Thomas F.
King
August,
2017
Introduction
Its 80th
anniversary in 2017 witnessed an explosion of media interest in the 1937
disappearance of aviation pioneers Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan – perhaps most
vividly reflected in a short-lived History Channel documentary (c.f. https://www.newsweek.com/amelia-earhart-mystery-documentary-history-channel-639938) and the popularity of podcasts in the “Chasing
Earhart” series (https://www.chasingearhart.com/).
In 2018 I
published a novel about the disappearance and its aftermath – Amelia Earhart UNRESCUED (King 2018; https://tinyurl.com/y95rarys)
– that is, about how I envision them.. UNRESCUED and its 2009 sequel, Thirteen
Bones (King 2009; https://tinyurl.com/ydgzum44), are
fiction. Well-grounded fiction, I think, and entertaining fiction, I hope, but
fiction nonetheless, not fact.
Facts are
rather scarce about the Earhart/Noonan disappearance. It’s well documented,
though, that on the morning of July 2nd, 1937, nearing the end of
their record-setting flight around the world near the equator, they took off in
their Lockheed Electra 10E aircraft from Lae, New Guinea. They were set to land
over 2,000 nautical miles to the northeast at Howland Island, a tiny raised
coral island in mid-Pacific, half a degree north of the equator and four
degrees east of the prime meridian. There they were to refuel and fly to
Honolulu, then on to California.
It’s also well
documented that they never arrived at Howland, and a vigorous search turned up
no trace of them (See Gillespie 2006). What happened to Earhart, Noonan, and
their Electra has been described as one of the 20th century’s
greatest mysteries. Many hypotheses –
that is, semi-educated guesses[1] – have been advanced to solve
the mystery.
In this paper
I’d like to summarize and compare some of the most widely believed-in hypotheses.
How I Came to the Earhart
Mystery
My father, the
late U.S. Navy Cdr. T.T. (Ted) King was in military government in the Pacific
during World War II. He’d go ashore once the Marines had more or less secured an
island and oversee setting up arrangements for the local people and captured Japanese
military personnel. He was on Kosrae, Pohnpei, Chuuk, Guam, and Saipan, among
other islands. So he brought home stories about Amelia Earhart, who he said he regarded
as a “dizzy dame” who’d gotten lost and no doubt gone into the drink. He
discounted stories he’d heard about her being captured by the Japanese.
I didn’t pay
much attention; I was a kid, with other things on my mind.
In 1977, I went
to Saipan as “Consultant in Archaeology and Historic Preservation” to the High
Commissioner of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. I was based on
Saipan, but my beat was the rest of Micronesia, helping set up what would
become the historic preservation programs of Palau, the Federated States of
Micronesia, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Like my by then deceased
father, I heard Earhart stories, but didn’t attend to them much – my business
was helping build programs that Micronesians could support, to preserve Micronesian
history and culture, not stories about lost American flyers. And the Marianas,
where Earhart stories were thick on the ground, weren’t my responsibility.
When my time in
the islands was done, I went back to the mainland and spent ten years with the
Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which advises the U.S. president and
congress about historic preservation matters. Toward the end of my tenure there
(I survived the Reagan administration, but not that of GHW Bush), I met Ric
Gillespie and Pat Thrasher.
Ric and Pat are
the creators and leaders of TIGHAR – The International Group for Historic
Aircraft Recovery, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving historic
aircraft and researching aviation history. About the time I was leaving the
Advisory Council, Ric contacted me about a project TIGHAR was taking on – investigating
the hypothesis that Earhart and Noonan had wound up on Nikumaroro, an
uninhabited atoll in the Phoenix Islands of Kiribati. To make a long story
short, I joined TIGHAR’s first expedition to the island in 1989, and got hooked
on the Earhart mystery. Pursuing an answer to it has been my hobby for the last
30 years. I’ve been to the Phoenix Islands eight times and done research in
Fiji as well as in various U.S. locations. I’ve co-authored a book and a
summary article about our work (King et al 2004; King 2012), as well as two
novels based on it (King 2008, 2018). I’ve contributed quite a few postings to
TIGHAR’s website (tighar.org)
and maintain my own “Amelia Earhart Archaeology” blog (http://ameliaearhartarchaeology.blogspot.com/).
