July 2, 2012: The 75th Anniversary

As if we needed any more evidence that the so-called mainstream media despises the truth about Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan’s death on Saipan in Japanese captivity, more than a dozen major U.S. newspapers including the New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Kansas City Star and Christian Science Monitor have rejected the below commentary I sent to them last week,  in various versions to comply with their particular word-count requirements.

Only one editor, at the Baltimore Sun, even had the courtesy to respond, telling me in an email, “Can’t use it, but thanks.”  The rest simply ignored me.  Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last, includes a chapter titled, “The Establishment’s Contempt for the Truth,” that presents real-world examples of this aversion to the truth, and focuses on the work of well-known Earhart “experts” in the popular culture who have badly misled Americans with their public utterances, both written and verbal. 

This latest incident would qualify as yet another nail in the coffin of media deceit and denial in the Earhart case, a fact as yet unknown to the American public. We hope to change that, as more and more become aware of Truth at Last and its disturbing message that the U.S. government has been lying  to everyone for nearly 75 years.  The universally rejected letter, headlined “It’s time to end the truth embargo in the Earhart disappearance,” follows:

July 2 is the 75th anniversary of the tragic loss of  Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, her navigator, during their world-flight attempt on July 2, 1937.  For far too long, the only ideas about what happened to the fliers that seem to matter are those of Ric Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR).

This incessant media campaign promoting Gillespie’s long-discredited claims, all revolving around the idea that Earhart’s Electra 10E landed on Nikumaroro Atoll (then Gardner Island), three hundred miles southeast of Howland Island, the fliers’ intended destination, where Earhart and Noonan eventually perished, has dominated all Earhart-related news in recent memory.  Ten trips to the atoll since the late 1980s have produced zilch, yet Gillespie still insists that Earhart and Noonan were there and the Electra was washed over a reef by ocean tides.

Not one piece of the assorted detritus Gillespie and his cronies have collected from the tramped down island — home to hundreds of native Gilbertese, U.S. Coast Guard personnel and many others since the mid-1940s – and attempted to tie to Earhart or Noonan has stood up to scrutiny, and TIGHAR’s endless trips to Nikumaroro have proven only one thing – that Earhart and Noonan were never there.

Regardless, the propaganda continues unabated from the mainstream media. There seems no end to it, but when examined closely, a method can be detected in the madness.  The U.S. State Department’s recently announced support of TIGHAR’s current Nikumaroro jaunt only makes official what many Earhart researchers have long known: the U.S. government has no interest in admitting the truth about Earhart’s death on pre-World War II Saipan at the hands of the Japanese, but is determined to deny that fact and misdirect attention toward false solutions in the case.  The TIGHAR solution has been the establishment’s selected vehicle for Earhart disinformation since the group’s arrival on the scene in 1989.

Long before Gillespie and TIGHAR started to make national noise in the late 1980s, Fred Goerner had all but proved Earhart and Noonan’s presence on Saipan in the days following their disappearance.  Goerner’s 1966 classic, The Search for Amelia Earhart, is the only bestseller on the subject ever penned, and remains a gem of original research.  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 effort, Eyewitness: The Amelia Earhart Incident, recounts the author’s remarkable experiences on Saipan in the summer of 1944 during the American invasion that also indicated the presence there of Earhart, Noonan, and the Electra 10E in the weeks and months following their loss.

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 Earhart and Noonan’s ends on Saipan. Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last (Sunbury Press) my new book, offers many new findings, witness accounts and documents that overwhelmingly confirm the fact of Earhart and Noonan’s post-loss presence and deaths on Saipan while in Japanese captivity.  Besides presenting the most compelling case ever for Earhart on Saipan, I explain at length why our government is still so determined to deny the facts in the case, and how its aversion to the truth is reflected in virtually every public discussion about Amelia Earhart’s fate.

During the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, perhaps as early as 1937, the truth in the Earhart case became a sacred cow, and thus political poison in Washington, the fact of the fliers’ deaths in Japanese hands never to be officially acknowledged.  Every year – and sometimes several times a year — the government-media disinformation machine bombards the American public with the false claims of Earhart theorists, mainly Gillespie’s, occasionally those of crashed-and-sank proponents like Elgen Long, Dave Jourdan and Bob Ballard.

No matter the means, the goal of keeping the vast majority of Americans ignorant about the true fate of the lost fliers, arguably the first casualties of World War II, is always the same.  In the weeks and months preceding July 2, 2012, the “diamond anniversary,” of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, so to speak, this disinformation campaign has been operating in overdrive.

Some might interpret this letter as a bald attempt at a free ad for a new book, but this is about far more than just a book.  The loss of Amelia Earhart is a real and important event in this nation’s history that has been badly misrepresented and misunderstood for three-quarters of a century.  The good news is that in the marketplace of ideas, the truth will eventually come out, even if it takes 75 years to emerge.  The New York Times [and hundreds of other mainstream U.S. newspapers] can be part of the solution, or continue to help maintain the status quo in the Earhart case – complete and abject denial of the truth.