X marks the spot
If you were searching for Amelia Earhart, where would you begin?
The Bordeaux region of France, of course, because X marks the spot and it is also where a note in a bottle washed ashore in 1938 - 16 months after Earhart and Fred Noonan disappeared in the northern Pacific ocean.
The woman who found the bottle (who may or may not have been selling sea shells by the sea shore) turned it over to the local gendarmes, who sent it to Paris.
The note was conveniently written in French, and tells the story of an unnamed sailor whose yacht, Veveo, sank in the Marshall Islands, and who was arrested as a spy by the Japanese when he made it Milli Attol, about 600 miles north of where Earhart intended to land.
The Japanese shipped him to a prison on Jailut Attol, also in the Marshalls and that is were he saw Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.
The sailor wrote that Earhart etc. had been rescued by seaplane and were kept as hostages. The sailor wrote that he had been forced to become a stoker on a Japanese freighter headed for Europe and that was why he was sneaking bottles overboard.
There you have it; the mystery is solved. Japan had a rational position: If you drop that pesky oil
embargo, we will will give back Lady Lindy. We need oil to sneak up on you to bomb Pearl Harbor at some future date. Cool Story.
The English-language translation is in the U.S national archives and was declassified in 1977.
The Bordeaux region of France, of course, because X marks the spot and it is also where a note in a bottle washed ashore in 1938 - 16 months after Earhart and Fred Noonan disappeared in the northern Pacific ocean.
The woman who found the bottle (who may or may not have been selling sea shells by the sea shore) turned it over to the local gendarmes, who sent it to Paris.
The note was conveniently written in French, and tells the story of an unnamed sailor whose yacht, Veveo, sank in the Marshall Islands, and who was arrested as a spy by the Japanese when he made it Milli Attol, about 600 miles north of where Earhart intended to land.
The Japanese shipped him to a prison on Jailut Attol, also in the Marshalls and that is were he saw Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.
The sailor wrote that Earhart etc. had been rescued by seaplane and were kept as hostages. The sailor wrote that he had been forced to become a stoker on a Japanese freighter headed for Europe and that was why he was sneaking bottles overboard.
There you have it; the mystery is solved. Japan had a rational position: If you drop that pesky oil
embargo, we will will give back Lady Lindy. We need oil to sneak up on you to bomb Pearl Harbor at some future date. Cool Story.
The English-language translation is in the U.S national archives and was declassified in 1977.
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| Ominous photo-op, with a coffin-nose Cord and suicide doors. |
I have only been searching for Earhart for 50 years, so it is not like I am obsessive or anything.
The history of herstory
Amelia Earhart could not find Howland Island but she sure got around to all the others according to the lore: The Mariana and Marshall islands, the jungles of New Britain, and Gardner in the Phoenix islands. What we need is something like a unified Earhart theory that can put her in all those places insome kind of rational order.
From the beginning of her disappearance July 2, 1937, Gardner Island was suspected as a landing site in what was near her line-of-position although it was below the equator. The problem was there was no airplane on Gardner when three navy float planes circled the island on Friday, July 9, seven days after she disappeared and two days after she was last heard from.
This did not stop searchers 53 years later when The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery found evidence that a human skeleton, a castaway, had been found on Gardner sometime between 1938 and 1940.
The British established a colony on Gardner to relieve population pressures in
the Gilbert Islands. The Brits took great pleasure in abbreviating the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme. We may not know where Earhart was, but it does explain the comedy of Benny Hill. Like Earhart, the bones have disappeared so it is logical to assume they were hers. During 30 years of
searching, Tighar has come up no evidence whatsoever that Earhart had ever been on Gardner.
the Gilbert Islands. The Brits took great pleasure in abbreviating the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme. We may not know where Earhart was, but it does explain the comedy of Benny Hill. Like Earhart, the bones have disappeared so it is logical to assume they were hers. During 30 years of
searching, Tighar has come up no evidence whatsoever that Earhart had ever been on Gardner.
The hard truth of getting lost is, if you don’t know where you are, you do not know where you're going. The hard truth of historical mysteries is they are based on three elements: Assumption, conjecture and the occasional note in a bottle on the coast of France.
If the facts don’t support your theory, then manipulate the facts. If you don’t have any facts, create them.
So where did Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan end up? On an uncharted desert island below the equator and 1,300 miles to the east. This is far beyond the search pattern of the American navy, which searched no farther east than the Gilbert Islands and no farther west than the Phoenix Islands.