All this has
led me to learn a lot about Earhart, Noonan, their disappearance, and the
various hypotheses that purport to account for their disappearance; that’s the
basis for what I’ll share here.
The Hypotheses
Setting aside
propositions like alien abduction and passage into another dimension[2] (which might be correct,
but how would we find out?), there are five or six semi-testable hypotheses
about what happened to Earhart and Noonan.
The “Crashed and Sank”
Hypothesis
The “Crashed
and Sank” hypothesis is a popular one, presumably because it seems conservative
– and perhaps because it offers the possibility of recovering Earhart’s Electra
from the ocean bottom, maybe with its crew’s remains still inside. Several
investors over the years have put a lot of money into searching the sea bottom for
the plane (cf. http://nauticos.com/ocean-discovery/amelia/).
“Crashed and
Sank” assumes that Earhart and Noonan simply ran out of fuel and went into the
drink. This is certainly possible, but the hypothesis doesn’t account for some
important evidence – notably the fact that over 100 radio messages were received
after Earhart’s disappearance, many on Earhart’s frequencies, by stations in
and around the Pacific. Some were in what was identified as Earhart’s voice,
and several of them were plotted by radio direction finding as emanating from the
Phoenix Islands – where at the time there were no known operative radios. To broadcast
at all, Earhart’s plane would have had to be on land, not sinking in the ocean
(See Gillespie 2006:189-90). As we’ll see, there’s also evidence supporting
alternative hypotheses.
The “Turned Around”
Hypotheses
Two hypothesis
currently in play have Earhart and Noonan winding up pretty close to where they
started on July 2nd, crashing on New Britain (See https://earharttruth.wordpress.com/2016/12/05/new-britain-theory-presents-incredible-possibilities/)
or on Papua New Guinea’s Buka Island (http://www.astonishinglegends.com/al-podcasts/2018/5/4/ep-106-earharts-plane-found).
Both hypotheses are based on the observation of aircraft wreckage resembling
Earhart’s Electra observed during World War II and/or more recently, and oral
historical data. Both assume that
Earhart and Noonan realized during their flight that they could not make it to
Howland Island, so turned around and tried unsuccessfully to return to Lae – or
that they didn’t get too far from Lae at all.
Both hypotheses
have a high hurdle to clear. The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Itasca, lying off Howland Island on the morning of July 2nd,
recorded receiving radio signals from Earhart at signal strengths indicating
that she was getting steadily closer to them. One of her last such signals
reported that she was “on” the island (i.e. over its mapped location) but
couldn’t see it. These radio data are deeply inconsistent with the notion that
she was, at the time, not near Howland Island but near New Britain or Buka
Island almost 2,000 nautical miles to the southwest. Still, there might be some
way for the New Britain or Buka Island hypothesis to be correct, and people are
pursuing them – in effect testing them by looking for identifiable wreckage.
The “Japanese Capture”
Hypothesis
“Japanese
Capture” is one of the most popular of the Earhart/Noonan disappearance
hypotheses. It is of particular interest to residents of the Mariana and
Marshall Islands, and it’s the one my father and I caught wind of during our
times in the islands. There are several
variants on this hypothesis, most of them outlined and advocated with varying
levels of enthusiasm by Mike Campbell in his “Amelia Earhart: the Truth at
Last” book and website (See https://earharttruth.wordpress.com/
and Campbell 2016).
“Japanese
Capture” proposes that one way or another – in some versions flying there
directly, in others crashing in the Marshall Islands and being picked up by a
Japanese ship (and there are other variants) – Earhart and Noonan wound up in
Japanese captivity on Saipan (or perhaps Tinian), and there were either
executed or died of natural causes. Since neither the Japanese nor the American
government has ever acknowledged that this occurred, Campbell and other
Japanese Capture proponents tend to say that both governments have been engaged
in a cover-up for the last eighty years.
