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Dear Editor, As we approach the 75th anniversary of the tragic loss of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, her navigator, during their around-the-world flight attempt on July 2, 1937, the only ideas about what happened to the fliers that matter seem to be those of Ric Gillespie of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. No matter where one looks these days, the transparently false TIGHAR claim – that Amelia Earhart landed on Nikumaroro (then Gardner Island), three hundred miles southeast of their intended destination, Howland Island, and eventually perished there, completely dominates all Earhart-related news. Your article is the among the latest cases in point. None of the assorted garbage Gillespie has collected in 10 trips to the island has ever been connected to Earhart or Noonan in any way, because the pair was never on Gardner Island. On July 9, 1937, search planes from the battleship USS Colorado flew over the island and saw no trace of Earhart or Noonan. In October 1937, Henry Maude and Eric Bevington, of the British Colonial Service, visited Nikumaroro and found no trace of the fliers or the Electra. Hundreds of Gilbert Islanders lived on Gardner until the early 1960s, and a U.S. Coast Guard LORAN station operated there for two years during World War II. Further, the SS Norwich City, a British freighter, crashed on the Gardner reef in 1929, killing 11 crewmen died. Thus all the refuse that serves as Gillespie's Earhart "evidence pool" comes from perfectly prosaic sources, none of which are ever discussed in the daily dispatches from U.S. disinformation bureaus nationwide. TIGHAR’s claims were closely examined in the 1970s by San Francisco radio newsman Fred Goerner and famed engineer and inventor Fred Hooven, and summarily dismissed as ridiculous, but this third-hand, third-rate theory has somehow survived. . Long before Gillespie began to make national headlines in the mid-1980s with the first of his now 10 fruitless trips to the island, Goerner was busy establishing Earhart and Noonan’s presence on Saipan in the days following their disappearance. Goerner’s 1966 classic, The Search for Amelia Earhart, remains the only bestseller on Earhart’s disappearance ever penned. Researcher Joe Gervais’ early 1960s investigations on Guam and Saipan further established the American flyers’ presence on Saipan, and are recorded in Joe Klaas’ 1970 tome, Amelia Earhart Lives. Thomas E. Devine’s 1987 book, Eyewitness: The Amelia Earhart Incident, recounts Devine’s remarkable experiences on Saipan in the summer of 1944 during the American invasion that also indicated the pre-war presence of Earhart, Noonan, as well as Earhart’s Electra 10E. With Our Own Eyes: Eyewitnesses to the Final Days of Amelia Earhart was published in 2002, by this writer, and presents the eyewitness accounts of more than two-dozen veterans relative to the presence and death of Earhart and Noonan on Saipan. My forthcoming book, Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last (Sunbury Press) offers many new findings that overwhelmingly confirm the fact of Earhart and Noonan’s post-loss presence and deaths on Saipan at the hands of the pre-war Japanese military. Sometime during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, this truth became a sacred cow and political poison in Washington, never to be officially revealed. Thus, every year the establishment bombards the American public with false theories and disinformation about Earhart’s fate, with the sole aim of diverting attention and keeping the vast majority of our citizens ignorant about the true fate of the lost flyers, arguably the first casualties of World War II. This month, as we approach the “diamond anniversary,” of Earhart’s disappearance, so to speak, this disinformation campaign is operating in overdrive. Sincerely, Mike Campbell Knoxville, Tenn.