Betty's transcript
My favorite Earhart artifact is a transcript of a distress call set down by Helen Betty Klenck, aged 17. It is the only known transcript to exist. She heard this on her father’s shortwave radio sporadically between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. The date is uncertain.
Betty Klenck wrote down everything she could hear. It paints a dire picture. Fred Noonan suffers a brain concussion from the crash landing, and is speaking nonsensically. The transcript contains the only position report of the entire Earhart saga. Noonan appears to be adressing Earhart as Mary - her middle name- while Earhart appears to be addressing Noonan as Bud. Earhart repeats NYC several times, which may have been pronounced New York City and might be a reference to a wrecked freighter on Gardner Island, the Norwich City.
The position report is nowhere near Gardner. It is 165 degrees east longitude and 3 degrees, 9 minutes south of the equator.
In practical terms that is about 140 nautical miles east of Nauru Island and about 210 nautical miles south of the equator.
If you’re looking for the ghost of Amelia Earhart, that location would be worth looking at. If you are looking for sunken aircraft, you’d be in luck, because that is the general vicinity of the Guadalcanal Campaign of 1942-43. Even the future president, John Kennedy was marooned on an island there.
I’d go there myself on my 13-foot Guppy sloop but that boat has severe typhoon allergies.
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| Guppy 13 search vessel; she has typhoon allergies. |
Other distress calls were heard in North America as early as July 2, but not, apparently, by the battleship, aircraft carrier and coast guard cutter searching for Earhart. Betty Klenck's father, Kenneth did try to alert the U.S. Coast Guard.
Two earlier distress calls contained the Earhart plea for help in which she said she was down on a small island, uncharted, uninhabited. I searched for my atlas of uncharted islands but it too has mysteriously disappeared.
Fuelish assumptions
The charted position has always been considered impossible because Earhart was out or fuel or almost out of fuel as she approached Howland Island, the only presentable landing strip in all of Micronesia.
But was she out of gas? Earhart’s Electra could carry 1,250 gallons of fuel and could stay aloft for 24
hours if her fuel management was kept to 50 gallons per hour or less. She spent 20 hours trying to reach
Howland, so she may have had 4 hours of fuel left. That is a range of 500 additional nautical miles at cruising speed. Her average speed on her last flight was a little under 115 knots.
What if she got down to 30 gallons per hour? That’d give 18 more hours aloft. At 40 gallons per hour, that number drops to 11 hours of extra flight time. The reality is that no one knows. On her ill-fated flight to Hawaii, Earhart reported 10 gallons per hour when she had to slow to 120 knots to meet the dawn. She
had the aid of a tailwind during that period. Of the 947 gallons of fuel aboard she reported she still had a 4-hour reserve (600 miles). Oakland-to-Hawaii is almost the same distance as the Lae-to-Howland run, where she disappeared.
Amelia Earhart is said to have said to a friend (Gene Vidal), “If I can’t find Howland, I’ll just go back to the Gilbert Islands and land on a beach”.
If Amelia Earhart turned back whence she came, all of the island chains she passed on the way in were populated places. The position report cited above was almost the exact position occupied by the ocean-going tugboat, USS Ontario, which left the scene 1 hour after Earhart presumably passed by. Perhaps Earhart thought the Ontario was still in position. If it was, it could rescue the crew and the Electra.
Ontario was 185 feet long and burned coal. It returned to Samoa due to fuel and food needs.
One of the other people who heard Earhart on July 2 was Mabel Larremore. She contacted Tighar in 1990 and spoke from memory when she was 84 years old. Her story was remarkably similar to that written
by Klenck. Betty Klenck's notebook did not surface until 10 years later.
by Klenck. Betty Klenck's notebook did not surface until 10 years later.
Larremore added a twist to her tale: She awoke her family to listen to Earhart’s plea. Her eldest son, George Jr., then 16-years-old, spent a career in the Navy in the Pacific. Before he died, he told his mother he had seen Earhart’s grave on an unknown Pacific island, where he had taken shore leave.
His story was that the natives sailed to an uninhabited island to fish, where they found Earhart, her plane, and her deceased navigator. They took Earhart and some things from the aircraft back to their island, where she recovered from her injuries but later died.
The presumption is that George Jr. heard this story during the Second World War, but it could have occurred any time between 1941 and 1961, when he retired from the Navy.
George Larremore never claimed to have seen Earhart, merely that he was shown a grave and heard a story from the natives.