Japanese
Capture is supported by a rather large body of anecdotal evidence – that is,
stories that people have told that are interpreted as evidence of Earhart’s
and/or Noonan’s and/or their airplane’s presence in the Marianas and/or
Marshalls. Stories have come from residents of the Northern Marianas, Marshalls,
and Chuuk (among other island groups) as well as from World War II U.S.
servicemen and women (including high ranking officers with access to naval
intelligence[3])
and a few Japanese nationals. Many of
the accounts are second and third hand.
No generally accepted documentary or physical evidence has yet been
produced in support of Japanese Capture. Documents that have turned up have been
statements of opinion, and items interpreted as physical evidence – for example
a door from Saipan’s Japanese jail with “A. Earhart” and “July 19 1937” deeply incised
on one side – are of questionable origin.
Several years
ago, two TIGHAR colleagues and published an analysis and critique of the
Japanese Capture hypothesis (See King, Roberts and Cerniglia 2012). In a
nutshell, there is abundant evidence from the psychological literature that
even first-hand eyewitness accounts given to trained interviewers by honest
people must be taken with many grains of salt; the mind can play remarkable
tricks (c.f. Doyle et al. 2013, Loftus & Ketcham 1992, Schacter 2002). In
this case, where accounts were mostly gathered by untrained interviewers who very
much wanted to find evidence of Earhart in the Marianas or the Marshalls, often
from people who had every reason to tell their interlocutors what they seemed
to want to hear, the results are not very convincing to the skeptical reviewer.
A good example
of the problem with eyewitness accounts gathered by people intent on a
particular outcome is the November 1977 transcript of an interview by Fr.
Arnold Bendowske with Saipan resident Matilde Fausto Arriolo (Bendowske 1977). Ms.
Arriolo was one of three women interviewed by Fr. Arnold – probably an
authority figure in the eyes of all three Catholic women – who were said to
have seen an American woman in Japanese captivity.
Fr. Arnold
begins by asking flatly for Ms. Arriolo’s “story on Amelia Earhart.” There is
no evidence that Ms. Arriolo had used or known Earhart’s name, and she later
denies knowing the name of the woman with whom she interacted.
Ignoring this,
Fr. Arnold says he has already told the Navy that Ms. Arriolo had seen Earhart.
He asks her in what year she did so, and before she can answer, says that it
was in 1938. The interview goes on in this vein, and his interviews with Ana
Villagomez Benavente and Maria Roberto Dela Cruz are similar. None of the women
identifies the woman (or women) with whom they interacted as Amelia Earhart,
and Ms. Arriolo describes the woman as “a little bit of a mestiza” (that is, a
woman of mixed ethnicity). Fr. Arnold ignores this description, which does not easily
fit Earhart.
The kind of
witness-leading in which Fr. Arnold engaged is not unusual when untrained
people try to elicit oral historical information, but it taints the oral
historical record. Unfortunately, the stories of Earhart on Saipan are pretty
largely the results of such interview tactics, so it is difficult to make much
of them. The stories of Earhart in the Marshalls may be a little less impure,
but most of them are second- or third-hand, which allows for a lot of ambiguity
to creep in.
My guess is
that an American woman was held on Saipan by the Japanese, and perhaps
was executed or died there of disease, but she was not Amelia Earhart. Jesus
DeLeon Guerrero, who served as a policeman on Saipan during the Japanese
administration, reportedly said that a woman of mixed Japanese-Caucasian
ethnicity, born in Los Angeles, was hanged by the Japanese as a spy. Through Nisei
groups in California, I have made some effort to seek information about this
woman, but thus far with no luck. It may be, too, that a plane resembling
Earhart’s crashed in the Marshalls, but this does not mean that the plane was
Earhart’s. And while Naval Intelligence may at some point have concluded that
the Japanese had captured Earhart, and passed this conclusion up the chain of
command, not all intelligence is accurate[4].
So I’m left
thinking about the same of the Japanese Capture hypothesis as my father did,
and as I did during my late-70s sojourn on Saipan. I think it most likely
reflects the honest observations and conclusions of people who lived in the
Marianas and Marshalls during the Japanese period, elicited and interpreted by
Americans with strong interests in showing that Amelia Earhart had been
executed by the Japanese. The Japanese Capture hypothesis may be the “truth”
that its proponents claim, but they haven’t yet made a case that I find
convincing.
