Like most books about
the 1937 disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, Mike Campbell's is
rather adventurously titled, or rather subtitled. The book certainly
presents "the Truth" about the Earhart disappearance as Mike Campbell
perceives it Indeed, it is a near-encyclopedic exposition of
the truth in which Campbell and some others believe -- that Earhart and Noonan
were captured by the Japanese and executed on Saipan, and that the United
States and Japan have covered up these alleged facts through the last 75
years. Campbell here presents, in a fairly organized way, virtually every
piece of evidence for the Saipan Execution/Coverup (SE/C) Hypothesis,
together with a great deal that is not exactly evidence -- notably statements
of opinion by people whose opinions might or might not be particularly well
informed. What he does not present is a balanced analysis of this and
other evidence, particularly any evidence supporting contrary hypotheses.
Campbell is a true
believer, and his book reflects it. In fairness to him, he is not an
entirely rigid or inflexible true believer; he does puzzle over some of the
contradictions in the data, and he has revised and refined some of his opinions
since publication of his previous book on the subject, With Our Own Eyes (Campbell with Devine 2002). But he firmly
believes that he knows what happened to Earhart and Noonan, and he has no use
whatever for anyone who wants to consider alternative possibilities. Such
people -- the Smithsonian's Tom Crouch and TIGHAR's Ric Gillespie, for example
-- are to Campbell mere tools of the "establishment" that has covered
up Japanese perfidy and Earhart's fate since 1944, if not since 1937. Or,
as he characterizes Gillespie, they are mere hucksters trying to capitalize on
Earhart's name.
I could find nothing in
the way of new evidence in Campbell's new book, but he has organized a great
deal of information presented heretofore in scattered form -- books, articles,
letters, internet offerings -- and that is certainly a contribution. The
problem is that he is for the most part entirely uncritical of any evidence
that comports with his beliefs, and utterly scornful of anyone and anything
that contradicts it. And his evidence remains overwhelmingly anecdotal in
nature, comprising things that people said, or said other people said, or said
other people said other people said (or wrote in documents allegedly held
secret by the "establishment"). Often, the people quoted were
interviewed many decades after the alleged dates of the incidents they
described, usually by people with distinct interests in "proving"
some variant on the SE/C hypothesis, with none of the controls that are routinely
used by courts and law enforcement personnel to guard against leading the
witness and planting false memories (For a discussion of this problem see King,
Roberts and Cerniglia 2012). To Campbell all the resulting ambiguous data
adds up to "the Truth," and he is in no way shy about pronouncing it
so.
Campbell is also prone
to extremely selective reportage. One example may suffice to
illustrate. On pages 349-53 he makes
much of a May 13, 1938 transcribed telephone conversation between Secretary of
the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and Malvina Scheider, Eleanor Roosevelt’s
secretary, in which Morgenthau expresses reluctance to share records of the
Navy's search for Earhart with Earhart’s colleague and advisor Paul
Mantz. Morgenthau says that to release the documents would "smear
the whole reputation of Amelia Earhart." Since the radio logs of the
USCGC Itasca, which were later
released to Mantz, contained nothing
that reflected on Earhart's reputation, Campbell asks with great puzzlement,
why could Morgenthau possibly have been unwilling to share the requested
documents -- unless they contained evidence of something the US government wanted to keep secret? What Campbell fails to
mention in the context of the Morgenthau-Scheider conversation is the 106-page
report prepared by Itasca’s captain, Commander W.K. Thompson, which was highly
critical of Earhart, essentially blaming her for her own disappearance and
exonerating the Navy and Coast Guard of any responsibility for failing to find
her. Campbell cites Thompson's report in his bibliography, discusses it
briefly on pages 29-30, and reports on page 350 that Thompson met with
Morgenthau upon Itasca’s return to
Honolulu, but he never alerts the reader to the possibility that it might be
this document -- not the innocuous logs of the Itasca’s radio room or some secret revelation of Japanese
machinations -- that Morgenthau was reluctant to share with Mantz and hence
potentially with the world.
Thompson's report is summarized, quoted, and
discussed dispassionately by Ric Gillespie in Finding Amelia (Gillespie 2006:227-31), but if Campbell has read
Gillespie's book he doesn't cite it in his bibliography – perhaps because in
Campbell's eyes Gillespie is only a shameless self-promoter and darling of the
"establishment" that has so long covered up "the
Truth." Campbell’s book is rife
with such selective approaches to the “truth” as reflected in the documentary
record.
It
may be true that Earhart and Noonan were captured and executed by the Japanese,
and it may even be that these events have been kept secret by every U.S. president from Roosevelt on, and by every Japanese
government. But as Tom Roberts, Joe
Cerniglia and I wrote after reviewing much of the same data Campbell has
(albeit less comprehensively, but we hope more objectively), the evidence
"gives
us no serious reason to think that it is true. Some of the (SC/E) story’s variants … are
contradicted by objective independent data, while others are grounded only in
anecdotal evidence. And this evidence is
tainted by the methods (or lack of method) involved in its collection, making
it difficult if not impossible to judge its veracity" (King, Roberts
& Cerniglia 2012).
I can't speak for my co-authors, but Campbell's
new book gives me no reason to change my opinion of his evidence. This will doubtless come as no surprise to Campbell; in a recent email he has advised me that I, too, am
part of the "establishment."
References
Campbell,
Mike (with Thomas Devine)
2002 With Our Own Eyes:
Eyewitnesses to the Final Days of Amelia Earhart. Lancaster, OH, Lucky Press
Campbell, Mike
2012 Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last. Camp
Hill, PA, Sunbury Press
Gillespie,
Richard
2006 Finding Amelia: The True Story of the
Earhart Disappearance. Annapolis,
MD, Naval Institute Press.
King,
Thomas F., Thomas A. Roberts, and Joseph Cerniglia
2012 Amelia Earhart in the Marianas: a Consideration
of the Evidence. Paper submitted to the
Northern Mariana Islands Council for the Humanities’ Marianas History
Conference, Saipan, June 14-16, 2012.
