Review of Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last. Mike Campbell, 2012, Sunbury Press, Camp Hill, PA

 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.

What Next?

Next week, the expedition launches to search the deep reef slope off Nutiran on Nikumaroro.  Absent some utter disaster (piracy, sunk by a rogue wave, etc), it will produce one of four outcomes:

1. A definitive, no-doubt-about-it, smoking-gun Electra-part.
2. A probable/maybe Electra-part that requires more study and/or a return trip to recover.
3. One or more ambiguous items or other phenomena requiring more study, in situ or elsewhere; or
4. Nothing.

As I've argued on this site before, even a "4" result would in no way disprove the Nikumaroro Hypothesis; it would only indicate that with the technology now in hand, given the likely reduction of the wreck by the forces of nature, we haven't been able to find it.  But the inevitable reaction by TIGHAR's one or two naysayers will certainly be to trumpet the negative data and insist that it DOES show that AE and FN never made it to Niku.  That will undoubtedly have a chilling effect on fundraising for further research. 

It's hard -- even impossible -- to predict the effect of a "2" or "3" result; it depends on what's found.  But either would probably generate pressure for more underwater work, to verify or disverify whatever has been found.

A "1" result could have either of two quite different results.  It might unleash a great wave of support for more work to flesh out the story of the castaways and what happened to them.  It might generate pressure to turn Nikumaroro into a tourist destination, with all the tricky environmental, social, and political consequences such a transformation would entail.  And/or people might simply say "OK, that mystery's solved; let's go on to (Insert your favorite mystery)."

I think we ought to be discussing, in at least preliminary terms, what TIGHAR ought to do in the event of either a "1" or a "4" finding. 

If "1," I think our prime obligation will be to protect the island.  Work with the Kiribati government and anybody else who'll help to make sure the place isn't overrun by treasure hunters or just plain tourists.  One obvious thing to do might be to negotiate an arrangement with one or two responsible cruise ship operators to take tourists on carefully controlled visits to the island -- satisfy the demand (assuming there is a demand) in a way that doesn't injure the island, its plants and animals, its air and water, or its archaeology.  Such tourist visits might be coordinated with an ongoing program of research at the Seven Site, perhaps at the Aukaraime Shoe Site, the putative Camp Zero, the Village, and other locations, in which visitors could participate under supervision.

If "4," the problem will be to continue research at all; there will be a natural tendency to see the Niku Hypothesis as discredited, and funding is likely to dry up.  But there are relatively low-cost ways to get to Niku and spend a reasonable amount of time doing reasonable and useful research.  We still have the Seven Site to finish excavating.  There's still the Village to search, and the neighborhood of the Shoe Site, and the putative Camp Zero.  We could use some comparative studies at the Loran Site.  Last year I was able to estimate that we could put a dozen and a half or so people on the island for close to a month to do a range of archaeological projects for about $200,000.  The accommodations wouldn't be swanky, but they'd be livable, and there's serious work to be done.  This work might or might not yield smoking guns, but I continue to think that we do ourselves a disservice, and participate in the dumbing-down of the population, by focusing on smoking guns; we ought to be showing people how real research is done.  The real research we have done, and are doing, is building up a body of evidence that I think makes a convincing case for the Niku Hypothesis -- regardless of whether we ever find a definitive Electra-part or scrap of Earhart DNA.

Besides the fieldwork, there are a number of analytic avenues to be pursued.  Did the ointment pot really contain freckle creme?  What sizes of shoes did Earhart have on the plane anyway?  Who built the fire at the Shoe Site, when, and why?  What else can we glean from the various archives, from the recordings in the Solomons, from the faunal remains?  What about some of our head-scratcher artifacts?  And where the devil are the bones and artifacts that went to Fiji in 1940?  There's lots to do, and we ought to be thinking about how to do it, if this year's expedition is a success or if it comes back empty-handed.   

That Freckle Cream Jar

The media have been all over the story of “Amelia Earhart’s freckle cream jar” (eg. http://news.discovery.com/history/amelia-earhart-freckle-creme-jar-120530.html), and several people have asked me about it, so here’s a little information and a bit of grumping about the perceived and actual nature of archaeology.

