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Speculation on the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan has continued since their disappearance in 1937. The most likely explanation is that their airplane ran out of fuel, crashed in the ocean, and sank.
- Overview
- Skepticism and Confusion Intensify
A Japanese blogger has refuted a key piece of evidence in a recent History Channel documentary about the aviator's disappearance.
A photograph that a recent History Channel documentary proclaimed as lost evidence that could solve the mystery of Amelia Earhart's disappearance appears to have been published nearly two years before the aviator vanished in July 1937.
The pre-WWII photograph features a throng of people on a dock in Jaluit Atoll, one of the Marshall Islands. In the documentary Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence, filmmakers claim that two Caucasian people in the photograph—a man standing next to a post, and a person of indeterminate sex squatting on the dock's edge—are Earhart's navigator Fred Noonan and Earhart herself, in the custody of the Japanese military in 1937.
However, new evidence indicates that the photograph was published in a 1935 Japanese-language travelogue about the islands of the South Pacific. As Japanese military history blogger Kota Yamano noted in a July 9 post, he found the book after searching the National Diet Library, Japan's national library, using the term "Jaluit Atoll," the location featured in the photograph.
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“The photo was the 10th item that came up,” he said in an interview with The Guardian. “I was really happy when I saw it. I find it strange that the documentary makers didn’t confirm the date of the photograph or the publication in which it originally appeared. That’s the first thing they should have done.”
In the leadup to the documentary's July 9 premiere, the History Channel touted the photograph, which it obtained from the U.S. National Archives, as potentially transformative evidence dating to before World War II, possibly to 1937. But ever since news of the documentary broke last week, outside experts have expressed various levels of skepticism, which has only intensified in the last 24 hours.
For its part, the U.S. National Archives notes that the photograph used by the filmmakers is not marked with a date. "The materials gathered in the report support a geographical-type study or survey of the Pacific Islands," National Archives Director of Public and Media Communications James Pratchett said in a statement emailed to National Geographic.
Tom King, the chief archaeologist for TIGHAR, the chief group investigating the possibility of Earhart crash-landing on Nikumaroro, says that he has known of the photograph for years and never took it seriously as evidence.
"We looked at it and said, 'Well, it's a man and a woman on a dock looking out in the other direction—it's basically a meaningless piece of information,'" he says in a phone interview from an ongoing TIGHAR expedition in Fiji. "You can read things into it like you can read faces on the moon." (King's current expedition was co-sponsored by the National Geographic Society.)
And in the wake of Yamano's evidence, the History Channel and the documentary's on-screen personalities have expressed various forms of concern and disbelief.
"I don't know what to say," says Kent Gibson, the facial-recognition expert that the History Channel hired to analyze the photograph for Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence. "I don't have an explanation for why [the photograph] would show up two years early."
Apr 27, 2019 · Several islanders have come forward in the past claiming to have seen Earhart and Noonan's execution, but evidence backing up their allegations has never emerged.
- 3 min
- Lauren Beldi,Michael Walsh
Jul 6, 2017 · Earhart and Noonan were spies shot or forced down on a secret mission to gather intelligence about the Japanese in the Marshall Islands, according to one set of theories.
- 1 min
Jul 6, 2017 · The conclusion drawn by the History documentary, based on the new Marshall Islands picture, is that Earhart was taken by the Japanese, later interned and eventually died a prisoner of war.
Jul 6, 2017 · Since Amelia Earhart, the famous American aviator, and Fred Noonan, her navigator, disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean during a 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe, groups of...
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Feb 17, 2019 · Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared the following day. Amelia Earhart disappeared on 2 July, 1937. The pair were in a Lockheed Model 10-E Electra, which had an aluminium patch attached to its fuselage in Miami to repair damage prior to their departure.