There is such an island in Micronesia that fits the description. It is Kapingamarangi (pay attention to the
spelling. It might show up on the geography quiz).
spelling. It might show up on the geography quiz).
Kapingamarangi Atoll’s main resource is fishing. It has a well-kept graveyard and has had limited
exposure to European, American or Japanese culture. It’s land area is too small for colonization.
exposure to European, American or Japanese culture. It’s land area is too small for colonization.
It is also in the vicinity to Betty Klenck’s position report. This atoll is about 157 degrees east and 1 degree north of the equator (again, Betty Klenck’s position report was: 165 degrees east longitude and 3 degrees south).
Earhart's last position report to Harry Balfour at Lae, was 4 degrees 33 minutes south and 159 degrees, 9 minutes east. How ya' like them apples? There's something about that part of the ocean to which Earhart was drawn. In the last case, she flew into the dark at 6 p.m. local time, at least 800 miles from Lae and 1200 miles from Howland. Even more convenient to George Larremore's story are the Nukumanu Islands at about 160 degrees east and 4.5 degrees below the line. These islands are a remote outpost of Papua, New Guinea. Earhart had seen these islands in daylight, and were the last land Earhart saw on the way to Howland Island. The question remains is if there is another little island 5 degrees farther toward the western hemisphere.
“On coral southwest of unknown island. Don’t know how long we will ... We are cut a little,” is said to be
a copy of a U.S. Naval transcript picked up in Hawaii on July 7, 1937. The alleged copy came into the possession of Fred Goerner who spent 6 years tracking down the fate of Earhart and Noonan. He acquired the transcript from Elmer Dimity, a parachute maker and unofficial promoter of Earhart.
a copy of a U.S. Naval transcript picked up in Hawaii on July 7, 1937. The alleged copy came into the possession of Fred Goerner who spent 6 years tracking down the fate of Earhart and Noonan. He acquired the transcript from Elmer Dimity, a parachute maker and unofficial promoter of Earhart.
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| Amelia Earhart showing off her fuel-switching thingamajig. |
The tale of two Freds
Until his death in 1994, Fred Goerner served as the source of the predominate theory that Earhart and Noonan were captured and killed by the Japanese military on Saipan in the Mariana(s) Islands.
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| Headline that got the whole Earhart mystery rolling in 1960. |
Fred Goerner worked as a newsman for KCBS radio in San Francisco and began his search for Earhart after reading the tale Mrs. Josephine Blanco Akiyama told in the San Mateo Times May 27, 1960. The story
gained national prominence through the CBS radio and television network.
Many people noted that he looked a lot like Fred Noonan, which came in handy when he sought permission from Noonan’s widow and Earhart’s sister to disinter a grave in Saipan where the two were thought to be buried.
Goerner’s book, The Search for Amelia Earhart, is an intriguing and believable book. This is where I began my interest about the fate of Amelia Earhart: Goerner's belief that she was a spy.
The quest to establish Earhart and Noonan died in the custody of the Japanese military remains unresolved but Goerner uncovered quite a bit of skulduggery. Most of the principal characters were then alive and but have since gone to grave.
Goerner ultimately came up with no proof of his theory that Earhart deviated from her equatorial flight to take a look at the Marshall Islands well north of the equator, to see if the Japanese were building military defenses on the Japanese mandate islands.
The mandates were so-called because of a League of Nations agreement to give the islands to Japan after they were seized from Germany after World War l. Before that they were in Spanish possession.
The key part of Goerner’s theory was the Earhart mistook her position and was still in the Marshall island group when she thought she was near Howland Island.
Earhart’s terse radio messages did not include any position reports after she flew out of radio range of
Lae, New Guinea, which may have been as far as 850 miles from her takeoff point.
The spy theory is exotic but unlikely. Flight plan deviation across thousands of miles of blue water
would be very dangerous and included the threat of sparking a war with Japan that the United States was not prepared for.
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| Illustration of islands for the lost flight. Note the east-west meridians. |
It is possible Earhart had the fastest plane in the world at that time and could have outrun any Japanese pursuit. Goerner thought two of her radio messages significant to his theory. Earhart radioed she was 200 miles out and radioed again a half-hour later saying she was 100 miles out. That is an airspeed
of 200 miles-per-hour, near her top speed of 220 miles-per-hour. Three years later, the famous Japanese Zero fighter aircraft had about the same performance and range as the Electra 10E
Now The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery is equally glued to the Gardner Island theory.
