Reporter's diary adds clue in Amelia Earhart mystery

[Story]

Earhart flies from Hawaii to California on this day in 1935
11 January 2008 | 03:06 | FOCUS News Agency

Earhart flies from Hawaii to California on this day in 1935. In the first flight of its kind, American aviator Amelia Earhart departs Wheeler Field in Honolulu, Hawaii, on a solo flight to North America. Hawaiian commercial interests offered a USD 10,000 award to whoever accomplished the flight first. The next day, after traveling 2,400 miles in 18 hours, she safely landed at Oakland Airport in Oakland, California.

On May 21, 1932, exactly five years after American aviator Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, Earhart became the first woman to repeat the feat when she landed her plane in Londonderry, Ireland.

Two years after her Hawaii to California flight, she attempted with co-pilot Frederick J. Noonan to fly around the world, but her plane was lost on July 2, 1937, somewhere between New Guinea and Howland Island in the South Pacific. Radio operators picked up a signal that she was low on fuel--the last trace the world would ever know of Amelia Earhart.

 

[Fletch]

Pardon the bump...

...but some may care to know that back in November I stumbled on reporter Jim Carey's journal on the web and posted about it here. Carey represented the AP on the press ship for Earhart's last flight.

Not loads about the disappearance itself, but at least his notes weren't confiscated or classified.

In any case, an evocative piece of a lost era when the world was getting smaller, but was still bigger than we today can imagine.

 

[Julius Xavier]

Speaking of Amelia...

Rumor has it Hillary Swank is playing the flying ace in an upcoming movie.

I can kinda see it. I guess.


Hillary Swank Eager to Tell The Story of Amelia Earhart
Plans on flying the friendly skies to prep for her role.
by Fred Topel | December 18, 2007

Hilary Swank Will Play Amelia Earhart Two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank will have her work cut out for her when she plays legendary female pilot Amelia Earhart in her next movie. Comparisons to the real-life Earhart may be even harder to face than dressing like a boy and bulking up for the boxing ring.

"There is an abundance of material to do research on with her," said Swank. "I'm actually going to start that research in January and I'm very much looking forward to it. She was certainly a pioneer of her time. She was a wonderful role model to women. She had such strength in a man's world and especially in that era. People said, 'Do you think that she used her publicity?' Of course she did. Flying is expensive, so it's great that there is all this media for me to do my research with. She used it well to benefit her dream. So I'm really looking forward to diving into that and learning how to fly. I'll certainly do all of that."

Philip Noyce is directing the film, which begins shooting in February. While Earhart may be the most well-known celebrity Swank has yet played, she does have experience with biographical stories.

"Any time that you play a character who was alive, you just don't have as much room to creating fictional parts of the person. You want to find as much as you can about the reality of the person and do justice to their story, so you do feel an avid responsibility. Whether they're famous or not, you still want to tell the story in a way that they would be proud of."

Swank sees Earhart as an important role model for women. "I think she was willing to do things that were deemed not for women, and did them just as well as men. I think that was a blessing and a curse. I think it was something that was difficult, it was a challenge, certainly -- but also really helped with all the other women at that time. She was a pioneer for women certainly too, not just for aviation, but for women."

 

[Patrick Murtha]

I asked my father about this story again this weekend, just becuase it was a bit hazy to me too. Some of my details were a bit off (I was only 6!). My dad set me straight on a few points :

1. The woman who told him the story was the daughter of the woman who claimed to see Amelia Earhart. (When you're 6 everyone looks 60. )

2. According to her, the Japanese soldiers forced the native women on Saipan (including her mother) to feed the prisoners with their own food. Which was an extra burden on them.

3. Not only did the women on Sapian (Saipanese? Saipanians?) think it was strange that the woman prisoner was wearing men's clothes (she mentioned a leather hat) but also the Japanese soldiers had told them that she was an airplane pilot -- apparently this is what really shocked them, because they didn't believe women could do such things. They just didn't have any similar cultural reference point.

I also talked to my dad about digitizing some of the slides he took of the jail cell, and other Japanese war era ruins on Saipan. It's one of a billion projects he's got going, but as soon as he does, I'll post them.

The Earhart/Saipan connection is explored at length in the 1966 book The Search for Amelia Earhart by CBS reporter Fred Goerner. I read the book with fascination as a teen in the early 1970s. Goerner has been dismissed or discredited by many later Earhart researchers, but something about his account has always nagged at me: There were too many Saipanese witnesses who made claims similar to what your father heard. And the question remains: If it wasn't Earhart and Noonan whom the Saipanese saw, just what American female and male were imprisoned on Saipan?

 

[carter]

...but some may care to know that back in November I stumbled on reporter Jim Carey's journal on the web and posted about it here. Carey represented the AP on the press ship for Earhart's last flight.

Not loads about the disappearance itself, but at least his notes weren't confiscated or classified.

In any case, an evocative piece of a lost era when the world was getting smaller, but was still bigger than we today can imagine.

Reading the 19 pages from Jim Carey's journal makes me think that that voyage of the Itasca, first to meet and later in search of Amelia Earhart, would make a fine film. Especially with the young reporter as the lead character against the backdrop of the doomed flight. Pretty much an all male cast.

 

[Fletch]

Rumor has it Hillary Swank is playing the flying ace in an upcoming movie.

I can kinda see it. I guess.