The jar was found in several pieces, fairly well dispersed over the Seven Site on Nikumaroro, during our major excavation there in 2010. TIGHAR researcher Joe Cerniglia has been particularly persistent in trying to nail down exactly what may have been in it when it was whole and in use. It most likely dates to the twentieth century no later than the 1930s and was manufactured in the U.S., but Dr. Berry’s Freckle Cream is only one of several cosmetic lotion-type products that Joe and others have identified as having been marketed in such containers. The freckle cream association is particularly intriguing, because Earhart had freckles and is said to have been sensitive about them.

The catch, though – not mentioned much in the popular press – is that all the genuine Dr. Berry’s jar’s that Joe and others have been able to locate are made of opaque white glass, presumably to protect their contents from the sun. Our jar is transparent. Was Dr. Berry’s ever packed in clear jars? We don’t know, though Joe and his bottle-brethren are trying hard to find out.

What tends to be lost in the hype, though, is that the jar is only one of several pieces of mutually reinforcing evidence suggesting that an American woman camped at the Seven Site for a time in the years before World War II. Besides the jar, we have:

A broken bottle that appears to have contained Campana Italian Balm, a popular American skin care product in the 1930s;

Two pieces of flat, beveled glass that match the shape and size of the mirror in a 1930s rectangular compact; and

A number of pieces of red substance whose chemical composition suggests that it is rouge, possibly from the same compact.

Less gender-linked items include:

A fragmentary Mennen’s Skin Bracer or baby oil bottle, again American and (to judge from its embossed Art Deco lettering) from the ‘30s;

A pre-war beer bottle and a smaller bottle that probably contained St. Joseph’s Liniment, again from the U.S., which had been set upright in a campfire, perhaps in an attempt to purify water by boiling;

An assemblage of fish and baby turtle bones that’s consistent with the more or less random foraging of an inexperienced castaway, and not with the subsistence practices typical of indigenous South Pacific populations.

A feature made up of giant clam (Tridacna) shells, some of which show evidence of attempts to open them from the hinge side (like oysters in the eastern U.S.), and others of which have been opened by smashing with a rock – neither behavior typical of indigenous Pacific populations.

Historical, archaeological and photographic data also suggest that the site is where a partial human skeleton was found in 1940, associated with a sextant box and parts of a woman’s and man’s shoes. The sextant box was marked with numbers indicating that it held a Brandis sextant acquired by the U.S. Navy toward the end of World War I and probably disposed of as surplus thereafter; some sextants in this series were modified for use in aviation.

The Discovery News item in which the freckle cream story was broken mentions some of these pieces of data, but most of the other press has focused on the jar as though it were an isolated find. This may reflect an understandable but unfortunate belief on the part of the public that archaeology is all about finding definitive artifacts – and moreover, THE specific definitive artifacts that one sets out to find. A la Indy Jones, we go looking for the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail or the Crystal Skull of Whateverland; we have all kinds of adventures, and eventually we find it, proving whatever it was (if anything) we set out to prove. Based on this kind of perception we're expected not just to find a smoking gun, but the precisely right smoking gun, I had a note the other day from a fellow who said he wasn’t impressed with the jar because if Earhart had been on the island, we should have found her briefcase.

That’s simply not how archaeology works, folks. We rather seldom find definitive individual artifacts, and when we do, we’re wise to be wary of them; they can be faked (See, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake's_Plate_of_Brass), and even if they’re real they can be misleading. It’s far more common in archaeology, and more trustworthy, to base our conclusions on a pattern of clues – artifacts, faunal remains, the organization of sites, and so on – that collectively give us a plausible story, a reasonable picture of what happened in the past. I know that kind of research is hard to present in screen shots and sound bites, but that’s how we actually piece the past together. And that’s that kind of a reasonable picture we think we’re seeing come together at the Seven Site. It’s still murky, and it’s still possible we’re misperceiving it, but if we are, it’s because we’re misinterpreting the patterns of evidence, not because we’re missing some specific definitive artifact.

Amelia Earhart, Ridiculous Claims, and Contemporary Political "Thought"

Introduction

I recently had the privilege of working with my friends and TIGHAR colleagues Tom Roberts and Joe Cerniglia on a paper for the Northern Mariana Islands Council for the Humanities Marianas History Conference. The paper analyzed the suite of hypotheses featuring Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan being captured and executed by the Japanese military in the Mariana Islands.

