who mention Noonan’s injuries are more likely to be true than those who don’t.

The case for landing at Mili Atoll is fairly solid but, not as solid as TIGHAR’s case for a Gardner Island landing. Nina Paxton’s interview with the Ashland Independent newspaper on July 9, 1937 is not filled with details as Mr. Rogers suggests. She actually said “Down in the ocean.” Then Miss Earhart either said “on…or near little island at a point near……..” After that Mrs. Paxton understood her to say something about “directly northeast” although she was not sure about this part. “Our plane about out of gas. Water all around. Very dark.” Then she said something about a storm and that the wind was blowing. “We’ll have to get out of here,” she said, “We can’t stay here long.” This message was preceded by Miss Earhart’s call letters, “KHAQQ calling, KHAQQ calling.” We don’t have the letters that she sent to Walter Winchell, nor do we have all the letters she sent to Fred Goerner, but this article gives none of the detail that Mr. Rogers refers to in his article. It has been suggested that maybe the newspaper didn’t print all that she said. We find it hard to imagine that had she given the precise detail that Mr. Rogers describes in his article. It wouldn’t have become national news, since she pinpointed Amelia’s exact position on the 3rd of July just 24 hours after her disappearance! Another problem with this exact detail is how would Fred have given Amelia this exact information? The kind of detail that she outlined would have required charts of the Marshall Islands, charts which we can be reasonably sure they didn’t
have.  The Marshall Islands were a little over 500 miles NNW of their intended course line. If they hadn’t intended to go there why would they have had the charts? We know that Noonan used blank sheets of paper to plot his course and weight was of primary concern on the flight. He would have given the coordinates in Lat/Long rather than a vivid description of the island. Paxton also states (in a later communication) that she heard Amelia say “…the plane is drifting in the passage”. This was impossible, because the aircraft couldn’t transmit while floating! Given the lack of information to support Ms. Paxton’s later accounts, we feel compelled to accept the account that she gave the Ashland Independent on July 3rd. In that account she gave very general information and it was quite probably actually what she heard. What Ms. Paxton claims to have heard on the 5th of July is quite probable, but Mr. Rogers states in his article that “This message was also heard by a radio operator on Wake Island.” If Mr. Rogers is referring to the operator who did the direction finding, all he claims to have heard was “At 1223 a very unsteady voice modulated carrier was observed at 94.5 degrees (5 degrees up from C5) on the detector dial using ‘C’ coils (3105 KC appx). This transmission lasted until 1236 CCT. I was able to get an approximate bearing of 144 degrees” We believe that if Mr. Hanson at the Wake Island facility had heard the detailed transmission that Ms. Paxton claims to have heard, he surely would have mentioned it. He would have most likely indicated it both in his communications with Midway and Oahu and later in his letter to his boss in San Francisco.

The remainder of Mr. Rogers’ article seems to be quite plausible and each account backs up the others. We have no doubt that Amelia and Fred were in the Marshall Islands and that Mr. Noonan had incurred the injuries that are described. There is also no reason to doubt that they both were taken to Saipan where they both eventually died. The facts surrounding their deaths are unsure because of the various slight differences in the eyewitness accounts.

So what do we see as fact, plausible supposition, possibility or fiction?

FACTS:

Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan took off from Lae New Guinea on the 2nd of July 1937 at 10am local time (0000 GMT). Her route of flight and her final destination are not fact. The assumption that her route of flight was to Howland Island by a direct route is not a fact only a plausible supposition. There was no one on Gardner Island capable of responding to the Colorado’s search aircraft on July 9th at approximately 1000 hours.

The Japanese had a Lockheed Model 10A Electra (KXL1) that they bought in 1936 to participate in the kategolrii trainers competition.

Fleet Admiral Hiroyasu Fushimi ordered KAMOI to search for Amelia Earhart’s plane. The KAMOI received the order but it contained no information upon which Captain Kozaka could base a search. The order was cancelled a few hours later.

Statements made about the availability of all records pertaining to actions by the Japanese before and during the war are greatly exaggerated. “Almost all of the official Japanese records for the entire war are scattered and incomplete. After the surrender in August 1945, six weeks elapsed before the American Forces actually occupied Japan; during that interval a huge bonfire was fed the secret files of the Metropolitan Police Headquarters (Mitchell , 14) and Japanese military officers “destroyed evidence of war criminality by the warehouse full.”(Brackman, 40).” This doesn’t take into account the destruction of records in bombings, shellings and the ensuing fires plus the normal destruction of records by a retreating army. (This includes the Island of Saipan). The CIA returned 3450 cubic feet of records in 1949 which they said had been examined and found to be of no value to them. (The have been unable since to locate any analysis or description created as a result of their examination of these records) “James William Morley, a Union College history professor, examined the records and published an article, “Check List of Seized Japanese Records in the National Archives,” in The Far Eastern Quarterly Vol. IX No. 3 (May 1950). He noted, “large as the collection is, it clearly does not represent all of the records of these ministries and their predecessors. Very few files are complete; many, no doubt, are entirely missing. Probably some were hidden or destroyed and others retained by interested occupation and other United States government authorities for current use.” All the captured records have been returned to the Japanese government. “The major collection of captured Japanese records was returned to the Japanese Government in 1958. No evidence has been discovered to indicate that when the records were turned over to the Japanese officials any provision was included for future American Government access. No receipt for the records has been found. Several smaller groups of records were returned to Japan in the early 1960s when they were relinquished by the military agencies that had retained them for use.” These last two italicized passages came from the Implementation of the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act and the Japanese War Crimes Provision of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. Interim Report to Congress.