I should
acknowledge, though, that proponents of Japanese Capture routinely dismiss
people like me as biased, and even as co-conspirators with the U.S. and
Japanese governments in concealing “the truth.”
The Nikumaroro Hypothesis
Then there’s
TIGHAR’s “Nikumaroro hypothesis.” Naturally, I think it’s most likely correct,
though I shy away from proclaiming it – or anything – to be “the truth.”
I summarized
the Nikumaroro hypothesis and the evidence supporting it in a 2012 paper (King
2012), and extensive background data are available at TIGHAR.org. In essence, we think that
Earhart and Noonan, unable to find Howland Island, flew south on the course Earhart
reported in her last universally accepted radio transmission -- 157-337 degrees – and found Nikumaroro (then
called Gardner Island). We think they landed safely on the island’s northwest
reef flat, transmitted distress calls for several days and nights (thus accounting
for the signals received) but finally lost the plane with its radio to rising
tides, and it broke up on the reef face. We think that Earhart and/or Noonan –
probably Earhart – subsequently died at what we call the “Seven Site” near the
southeast end of the island. A partial human skeleton was reportedly found in
this vicinity in 1940, associated with a sextant box, a woman’s shoe, and other
artifacts.
We’ve done
archaeological work at the Seven Site in 2001, 2007, 2010, and 2017. We’ve turned
up a number of campfire features in which someone cooked and disposed of fish,
bird, and turtle remains. The kinds of remains we’ve found suggest procurement
and consumption by someone not native to the islands. In and around the fire
features we have found a variety of suggestive artifacts – the probable remains
of a woman’s compact similar to one shown in photos of Earhart, a jar that
probably contained freckle crème, two bottles shattered in what was probably
someone’s attempt to purify water, a jackknife similar (but not identical) to
one reported to have been aboard the Electra. Elsewhere on the island we’ve
found aircraft parts that may (or may not) have come from the Electra, as well
as some interesting shoe parts, and we have photographic evidence of aircraft
wreckage on the northern reef flat in late 1937 and thereafter. We also have
our share of anecdotal accounts, from I Kiribati, and Tuvaluan people who lived
on the island between 1939 and 1963, as well as from British colonial officers
and from U.S. Coast Guardsmen who staffed a long-range navigation (LORAN)
station there between 1944 and 1946 (See King 2012).
Those colonists
and Coast Guardsmen introduced a lot of confusion into the archaeological
record, of course. We know that the Seven Site was planted in coconuts in the
1940s, and that people used to camp there while procuring turtles and birds.
The site is littered with cartridges from the Coast Guardsmen’s carbines.
Colonists or Coast Guardsmen could have brought in some of the odd artifacts
we’ve found, though it’s something of a stretch to pin them with things like
the compact and the freckle crème jar.
The Nikumaroro
Hypothesis, and the evidence we’ve found on the island, form the basis for UNRESCUED and Thirteen Bones.
The Orona Hypothesis
The Orona
hypothesis is, in a sense, a variant on the Nikumaroro Hypothesis. It has
Earhart and Noonan flying southeast from the vicinity of Howland Island and
winding up not at Nikumaroro but at Orona, an atoll about 200 nautical miles
east of Nikumaroro (see http://www.aquariusradar.com/AmeliaEarhartsplane.html).
The main piece of evidence supporting the Orona Hypothesis is a pattern of
pixels in satellite imagery suggesting the presence of something shaped like a
Lockheed Electra in the Orona lagoon. Arguments against it include the fact
that Orona was occupied and being planted to coconuts in 1937, with a British
overseer on station who might be expected to have seen an airplane ditch in the
lagoon. But who knows? Someone needs to dive on the putative Orona Electra and
see what – if anything but coral heads – is there.