In the course of this enterprise, I corresponded with the author of a fairly recent book that posits not only Earhart's and Noonan's demise at the hands of the Japanese, but a quite aggressive coverup by both the Japanese and United States government, extending to the present day. To minimize the potential for name-calling, I’ll disguise my correspondent as "Sam."

The correspondence spanned the time of TIGHAR's Earhart Search 75 Symposium, and the release of several items in the media about TIGHAR's fieldwork on Nikumaroro. The media particularly fastened on our discovery of a small jar that may have contained a cosmetic ointment purported to reduce freckles.

I publish excerpts from our correspondence here not to pick a fight with Sam or anyone else, but because I think Sam's writing provides an interesting window into how the minds of some of our critics work.

The Correspondence

Having read our paper, Sam said:

Thanks for sending. Although your conclusions are painfully contorted to deny the truth, this paper is far better than anything I would expect from someone so closely tied to Ric Gillespie. From your point of view, I'm sure you think it's almost fair. You realize, don't you, that if Gillespie had one-hundredth of this much "anecdotal" evidence to support his ideas, the Niku theory would have been universally accepted as gospel by now? Niku has never been anything more than smoke and paper thin speculation promoted all out of proportion by a gullible, ignorant, and corrupt media, and Fred Goerner, with Fred Hooven's expert guidance, warned Gillespie about it from the start. But there's far more involved with Niku than just Gillespie's personal interests, as Hillary and State have recently demonstrated, quite shamelessly. Of course nobody but us chickens have a clue about what's really going on, right? He certainly hasn't fooled those of us who pay close attention.

The anecdotal evidence to which Sam refers is the evidence for the Earhart-in-the-Marianas hypothesis -- which indeed is entirely anecdotal, and based on unsystematically collected anecdotes at that. But note how Sam presents himself, as an authority who knows the truth (based on anecdotes), instructing me on what I should "realize," and proceeding to inform me that the hypothesis I've helped propound and test over the last 23 years is nothing but "smoke and paper thin speculation." I must be pretty dumb not to have realized all that.

Sam goes on to say that the late Freds Goerner and Hooven "warned Gillespie about it from the start." It's safe to ascribe things to the deceased, of course, but one can't know how Goerner or Hooven would respond to the considerable body of data collected by TIGHAR in the years since their demise. Goerner at least showed a healthy ability to change his mind when confronted with contrary evidence. He did say -- before his death in 1994 -- that he thought the Nikumaroro Hypothesis was weak, but would he say that now? I don't know, but apparently Sam somehow does. As for Hooven, it’s worth noting that TIGHAR has praised Hooven’s study of the post-loss radio signals, which he said suggested that Earhart and Noonan had landed in the Phoenix Islands – where he posited that they had been collected by the Japanese. As the demon Gillespie noted in his description of Hooven’s work, Hooven died in 1985, and had he lived to learn of TIGHAR’s findings his opinion might have changed (See http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Hooven_Report/HoovenReport.html).

But Sam quickly broadens the scope of his critique, including the "gullible, ignorant, and corrupt media" and "Hillary (Clinton) and (the) State (Department)." It's good that he and his colleagues aren't fooled, but what is it that Secretary Clinton and her department up to? Sam doesn't quite say, but he promptly includes me in the conspiracy

Since I have always considered you to be pure "establishment," should we now consider your paper the latest concession by the establishment to the truth? If so, I'll admit it's much better than what we've had, and wonder how the rest of the establishment will receive it. ... I would advise you to abandon the bi-yearly Niku boondoggles and all the attention and false accolades they bring, and join me and a few others in supporting the unvarnished truth. I can't guarantee you or anyone else anything but rejection, but at least you'd be on the side of the angels, rather than the alternative, which I think will someday count for far more than it does now.

So I'm apparently more or less in bed with the Secretary ('scuse us, Bill), but Sam sees me as perhaps salvageable; maybe I can be persuaded to come over to the way of the truth. Guessing (based on his book) that what he thinks the government is up to is hiding what really happened to Earhart, I replied:

It would come as something of a surprise to some of my archaeological and other colleagues to see me referred to as "establishment," but if that characterization makes you happy, so be it. I HAVE worked in, around, under and against the U.S. government long enough to be very skeptical of its ability to keep a secret for 75 years. But I'm also old enough to be untrusting of my own judgment, so despite 25 years of rather close attention to the Nikumaroro project, I'm not as willing as you seem to be to proclaim the "unvarnished truth" or castigate others as -- let's see -- "gullible, ignorant, and corrupt." I do think we (and "we" are not just Ric, or Ric clones) have a pretty good hypothesis and some pretty good evidence ..., but I don't claim it as the Truth -- varnished, unvarnished, or painted bright pink.