PLAUSIBLE SUPPOSITION:

Howland Island was her intended final destination for this leg of flight.

The route she followed was not the most direct route to Howland Island.

She was on a photographic mission over Japanese Mandated territory.

She landed her aircraft, wheels down, on Gardner Island on July 2, 1937.

Someone (probably Earhart and Noonan) made radio calls from Gardner Island until 2018 local Gardner time on July 7th. This was approximately 36 hours before the air search of July 9 (at approximately 1000 hours)

The following were participating in aircraft maneuvers in the Marshall Islands. The Japanese seaplane tender, KAMOI, the mine layer, OKIOSHIMA, the destroyers ASANAGI AND YUNAGI and Navy Type 91Hiro H4H Flying Boats from the Yokohama Air Station all were in the vicinity.

Someone ditched a Lockheed Electra in the lagoon on Mili Atoll in early July of 1937.

Two individuals, a woman (wearing pants with short hair) and a man (with a bandaged head injury) were prisoners of the Japanese in the Marshall Islands (Kwajalein, Roi and Mili Atoll) and on Saipan.

Official Japanese records concerning actions of their navy and army in the Mandated Islands should not to be taken at face value. They claim today, as they did before and immediately after the war, that they didn’t start construction of a base on Taroa in the Maloelap Atoll until 1941. Investigators have determined that construction had to have begun in 1937. This was determined by eye witness accounts and analysis of the concrete that make up the different buildings and runways. So the Japanese have been lying about assorted things concerning the Mandated Islands since the 1930’s and continue to do so today. The chances of finding an official record of Amelia’s and Fred’s capture and eventual death are so slim, they are almost non-existent.

POSSIBILITY:

The Kamoi could have been given orders to proceed to Gardner Island and kidnap Earhart, Noonan and the Electra. They had the ability to put the Electra aboard, secure it to the deck and cover it. They didn’t have to keep it dangling from the crane used to recover aircraft.

One of the top navigators in the world, who hit his targeted destinations on the money every time on the journey, (except once when Amelia overrode his decision) got lost on a straight line journey from point A to point B.

POSSIBILITY (BUT NOT LIKELY}

An experienced aviator and aviation navigator got overly excited when they couldn’t find their destination with over 4 hours of fuel remaining (approximately a 600 mile range).

The witnesses to the presence of Amelia, Fred and the Electra in the Marshall Islands and Saipan and the testimony of the U.S. Marines that took Saipan from the Japanese are all lying or mistaken.

FICTION:

Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan died of exposure, starvation or thirst on Gardner Island where they had shelter, water (coconut milk and pools of stagnant water) crabs, birds, fish and rats to eat. Also, that they were alive and made no attempt to signal the buzzing aircraft from the USS Colorado.

The Electra was washed off the reef at Gardner Island without a storm or even exceptionally high tides to help it over the edge.

The Electra landed at Gardner Island and Mili Atoll on the same day at approximately the same time.

The aircraft landed at Mili Atoll as described by Lijon, an eyewitness from Mili Atoll. Per Woody’s article, “He knew it was in trouble because it was low down and he could tell it was in trouble because it didn’t make any noise.” One would guess the plane had exhausted its fuel and was making a “dead stick” landing. A “dead stick” landing would have meant that they were out of fuel. I believe this is fiction because they broadcast for at least 5 days and had to have fuel in order to run their right engine to recharge the batteries.

According to TIGHAR, all the information pertaining to their fate has been declassified and made available to the public by both the American and Japanese Governments. We have pointed out the lack of records from the Japanese side of the house, but haven’t mentioned that most likely the vast majority of Japanese who had contact with the flyers were killed during the war. To the naïve, hopefully few, people who think that the U.S. Government has revealed all the particulars of all the operations conducted before, during and after the war, we say this. If you really think all have been disclosed and made public please refer to J. Edgar Hoover’s lost files, the 15 minutes of Nixon’s erased tapes and the CIA’s MK Ultra program (where all the records were ordered destroyed by then CIA director Richard Helms in 1973) to name just three examples.

It is our fervent hope that soon the proponents of the Gardner Island landing and the Mili Atoll landing , will get their minds on FINDING OUT WHAT HAPPENED TO AMELIA EARHART rather than trying to prove that their scenario is 100 % correct. The two theories can be made to work together and both factions can get on with investigating the obvious possibility that both theories are partially correct, but that neither is entirely right. The theory that the pair died somewhere in the Mariana Islands (most likely Saipan) has more credibility and more “evidence” to support it than the theory that they died on Gardner Island.

TIGHAR, you can’t prove you’re right by trying to make everybody else wrong. Mili Island theorists, please think about the possibility that the whole scenario at Mili was a Japanese “dog and pony show” to make it look like the pair violated Japanese airspace. This would have constituted a reason for the Japanese to legally hold the pair against their wills. Fred Goerner started a bit of a revolution and maybe of all the investigators to date, he is the only one who knows what really happened.