Amelia Earhart

[flightlevel00]

I've just finished reading a recently published book by Mike Campbell about the last flight of Amelia Earhart. The book mostly contains eyewitness accounts of bits and pieces of the final story, taken together, the story is fairly complete. Some of the elements of the story are perhaps a little shocking....in particular a reference to the Electra 10 being flown and then destroyed on Saipan in 1944 after the US invasion of the island. There are still some small details that could be better explained. I looked up Howland Island on Google Earth, it does not look like the kind of place I would have chosen as a fuel stop. The book is available on Amazon.com "Amelia Earhart, The Truth at Last"

[martymayes]

I'd like to read it someday, however, I don't think it's anything more than "another theory" of what might have happened.

[flightlevel00]

I'd like to read it someday, however, I don't think it's anything more than "another theory" of what might have happened.

I thought it was believable....its well documented....

[Floatsflyer]

Aahhhh......poor Amelia and Noonan. We just can't leave them alone. Why? Because of the nature and compulsive need of human beings to understand and know what happened in the face of the unknowing and inexplicable.

The decades long search for her and her navigator has never ever unveiled any shred of genuine evidence whatsoever of their last moments. How could there be? There were no eyewitnesses. Hence she has become a mythical figure of huge proportion, bigger than she ever could have imagined if she had completed the round the world mission.

People caught up in this bit of history do not want to ever accept a simple and plausable notion that the plane was lost, ran out of fuel, crashed somewhere into the vast Pacific and they were killed on impact(or survived and eventually drowned or died of exposure). Can't accept this because she was just too big, too famous, too female, too iconic, too daring, too heroic for this conclusion to be palpable. So we get 75 years and counting of speculation, theories and innuendo.

I take exception with the title of this book you quote. The word "Truth" is a marketing ploy to sell books. In the absence of genuine evidence and surviving eyewitnesses in the plane or on the ocean's surface at the the moment of disappearance, there can be no "Truth".

I say, let sleeping dogs lie!

[martymayes]

I thought it was believable....its well documented....

So are all other books on the same subject.


The author's job is to make it believable and there's is usually no shortage of documentation to support their argument.

[Bill Greenwood]

I haven't read that new book, maybe if it is at Osh I'll glance at it.

One year at Sun N Fun, I roomed with noted aviation writer and EAA member and good guy Jeff Ethel. He had a book out on A E that had a theory that she and Noonan were captured by the Japanese and held and died on Saipan. This was based mostly on hearsay stories.
Jeff told me himself that the weak spots in the theory was that the natives who told the stories of seeing a white man and woman held by Jap forces had a natural friendlines for Americans and they also were poor and needed money badly. The result is that for $50 U S, they could tell you almost any story that you wanted to hear, and there just wasn't any hard physical evidence to back it up.
The TIGHAR charade began at that time,and Jeff went over many of the obvious false claims they made, which sounded possible on the surface, such as the women's shoe sole that was found. It was size 9, above average for a women then, and Jeff said there are some of her shoes at the museum in her native Kansas, and they are size 5.
One fact that does arouse the curiosity is that the Imperial Navy claimed to have searched the islands and Jeff says records show that the ship supposedly searching never left the harbor in Japan, so who knows.
Jeff freely admitted that she probably went into the ocean and that was the end of it.

One question is was she a spy of some type? Again, a dilema : she was probably a patriotic American and may well have said yes, if asked to keep her eyes and ears open. But on the opposite side,she had served as a nurse in WW I and was horrified by the injuries to young men and so became pretty much of a pacifist.
If she was not a spy, would the Japanese have aided her if she was found safely? After all, we were not at war yet. But even as a pacifist, she might have be willing to report anything she saw back to our govt since we were not at war yet, and such knowledge might concieveably prevent war breaking out.
Who really knows?

[martymayes]

There is a theory that she was picked up by the Japanese, saw the military fortification so obviously could not be released. Supposedly she was held as a prisoner and died of dysentery.

A "spy" theory where they purposely flew over Japan and photographed the military fortification.....

My favorite theory is the 'witness to the execution' book, where she was picked up from the Pacific by the Japanese, held in a mimimum security camp where she worked and befriended a Japanese lady. Once the war broke out, she was taken out to a breadfruit tree, blindfolded and executed. The author of this book apparently traveled to Japan and found a descendant of the Japanese lady from the camp who knew the story. They went to the same breadfruit tree and dug up a cloth that was 'determined' to be a blindfold (key twilight zone music), yes, the same blindfold Amelia Earhart was wearing when executed.

I'm kinda disappointed nobody has come up with an alien abduction theory, however,

Most likely what happened was they ran out of gas, ditched and sank. Even with the number of wrecked planes in that area of the Pacific after WWII, there's always the chance someone will figure out a way to locate and recover incontrovertable evidence from the Electra, Amelia or Fred, putting the legend to bed once and for all. That would be cool but I won't be holding my breath.

[Frank Giger]

I'm kinda disappointed nobody has come up with an alien abduction theory, however,




http://www.darts-page.com/images/ancient-aliens.jpg

[rwanttaja]

One question is was she a spy of some type? Again, a dilema : she was probably a patriotic American and may well have said yes, if asked to keep her eyes and ears open.
If you've read ChuckYeagers' first book, he describes how he loaded a civilian aircraft with hidden cameras for a flight into Russia during the cold war. So it's not totally far-fetched Earhart could have been asked to keep her eyes open.

But I tend to go with Occam's Razor on this one; the simplest explanation is that she ran out of gas and died at sea.

Ron Wanttaja

[rwanttaja]

I'm kinda disappointed nobody has come up with an alien abduction theory, however,
Star Trek: Voyager episode "The 37s"... "Voyager answers an ancient SOS distress and finds 8 humans - including Amelia Earhart - in cryo-stasis on a nearby planet."

Ron Wanttaja

[flightlevel00]

I have to agree TIGHAR is a charade....