Sam replied:

The truth about Saipan and the few files, hidden deep in top secret files reflecting what happened there, are not something that many "government" people were ever privy to, then or now. But if Hillary Clinton, for example, isn't a corrupt individual in your book, then there's little hope for your conversion.

To which I responded:

Let's be clear. I don't aspire to conversion, and I already am convinced that everybody in and around government is more or less corrupt. But as I said in "Shoes," in an investigation I do think it's important to shave with Ockham's Razor -- you don't jump to complicated conclusions until you've reasonably exhausted the simple ones. In the case of Earhart, the simplest conclusion is that she crashed and sank, but that doesn't account for the post-loss radio messages, nor does it account for the stuff we've found on Nikumaroro. So the Nikumaroro hypothesis becomes the next-simplest conclusion, and until and unless we disprove (or somebody disproves) that one, I think it's the best game in town.

This didn't go down well with Sam.

Give me a break, Tom. Nothing that's been found on Niku has been directly connected to AE/FN in any way. It's become a joke and a circus. Hundreds of people tramped around on that island before Gillespie ever got there. Hoovan and Goerner looked at it closely and threw it in the dumpster. It's a third-hand, hand-me-down-idea that's been explored to death without result. You guys kill me, really.

Odd, I thought we'd had some results. I replied:

I'm no more interested in converting you than I am in being converted, but let me just suggest that you read our stuff before you start calling names. Hooven and Goerner were never on the island; I've spent about three months working there. They weren't aware of the bones papers; I am. They didn't do archaeology on the island; I have. They didn't research the island's history in anything like the detail we have. I don't understand why you think invoking the names of extinct authorities and slapping labels on people's work is convincing to anyone but yourself and your friends.

Which led to:

Nonsense, all of it. The bones papers? More of absolutely nothing, dressed up with pretentious ten dollar words. You're supposed to be a scientist, but both of you choose your results and work backwards trying to fit your evidence to your desires. You fool nobody with half a brain, and without the immense help of the mainline media establishment, in on the charade, the whole NIKU scam would have been ignored decades ago. Please leave me alone now, I've had enough and my patience with you is wearing thin. Thanks for sending the paper, but enough is enough.

I was relieved enough to see the end of the correspondence, and decided not to get into whether we can fool people with whole brains, or explain what I meant by the “bones papers,” so I wound up our interchange with just one last dig:

Yup, it's like Harrry Truman said about kitchens.

An Epiphany
I don’t know anything about Sam’s politics, but it occurs to me that the way he frames his thinking about Earhart’s fate is a nice microcosm for the way many members of congress and conservative (among other) commentators approach such larger issues as the national economy, defense, the shredding social safety net, and the environment.

1. First we decide what the truth is.

2. Then we ridicule and impugn the motives of anyone who disagrees with us.

3. If anyone argues, we just increase the volume of our ridicule – even when we’re talking at people who manifestly know better.

4. If anybody offers evidence that contradicts our point of view, we don’t consider it; we simply label it “discredited” or “false” or “nonsense.”

5. We hint darkly or flatly assert that those who argue with us have devious, disreputable, maybe unpatriotic motives. Gillespie is a crook; King is an establishment shill; we’re all fronting for the immoral, un-American Clintons.

6. And when push comes to shove, we just say "shut up" and go back to talking only with those who agree with us.

It would be nice to think that people today are smart enough not to fall for this kind of thinking, but given what's become of our educational system, I don't suppose that's a very good bet -- in historical research or in politics, alas.

Two Forthcoming Articles

Two New Papers

Pacific Studies, a multidisciplinary journal on the people and cultures of the Pacific, has accepted my article, “Amelia Earhart on Nikumaroro: a Summary of the Evidence.”  The article is what it’s titled: a straightforward summary of the Nikumaroro Hypothesis and the evidence we’ve gathered over the years relating to it.  Nothing new, but I thought it would be useful to put it all in one place, and a peer-reviewed journal seemed like a good venue.  Pacific Studies can be accessed at https://ojs.lib.byu.edu/spc/index.php/PacificStudies/, and the article should be out in the fall.

