Tom Maxwell's Orona Atoll Hypothesis

Orona Atoll (Source: Wikipedia)

Tom Maxwell and the Orona Imagery

I was unaware of Tom Maxwell’s Orona Hypothesis until he was interviewed on Chris Williamson’s “Chasing Earhart” podcast, Episode 36 (https://audioboom.com/posts/6680856-is-orona-island-hiding-a-secret-a-conversation-with-tom-maxwell). Mr. Maxwell was on Kanton Island (aka Canton) in 1972-75, tracking missiles from Vandenberg Air Force Base that were splashing down in the vicinity; he developed an interest in the Earhart/Noonan mystery and discovered a satellite image that he believes shows the Electra at the bottom of the Orona (aka Hull Island) lagoon. See http://www.janeresture.com/kiribati_phoenix_group/hull.htm for background data on Manra.

Mr. Maxwell has developed his interpretation of the imagery considerably in posts on the “Pacific Wrecks” forum (https://www.pacificwrecks.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=14021; see also http://www.aquariusradar.com/AmeliaEarhartsplane.html ). 

The Hypothesis

To account for his observation, Mr. Maxwell developed an hypothesis that’s similar to the Nikumaroro Hypothesis in that he has Earhart and Noonan flying southeast from the vicinity of Howland Island, but he posits that Noonan, knowing that Canton Island had quite recently been occupied by U.S. and British scientists observing the 1937 solar eclipse (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/08/explore-space-eclipse-world-war-II-canton-island/), had Earhart steer farther to the east, landing not at Nikumaroro but at Orona. He proposes that they splashed down in the lagoon, and that the plane remains there to this day.

Satellite Image, Marked by Mr. Maxwell

(Source: Tom Maxwell)

Complications

This perfectly plausible (I think) hypothesis is complicated by the fact that Orona was occupied at the time, as the site of a coconut planting/harvesting operation supervised by Capt. J.W. Jones, who had arrived there with his Tokelauan Burns-Philp employees in May 1937. Lt. John Lambrecht of USS Colorado landed in the Orona lagoon during the search for Earhart, and interviewed Jones, who reported no aircraft landings (See https://tighar.org/wiki/Hull_Island).

Mr. Maxwell posits that Jones and his employees didn’t see or hear the Electra splash down because they were operating on the opposite end of the atoll, some 5 miles away. This strikes me as reasonable, based on my experience on Nikumaroro – if, of course, the plane went straight into the lagoon without any circling around.  

But assuming Earhart and/or Noonan survived the landing, why didn’t they go walkabout and find Jones and his colleagues? Mr. Maxwell proposes that Japanese forces encamped on Nikumaroro came and abducted them. From here on his hypothesis merges with the well-known Japanese Capture Hypothesis (c.f. https://www.amazon.com/Amelia-Earhart-Truth-Last-Second/dp/1620066688), and specifically with the postulates offered by Joe Klaas in his 1970 book Amelia Earhart Lives – though Mr. Maxwell does not necessarily subscribe to the details of the Klaas hypothesis.

There’s been a fair amount of discussion of Mr. Maxwell’s observations – mixed up with the thinking of Joe Klaas and his advisor Joe Gervais – on TIGHAR’s discussion forum; see https://tighar.org/smf/index.php?topic=427.0 and  https://tighar.org/smf/index.php?topic=427.15 for examples.

When I heard Mr. Maxwell’s “Chasing Amelia” podcast I was intrigued, and puzzled by the imagery, but pretty startled by his notion of a Japanese presence on Nikumaroro. We’ve found no historical, archaeological, or other evidence of such a presence, though presumably it wouldn’t have left much.  So I asked him about his research and learned that the Japanese capture parts of his hypothesis are thus far based on speculation.

My Impression

On balance, I don’t think Mr. Maxwell’s hypothesis holds up; it involves too much speculation and is encumbered by too many unlikely variables. But there’s that image – which I have to admit looks to me an awful lot like an Electra. But like a lot of satellite imagery, the one of the “plane in the Orona lagoon” is pretty pixelated, and subject to interpretation. In interpreting such things, the human mind is very prone to cognitive bias; we want to see patterns, and we may “see” them even when they’re not there.

We had an encounter with such bias in 2010, when someone looking at Google Earth imagery saw what looked like the letters “ELP” spelled out in coral in a pond at the southeast end of Nikumaroro. It sure did look like “ELP,” and we imagined Earhart and Noonan spelling out a distress signal whose "H" had been lost to the elements. We even wrote a song about it (To the tune of the Beatles’ “Help”). But when we went to the pond and gave it a close look, there was simply nothing there but natural shelving coral; we’d been bamboozled by bias. And in the 1938 airphotos of Nikumaroro taken by the New Zealand Pacific Aviation Survey (https://tighar.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Survey_(1938)), many of us could quite confidently see the outline of an Electra in the scaevola on Nikumaroro’s Nutiran shore –albeit in one photo pointing northwest and in another southeast. Only when the imagery was accurately scaled did we discover that the “Electra” was way too big to be what we thought we saw. Which was comforting since the area had been surveyed by our own field teams, revealing nothing.

Mr. Maxwell points out that when you look at imagery of the bottom of the Orona lagoon away from the “plane’s” location – and innumerable other places on the seafloor – you do not see Electra-shaped patterns of pixels; it’s only at that one spot. In a 5 October 2018 email to me, he argues for the likelihood that –

… the pixels in the image are created by the L10E aircraft and not light and shadow upon coral formations. In the thousands of miles of shallow oceans-maybe light and shadow could create the exact likeness of a complex object. But such a rare phenomenon of light and shadow, in the likely spot a skilled pilot and navigator could find not far from their final destination, is extremely unlikely.

I don’t have an answer to this assertion, but I’m dubious; we don’t see “ELPs” scattered all over Nikumaroro, either, but that doesn’t make our 2010 “ELP” meaningful. But the patterns in the Orona lagoon are odd, and their location is intriguing.

The Solution

There’s one obvious way to test the Orona Hypothesis. Mr. Maxwell has plotted his ostensible Electra pretty precisely, and it’s not in deep water. It looks to be a pretty simple piece of underwater archaeological reconnaissance to check it out.  Someone ought to do it, but note: the inspection should be a piece of controlled, planned, fully reported archaeological reconnaissance, not just some divers with metal detectors poking around. And it needs to be done with full respect for the Phoenix Islands environment and the regulations of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area.

I’m grateful to Tom Maxwell, Joe Cerniglia, and Tukabu Teraroro for their reviews of this paper in draft.