Drink your milk, Hillary. You'll need a few extra pounds, not many, but that Hollywood scarecrow look ain't gonna fly.

How can we get John Chapman to do the flight leathers for the pic? Or does it all have to be left to Ralph Lauren?

 

[Twitch]

I read every book and written word on this subject years ago. It is amazing that most of it was written before the internet yet all the confilcting theories and positively true stories sound like web hoopla.

She crashed and died, she bellied in and lived to be picked up by the Japanese, she was seen as a prisoner in multiple facilities to where they couldn't all be her due to date conflicts. She was executed. She was spying. She wasn't. She was released after the war and secretly lived a hidden life in the US thereafter. Her plane was found in aerial photos of scrapped aircraft in Japan. Her plane with the exact same manufacturer numbers actually crashed in the 1970s near Palmdale CA. Various nisland natives swear they watched her be buried. US military personnel swear they exhumed her body after the war. And a Corsair fighter pilot I knew told me when they got to the Marshall islands they asked the natives about Earhart who told them, "They crashed and the Japs took them."

So if we can get Lee Harvey Oswald connected somehow THEN we'll have a yarnlol

The hyperbole simply can't be seperated from the scant facts.

 

[Mike in Seattle]

You should tell these guys your dad's Saipan story
www.tighar.org/

But the Saipan, and other similar stories, are old, old news. I remember them visiting various islands where Earhart was supposedly imprisoned, on 60 Minutes or similar news shows back in the 70's. I remember watching it because 60 Minutes was on almost every Sunday evening when I was growing up, but at about the same time Cronkite had resurrected, for a short time, the old You Are There program and one of the first stories they did was Amelia Earhart's non-arrival at Howland. I also remember a couple of older women who friends & relatives claimed was Earhart in an assumed identity.

And to be absolutely clear, I'm not discounting eniksleestack's story told here in the least - but any Earhart enthusiast has probably already heard about the same locations or similar many, many times.

 

[Mike in Seattle]

So if we can get Lee Harvey Oswald connected somehow THEN we'll have a yarn lol

Wasn't he Earhart & Noonan's secret love-child?

 

[Twitch]

That woman spotted here in the States belonged to a woman's aviation club of some sort. Ended up that, you know how each persons ears are unique? Well they compared pics of this woman to Earhart and....no cigar!:eusa_doh:

 

[Story]

Now researchers at the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or Tighar, say they are on the verge of recovering DNA evidence that would demonstrate Earhart had been stranded on Nikumaroro Island (formerly known as Gardner Island) before finally perishing there.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id=8160365&page=1

 

[Lauren]

That was a great article. Thank you for posting it.

 

[Talbot]

"A woman wearing man's clothes" could have been any military nurse in a battle zone. And if the Japanese caught nurses, they imprisoned them.

Not always. http://www.ww2talk.com/forum/war-ag...vian-bullwinkle-massacre-nurses-japanese.html

 

[Story]

* DNA tests have not yet offered proof that Earhart lived as a castaway on a remote island in the Pacific.
* Genetic tests have not been able to answer whether a bone fragment is in fact part of a human finger.
* Researchers have, however, succeeded in extracting human DNA from clumps of a substance believed to be feces.
http://news.discovery.com/history/amelia-earhart-clumps-island-castaway-clues-110302.html

http://news.discovery.com/history/amelia-earhart-wide-angle.html

 

[thor]

What a fascinating bit of history! Afew years ago I was off the coast of Howland Island aboard a U.S. Navy ship and let me just say that is one desolate area of the pacific! There is absolutely nothing around, and while looking at a nautical chart of the area up on the bridge of my ship, Howland was just a speck on a huge expanse of nothingness.

Ask yourself this question: if that were you flying that Lockheed Electra in 1937, with precious little fuel remaining and no GPS, no life raft, no parachute, would you waste what little fuel you had left flying off to some reef/atoll/uninhabited island, where there was ZERO chance of taking off again even if you survived the ditching? Or would you search frantically along the last charted Line of Position despeartely seeking the sanctuary of Howland Isalnd and the welcoming safety of a landing strip? I know what I would do if I were in Ms. Earhart's shoes...and I ain't telling!

What a mystery!

 

[59Lark]

I remember reading the 1966 book at the local library and have always leaned that way, even if she was stranded at the desolate island why so much cover up is the navy ie the goverment that ashamed and how long did this cover up continue. It really wasnt that far fetched that fdr asked her to see how many japanese bases or navy was out there, and the search for her was massive, guilt from fdr. When one of passes the pearly gates we will have to ask , not that curious yet. The truth is she wasnt that good of pilot and their was equipment isssues. I believe too much evidence has been destroyed and lost to figure this out with a time machine. Yours 59Lark

 

[Story]

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had encouraging words Tuesday for a new investigation into one of the 20th century's most enduring mysteries: the fate of American aviator Amelia Earhart, who went missing without a trace over the South Pacific 75 years ago.

Clinton and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood gave their support and encouragement on Tuesday to historians, scientists and salvagers from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, which is launching a new search for the wreckage of Earhart's Lockheed Electra plane in the waters off the remote island of Nikumaroro, in what is now the Pacific nation of Kiribati.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/...cid=maing-grid7|aim|dl1|sec1_lnk2&pLid=144954

 

[cookie]

New Theory

http://www.msn.com/en-au/video/watch/where’s-amelia/vi-BBjSb8u?ocid=SKY2DHP