And for a bit of balance (or something), the Northern Mariana Islands Council for the Humanities has accepted “Amelia Earhart in the Marianas: a Consideration of the Evidence,” by Tom Roberts, Joe Cerniglia and me.  It will be published on the Council’s website -- http://www.nmihumanities.org/ -- coincident with their Marianas History Conference (“One Archipelago, Many Stories”) scheduled for June 14-16, 2012.  In this paper, we tried to take a sober, objective look at the many stories that put Earhart and Noonan in the Marianas (usually on Saipan) as a prisoner of the Japanese.  Although there are many overlapping anecdotes, reported in various ways by different authors, they essentially comprise eight stories:

• That Earhart and Noonan flew their Electra 10E directly to Saipan from Lae, New Guinea;
• That Earhart and Noonan landed elsewhere in Micronesia and were brought to Saipan by the Japanese;
• That the Electra was at Aslito Airfield (now Saipan International Airport);
• That Earhart (and in some versions, Noonan) was incarcerated at the jail at Garapan on Saipan;
• That Earhart was incarcerated or otherwise kept elsewhere on Saipan;
• That U.S. Military personnel found physical evidence of Earhart on Saipan and elsewhere in Micronesia;
• That Earhart and Noonan died or were executed on Saipan or Tinian, and were buried there; and
• That the U.S. government covered up the facts of the matter.

 We briefly examine how each story has evolved, and what evidence supports it, and then attempt to evaluate the basis for each.

One of the interesting aspects of working on this paper is that it’s caused me to dip into the extensive literature on the reliability and vagaries of eyewitness memory – an understandably hot topic in jurisprudential and law enforcement circles, and very relevant to the AE-in-the-Marianas stories, which are almost entirely based on such memories.  It was also interesting to find evidence – albeit anecdotal – that some U.S. troops as they fought their way through the islands of Micronesia were actively seeking Earhart, and in some cases believed that she was alive and feeding information to military intelligence.  And though we don’t propose an answer to the question of whether Earhart and Noonan wound up in the Marianas, we do conclude that:

“the stories of an American woman in captivity on Saipan…may well reflect something that really happened, someone who really was imprisoned and executed.  An effort to identify this shadowy person and reconstruct her story – without assuming that she must have been Earhart – could result in a valuable contribution to the history of Micronesia during the Japanese period and World War II.     

"Scientific Evidence" -- and the Search 75 Symposium

First, for anyone who’s not aware of it, let me announce the forthcoming June 1-3 Earhart Search 75 Symposium, to be held in Arlington, VA (across the river from Washington DC). This conference will feature speakers, panels, and exhibits about the Nikumaroro Hypothesis, our pursuit of it, and other Earhart-related matters. Come one, come all! Full information and registration forms can be found at www.tighar.org.

I also want to take this opportunity to comment on some articles that have appeared in various media since the announcement of the July expedition to search the deepwater face of the Nutiran reef on Nikumaroro. These articles have pooh-poohed the Nikumaroro hypothesis as something akin to Gilligan’s Island, and assured the world that no way, no how did Earhart and Noonan wind up on Niku. They may be right, of course, but they’re not proving their cases by poking fun at ours. More importantly, they’re obfuscating matters by referring to their thinking as “scientific.”

Here’s an example, from the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette – see http://easterniowalife.com/2012/04/16/local-earhart-researcher-continues-to-search-for-famed-pilot/

Robins resident and former Rockwell Collins engineer Rod Blocksome said The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) is about 350 miles off course in their search for Earhart.

‘[TIGHAR researchers] are pretty much the masters of the media and they’re very good at coming up with newsworthy things that garner some publicity,’ Blocksome said. ‘…I don’t think they’re going to find anything, though.’

Blocksome retired from Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids in May 2010 after 42 years as an engineer. The retired communications systems engineer has worked with Dave Jourdan, president of Nauticos LLC, in searching for Earhart’s wreckage over the past several years.

TIGHAR researchers also said they’ve found evidence – such as broken glass jars and bits of women’s makeup – that could prove Earhart and Noonan lived on the remote island.