The distress calls alluded to above were picked up by the navy on Diamond Head, Hawaii: July 2, a carrier wave was picked up. July 4, A male
voice could be heard but was garbled. July 7, Earhart’s voice was heard including her radio call sign KHAQQ.
She was trying to reach NRU1, which is said to be the call letters of the Coast Guard cutter, Itasca, but I have been unable to verify that.
The crux of the mystery is not what went wrong, but what did Earhart do when she was confronted with a deadly game of aerial poker. You and I now have the chance to be the pilot and make a choice that we must make.
Here’s how I play my hand. North was troubled by weather, perhaps a monsoon. A PBY flying boat sent from Hawaii to aid in the search July 2 was turned back by weather.
South was unknown territory but would lead to the uninhabited Phoenix Island group. Gardner Island was closest to her line of position. Again a group of three navy float planes flew over Gardner Island on July 9, and saw no evidence of a crash-landed aircraft.
West was blue water with no known land forms for thousands of miles.
East was from whence she came. The Gilbert Islands and the northern tip of the Solomon Islands, not to mention Nauru and Ocean Island were on her pathway.
I’m going to play the eastern card, but we already know the game was rigged. The pair did not survive. At some point she had to fold her hand anyway because night was coming.
All gamblers make mistakes. If Earhart did, I suspect she was trying to find a safe place to land so that the Lockheed 10E could fly again. Earhart’s best fuel management occurred at 10,000 feet (the logical ceiling without supplemental oxygen) and slow, to 120 knots. That is probably what she did.
Earhart apparently judged her fuel supply by watching the fuel-flow meters for each engine.
The unified Earhart theory
If the Japanese did pick Earhart up, it may have been at Kapingamarangi. Japan claimed this atoll as part of the mandate islands, and used it as a seaplane base. Earhart could have appeared in Saipan or even the Marshall Islands. Hell, in more recent times, the CIA admitted to having a secret prison in Poland.
Go figure.
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If the last, lost flight was not so tragic, It would make an exotic video game. Just watch your airspeed and fuel consumption and stay out of the mandates.
Gilligan’s Island had a happier outcome, but that was only a 3-hour tour.
The survivors
Earhart’s husband, George Palmer Putnam and Noonan’s wife, Mary Bea Noonan, encamped at Oakland airport, awaiting news of the lost flight and shared hope and grief until the navy search was abandoned July 18.
Putnam remarried twice after Earhart was declared dead in 1939. He moved to Inyo County, Whitney Portal and then to own and operate the Stovepipe Wells resort in Death Valley and died in 1950 of kidney failure.
Bea Noonan- she used Bea as her first name - ran a beauty shop in the San Francisco Bay region but later met a wealthy widower aboard a steamship returning from Hawaii. She became known in Santa Barbara as an expert of growing and cross-breeding orchids. Her mansion is where she received Goerner to give permission to disinter a grave in Saipan. Goerner attended the University of California, Santa Barbara and knew about the orchid lady, but did not know her significance. Fred Noonan was declared dead in 1938.
Fred Goerner retired from CBS news and died in 1994.
Betty Klenck, developed a close relationship with Tighar researchers and lived until 2014.
Mabel Larremore died in Vermont in 2008.
Her son , George, died in Idaho in 1985.
Source notes:
Books: Last Flight, Amelia Earhart, published 1937, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York. Arranged by Earhart’s husband, George Palmer Putnam. Earhart’s voice shows through clearly. She sent letters, and telegrams to Putnam during her adventure. It does not have an ending.
Japan’s Islands of Mystery, Willard Price. Published 1944, John Day and Company, New York. Price was a notable childrens' book author of exotic adventure stories. He lived in Tokyo for several years before the war with Japan.
He also finagled a year-long stay in the Japanese mandate Islands around 1935.
Daughter of the Sky, Paul Briand Jr. published 1960 by Duel, Sloan and Pearce, New York. This is a serviceable biography of Amelia Earhart. He speculated that Earhart had been captured in Saipan, based entirely on Akiyama’s sighting. Briand was an English teacher at the West Point and U.S. Airforce academies. This book is weak on aerial navigation techniques.
The Search for Amelia Earhart, Fred Goerner, published 1966, Doubleday and Company, New York.
The bestselling narrative of the search into the fate of the expedition. A reviewer noted it reads like a regimental history and it does at times because it deals with hundreds of characters Goerner interviewed.
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