Where Things Stand
All the above
hypotheses continue to be the subjects of more or less active research; it is
possible that one of them will be proved correct in the foreseeable future. In 2017, the Eustace
Earhart Discovery Expedition scanned the ocean
bottom near Howland Island in pursuit of evidence for the Crashed and Sank
hypothesis – without reported success. People are reportedly examining aircraft
wreckage on New Britain and Buka Island. Mike Campbell and his colleagues
continue to find anecdotal support for Japanese Capture. In 2017 we took
forensic dogs to the Seven Site on Nikumaroro, recorded evidence that a human
body had decomposed there, and brought back samples from which we are trying to
extract DNA (See https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/forensic-dogs-amelia-earhart-spot-where-died/).
At 75 years of
age, I don’t think I’ll be going back to Nikumaroro, or to Orona – though I’d
like to. So I’ve put my thoughts about what happened to Earhart and Noonan on
the table in novel form. I’d be astounded if Amelia Earhart UNRESCUED turned out to be very close to what
“really” happened, but it’s my best guess, embellished by my imagination. I
hope you enjoy it, whatever its relationship to “the truth.”
And why does
any of this make any difference? What significance is there in this quest, to
which so many people have given big chunks of their lives and thinking? I
confess to being, as it were, rather at sea. With all the world’s problems to
whose solutions we could be contributing, why do we invest our time, money, and
brainpower in looking for Earhart? I honestly don’t know, except that it’s a
mystery, and mysteries cry out to be solved. I’m reminded of what the spouse of
one of our TIGHAR team members said when he got on a satellite phone and called
home after the 9/11/01 attacks, which came while we were on Nikumaroro. He
fretted about the fact that we were where we were, while everything was blowing
up at home. She told him that after all the excitement died down, people were
going to need something to take their minds off their troubles, and we provided
that something.
Upon
reflection, I concluded that what she said made sense, and have comforted
myself with the reminder that for entertainment, we’re a good deal less costly
than professional football. I’ve also realized that that entertainment is
pretty much what Earhart did, too. In the depths of the Depression, she took
people’s minds off their troubles. And she showed people – notably women – that
there were things to which they could aspire, and that the world really is a
pretty wonderful place. So maybe that’s what makes it worthwhile to seek an
answer to the mystery with which she left us – whether we ever find it or not.
References
Bendowske, Fr. Arnold
1977 Transcripts of interviews with Ana
Villagomez Benevente, Matilde Fausto Arriola, and Maria Roberto De La
Cruz. Catholic Mission, Chalan Kanoa,
Saipan, November 8 1977 . Copy in TIGHAR files.
Campbell, Mike
2016 (2nd ed.) Amelia Earhart:
The Truth at Last. Mechanicsburg, PA, Sunbury Press
Doyle, James M., Jennifer E. Dysart, & Elizabeth F. Loftus
2013 Eyewitness
Testimony: Civil and Criminal (Fifth Edition),
New York, LEXISNEXIS
Gillespie, Ric
2006 Finding
Amelia: the True Story of the Earhart Disappearance. Annapolis, MD, Naval Institute Press.
King, Thomas F.
2008: Thirteen Bones. Indianapolis, IN, Dog Ear Publishing.
2012:
Amelia Earhart on Nikumaroro: a Summary of the Evidence. Pacific Studies 35:3:305-24, Honolulu, HI.
2018: Amelia Earhart UNRESCUED. Mystic, CT, Flat Hammock press.
__________, Randall Jacobson, Karen R.
Burns, and Kenton Spading
2004 Amelia
Earhart’s Shoes: Is the Mystery Solved? (updated edition) Walnut Creek, CA,
Altamira Press.
__________, Thomas A. Roberts, and
Joseph Cerniglia
2012: Amelia Earhart in the Marianas: a
Consideration of the Evidence. https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/ResearchPapers/AEinMarianas.html
Loftus, Elizabeth F. and Katherine Ketcham
1992 Witness for the Defense: The
Accused, the Eyewitness and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial. New
York, St. Martin's Griffin
Schacter, Daniel L.
2002 The
Seven Sins of Memory (How the Mind Forgets and Remembers). Boston, Houghton
Mifflin.