But Blocksome said circumstantial evidence and castaway theories are not what he, Jourdan, and Nauticos researchers are looking for around Howland Island. For them, indisputable, scientific evidence is necessary.


‘[We’re looking for] some very hard evidence that’s not controversial when we find the plane,’ Blocksome said. ‘[TIGHAR] comes up with little bits and pieces … Before we get everybody all excited, we want to make sure we got something that’s very solid and holds up to scientific scrutiny.’

What I object to in the above story, and others like it, is the equation of “scientific evidence” with something that’s “not controversial,” and the denigration of “little bits and pieces. The fact is that science works with whatever evidence it can find, and applies that evidence to the testing of hypotheses. In most cases it is precisely the buildup of “little bits and pieces” that makes or breaks the case.

It would be nice to find the indisputable, obvious, no-question-about it, smoking-gun piece of evidence (i.e. the airplane), and maybe it’s there to be found – at Niku or someplace else. But there’s a real good chance that it’s not there, or at least not likely to be found, and a failure to find it doesn’t necessarily mean that TIGHAR’s hypothesis is wrong. There are still all those little bits and pieces. And whether or not we ever “prove” the hypothesis to the satisfaction of every critic, it remains a fact that science is every bit as much about the collection, analysis, and application of “little bits and pieces” as it is about finding the big, obvious, indisputable and uncontroversial piece of data (like an airplane) that in one great flash proves the case.

Archaeological and historical research are applications of science that most particularly depend on the collection and interpretation of little bits and pieces -- whether they're little bits and pieces of hominid bone and crude tools in east Africa or little pieces of jars, bottles, and cosmetics from the Seven Site on Nikumaroro.  I think it's rather sad, and a testimony to the dumbing-down of the media's handling of science stories, to imply that only the big, obvious, flash-bang discovery ("Austrolopithecus walks out of cave to greet researchers: Scientists Stunned") constitutes "science."

Summary of Data for the Nikumaroro Hypothesis

In response to the interest aroused by yesterday's (20 March 2012) US State Department event, here's an update of a summary posted here in 2010 of the evidence for the Nikumaroro Hypothesis.  The original Word file has footnotes citing the sources behind each statement, but I can't figure out how (without GREAT tedium) to get these into this sort of blog posting.  If you want a PDF of the Word version, drop me a note at tfking106@aol.com, and I'll be happy to send one along.

Aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared over the Pacific on July 2nd 1937. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) hypothesizes that they landed and died on Nikumaroro, then called Gardner Island, an uninhabited island in what is now the Phoenix Islands Protected Area of the Republic of Kiribati. Detailed documentation of our basis for the Nikumaroro Hypothesis is found in two books published by TIGHAR members , and on TIGHAR’s worldwide web site . I have also published a novel that imagines the circumstances surrounding the discovery of what may have been Earhart’s bones . I have prepared this short paper to summarize the evidence supporting what we call “the Nikumaroro Hypothesis” regarding Earhart’s and Noonan’s fate. Here are the data:


1. In the last radio transmission that all authorities agree came from Earhart, she said she was flying "on the line 157 337” – this is generally understood to be what is known as a “line of position,” a navigational line oriented 337° (NNW) and 157° (SSE). The strength of the transmission indicated that she was relatively close to Howland Island at the time of transmission. She was not understood to say which direction she was flying on the line but U.S. Navy experts, Earhart’s husband George Putnam, and her technical advisor Paul Mantz all agreed that the flight probably proceeded southeastward in the hope of reaching land . Such a line passing through the vicinity of Howland Island also passes within visual range of Nikumaroro.

2. Nikumaroro is much easier to see from the air than Howland Island; it is bigger, tree-covered, and has a brilliant aquamarine lagoon .

3. After her disappearance, at least 121 radio messages were received by stations around the Pacific and elsewhere, most of them by professional radio operators, some of them in a voice identified as Earhart’s by operators who had heard her in past transmissions. When the U.S. Navy’s extensive search failed reveal anything, the Navy decided they were all mistakes or hoaxes. If even one of these messages was really from Earhart, she had to be on land with a fairly intact airplane capable of generating power for the radio . Detailed analysis of the messages by TIGHAR researchers suggests that at least 57 of the messages are credible as transmissions from the lost Electra

4. Radio stations at Wake Island, Midway Island, and Hawaii took radio direction finding (RDF) bearings on six of the transmissions. Four of these bearings crossed in the vicinity of Nikumaroro .

