Share this
Twitter
Myspace
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Slashdot
Furl
Yahoo
Technorati
Newsvine
Facebook
Export PDF
Print
E-mail
TagsBY GINA G. SCALA
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
From the moment Amelia Earhart’s plane disappeared over the South Pacific, the world has been mystified by her fate. Now, nearly 75 years later, her lot and that of navigator Fred Noonan is believed to be uncovered.
On Friday, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has been investigating one of the 20th century’s most famous disappearances, said it believes Earhart and Noonan died on an uninhabited island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati.
Earhart, who gained famed as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, vanished during an attempt to circle the world near the equator. Later declared missing and eventually dead, many believed her plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean.
But TIGHAR researchers found an anti-freckle cream bottle, broken into five pieces, on Nikumaroro Island, Discovery News reported. When those fragments were reassembled, they made up a nearly complete bottle, identical in shape to the ones used by Dr. C. H Berry's Freckle Ointment. The ointment was marketed in the early 20th century as a concoction guaranteed to make freckles fade, according to Discovery News.
"It's well documented Amelia had freckles and disliked having them," Joe Cerniglia, the TIGHAR researcher who spotted the freckle ointment as a possible match, told Discovery News.
These latest findings lead researchers to conclude Earhart and Noonan were low on fuel and unable to find their next scheduled stopping point – Howland Island; they radioed their position before landing on a reef at uninhabited Gardner Island, a small coral atoll now known as Nikumaroro Island.
Using what fuel remained to turn up the engines to recharge the batteries, they continued to radio distress signals for several days until Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed Electra aircraft was swept off the reef by rising tides and surf. Using equipment not available in 1937 – digitized information management systems, antenna modeling software, and radio wave propagation analysis programs, TIGHAR concluded that 57 of the 120 signals reported at the time are credible, triangulating Earhart’s position to have been Nikumaroro Island, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
"Amelia Earhart did not simply vanish on July 2, 1937,” Richard Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR, told Discovery News. “Radio distress calls believed to have been sent from the missing plane dominated the headlines and drove much of the US Coast Guard and Navy search.”
When the search failed, all of the reported post-loss radio signals were categorically dismissed as bogus and have been largely ignored ever since," Mr. Gillespie said. But the results of the study, he said, “suggest that the aircraft was on land and on its wheels for several days following the disappearance.”
A photo taken three months after Earhart’s flight shows what could be the landing gear of her aircraft in the waters off the atoll, The Christian Science Monitor reported.
“Analyses of the artifacts, faunals and data collected during the expedition are on-going but, at this point, everything supports the hypothesis that the remains found at the site in 1940 were those of Amelia Earhart,” TIGHAR, the Wilmington, Del.-based non-profit, said in a statement.
TIGHAR researchers will return in July to the area where Earhart and Noonan are thought to have spent their last days. They will use submersibles to try and detect the famous aircraft they believe was swept off the reef in 1937.
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.
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. Tara Kelley’s 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.