5. The only radio (other than, we suspect, Earhart’s) documented as having been in the Phoenix Islands was in the possession of John William Jones, a coconut plantation supervisor on Hull (now Orona) Island, about 150 miles east of Nikumaroro. Jones’ radio is reliably reported to have been out of order between early June and late August of 1937 .

6. TIGHAR analysis of the whole body of radio messages indicates only two plausible explanations for them. Either an extremely well-informed hoaxer with an undocumented radio was on one of the western Phoenix Islands imitating Earhart’s voice, or Earhart was there .

7. Search plane crews from USS Colorado, flying over Nikumaroro seven days after the disappearance, reported “signs of recent habitation” but, believing the island to be inhabited, concluded that they were not related to Earhart, so the Colorado did not land a search party . The island had not been officially inhabited since 1892, and we have discovered no records suggesting informal occupation.

8. British colonial officers who visited Nikumaroro in October of 1937 to see whether the island could be colonized found the island (as expected) to be uninhabited, but said they saw evidence suggesting an “overnight bivouac” (camp) .

9. A photograph taken by one of the officers shows an anomaly on the edge of the island’s northwestern reef that looks very much like an airplane’s landing gear . Detailed forensic image analysis currently underway thus far strongly suggests that the object imaged is consistent with the landing gear of Earhart’s Electra

10. Residents of the colony established on Nikumaroro in December of 1938, which lasted until 1963, report aircraft wreckage on the northwestern reef flat and in the lagoon. A US Navy pilot who visited the island during World War II reported local residents using aircraft control cable as a fishing line, which they said came from a plane wreck that had been on the island when they came .

11. TIGHAR has recovered pieces of aircraft wreckage from the remains of the colonial village on Nikumaroro; these appear to have been brought to the village to use in fabricating handicrafts. Some of these are from a B-24, probably one that crashed on Canton Island, some 230 miles to the northeast (people from Nikumaroro worked on Canton after World War II). Other pieces, including aluminum fragments and fragments of plexiglass, do not appear to match a B-24 but are consistent with a Lockheed Electra like Earhart’s .

12. In 1991, TIGHAR recovered parts of two shoes on Nikumaroro, identified by footwear specialists as a woman’s shoe and a man’s shoe. The former was identified as a “Blucher-style oxford” dating to the 1930s. Earhart wore such shoes on her flight, though the only example that can be measured in photographs appears to have been smaller than the one found by TIGHAR . Photographic evidence indicates that Earhart had at least three pairs of footgear on the plane, two of them Blucher-style oxfords, and there is documentary evidence suggesting a pair of hiking boots .

13. In 1940, the Nikumaroro colonists found thirteen bones of a human skeleton on the southeast end of the island next to the remains of a campfire with bird and turtle bones. Nearby the remains of a woman’s shoe and a man’s shoe were found, together with a sextant box and some small corks on chains. The bones were examined by two medical doctors. One said the bones came from an elderly Polynesian, the other said they were from an adult male of European or mixed race. The bone measurements taken by the second doctor have been analyzed by modern forensic anthropologists, whose studies indicate that they may more likely be those of a woman of European ethnic background, about 5’5” to 5’9” in height. Earhart would have fit this description. The bones have been lost .

14. The sextant box – which has also been lost – is recorded as having had two numbers on it: 1542 and 3500. Recent research has shown that during World War I, the U.S. Navy acquired a large number of nautical sextants, some of which were converted for aviation use. Known sextants acquired by the Navy from the Brandis Instrument Company carried serial numbers ranging from 3227 to 5760, and were assigned Navy numbers 845 through 4705; these numbers were stamped into the boxes as well as the instruments themselves. The numbers on the Nikumaroro sextant box thus suggest that it held a Brandis instrument owned for a time by the U.S. Navy.

15. The second number on the box – 3500 – is also close to the number 3547, which is written on a sextant box held by the Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Florida and is documented to have belonged to Fred Noonan . Fred Noonan is known to have used a nautical sextant as a back up and a photograph of the navigation room aboard a Pan Am clipper shows a box for a Brandis sextant. One of Noonan’s jobs in the 1930s was as a navigator trainer and a photograph of one his students shows a Brandis sextant.

16. In 1946 the late Floyd Kilts, a U.S. Coast Guardsman on duty on Nikumaroro, was told about the bones discovery by a local resident. Other Coast Guardsmen purchased wooden boxes built by the residents, with inlaid pieces of aircraft aluminum .

17. TIGHAR has identified a site on the southeast end of the island (the Seven Site) that closely matches the description given in British colonial records of the 1940 bones discovery site. Here we have found the remains of several cooking fires containing bird, fish, and turtle bones. There are also two clusters of giant clam (Tridacna sp.) shells on the site, apparently brought there so their meat could be consumed. Many of the clams in one cluster appear to have been opened by someone who tried to pry them open on the hinge side (as eastern U.S. oysters and some clams are opened); others have been opened by smashing them with rocks . Fishbones from the remains of cooking fires on the site suggest that whoever camped there was unselectively catching mostly rather small reef and lagoon fish, cooking them on the coals, and disposing of their bones in the fires; none of this behavior is consistent with fishing and fish preparation by indigenous Pacific islanders .

18. Finally, we have found a variety of artifacts at the Seven Site. Some of these are clearly of colonial or Coast Guard origin, but others are not . Among the artifacts recovered from the site in 2007 and 2010 are:

a. a broken bottle made by the Owens Illinois Glass company in New Jersey in 1933 containing traces of a substance containing oil and lanolin, probably either a skin cream or hair dressing;

b. a shattered bottle with the word “Mennen” embossed on its side in Art Deco lettering, apparently a 1930s cosmetic container of American origin;

c. a broken glass vessel identified as a small ointment pot;

d. two broken, partially melted bottles identified as dating to before World War II, found in the remains of a cooking fire where it appears they may have been used in attempts to boil water;

e. a U.S. manufactured jackknife, comparable to one carried on the Earhart Electra , that appears to have been taken apart, perhaps to re-use its parts;

f. the pull and slider from a size 06, “auto-lok” Talon brand zipper manufactured in the U.S. sometime between 1933 and 1936;

g. small fragments of red material chemically identified as probable cosmetic rouge;

h. two small pieces of thin beveled glass that match the mirror of a known 1930s vintage American woman’s compact.

Earhart is known to have carried a compact which, if it was like others of the period, would have contained rouge. U.S. Coast Guardsmen, island colonists, and British colonial officials are unlikely to have had such items. TIGHAR has found two photographs of Earhart holding rectangular objects consistent in size and shape to the sort of compact that would have held a mirror the size of the glass fragments found at the Seven Site. The apparent cosmetic containers are also more consistent with the presence of a Euroamerican woman on the site than with any of the others known to have used it. Zippers were used extensively by Earhart in her own clothing design, and by her friend Elsa Schiaparelli in designing some of Earhart’s wardrobe. The bottles in the fire suggest an effort to boil or distill drinking water – there is no fresh surface water on Nikumaroro except what can be caught during sporadic rain squalls.

Current Status of Research

TIGHAR conducted its most extensive excavation of the Seven Site in May-June 2010 , and analysis of results is currently underway. A TIGHAR team spent conducted archival research in Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati, in early 2011. Another team spent much of May 2011 in Fiji searching the Colonial War Memorial Hospital for the bones found on Nikumaroro in 1940, last reported in the Hospital in early 1942. Still another team visited the Solomon Islands and conducted oral historical research with the descendants of the Nikumaroro colonists. The data produced by these three studies are under analysis.

For further information or to join the search, please visit www.tighar.org, or contact:

• TIGHAR Executive Director Ric Gillespie at TIGHARIC@mac.com, or

• Senior Archaeologist Thomas F. King at tfking106@aol.com.

Books Related to the Research

• Amelia Earhart’s Shoes, AltaMira Press 2004; see http://www.altamirapress.com/Catalog/SingleBook.shtml?command=Search&db=^DB/CATALOG.db&eqSKUdata=0759101310

• Finding Amelia, Naval Institute Press 2007; see http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Books/Books/findingamelia.htm

• Thirteen Bones, Dog Ear Press, 2009; see www.tomfking.com

(or from any bookseller)

Recent Media Coverage

The Discovery Channel aired a documentary on TIGHAR’s project on December 11, 2010.