June 2: Gillespie and TIGHAR — Again

Two months have passed since I posted an entry on this virtually invisible blog, where only a scant few intrepid souls dare to tread.  Just as I was beginning to wonder why we haven’t lately heard from Ric Gillespie and TIGHAR (which has also become an acronym for deceit and misdirection in the Earhart disappearance), they turn up in the headlines once again, like the bad pennies they are.

Apparently it took nearly a full year before Gillespie could conjure up a new reason to fleece the unwary and justify yet another trip back to  godforsaken Nikumaroro Atoll, where he insists he can find Amelia Earhart’s Electra, if only he’s given enough OPM (other people’s money).  How many times have we seen this despicable song and dance?  I’ve lost count.

 “Amelia Earhart’s Plane Revealed in Sonar?” Discovery News asks its uninformed  readers to consider in its May 29 edition.  “A grainy sonar image captured off an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati might represent the remains of the Electra, the two-engine aircraft legendary aviator Amelia Earhart was piloting when she vanished on July 2, 1937 in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator,” Discovery News reporter Rossella Lorenzi writes.

 Released by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has long been investigating Earhart’s last, fateful flight, the images show an “anomaly” resting at the depth of about 600 feet in the waters off Nikumaroro island, some 350 miles southeast of Earhart’s target destination, Howland Island.

. . .  “We currently project that it will take nearly $3,000,000 to put together an expedition that can do what needs to be done. It’s a lot of money, but it’s a small price to pay for finding Amelia,” Gillespie said.

Loathe to miss another golden opportunity to keep its readers across the pond as stupid as possible, the UK’s Daily Mail echoed the Discovery News story two days later in its Mail Online edition, asking “Is this Amelia Earhart’s plane? Sonar image from uninhabited Pacific island could show remains of aviator’s aircraft Electra that disappeared in 1937.”  The extensive high-tech photo and graphic layouts in both articles are hugely overdone, as if both publications are trying to force-feed Gillespie’s latest red herring to their readers.  For anyone remotely informed about the Earhart matter, to label these stories and Gillespie’s claims utterly ridiculous is an exercise in abject understatement.

Pouring gasoline on a roaring fire of mendacity, Lorenzi reports that a “number of artifacts recovered by TIGHAR during 10 expeditions have suggested that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, made a forced landing on the island’s smooth, flat coral reef.”  What Lorenzi fails to tell readers is that NONE of the artifacts Gillespie has dug up on the trampled-over island has ever been connected to Earhart or Noonan, that hundreds of U.S. Coast Guard LORAN Station personnel and Gilbertese settlers lived on Nikumaroro for over 20 years between 1940 and the early 1960s, and that the media’s continuing embrace of Gillespie’s third-hand, long-debunked theory is pure disinformation, meant to keep the public ignorant about the facts in the Earhart matter.

This time Gillespie wants $3 million to seek out the source of this “sonar” hit or whatever.  It’s getting very difficult to read this crap anymore.  With Gillespie, TIGHAR and their media accomplices, it’s just the same hag dressed up in different clothes.  What it does show, beyond a doubt, is how alive and well the Earhart cover-up is, and how heavily invested the establishment is in keeping the masses in the dark about the truth. 

No observers in their right minds would give Gillespie a dime after 10 trips to Nikumaroro and nothing to show for it, so why would an objective media, without an agenda, spend two lines in promoting Gillespie’s constant failures?  Once again, Gillespie has proven Amelia Earhart was never on Nikumaroro, and once again, he’s going to be rewarded for it with a fat payday.  Don’t ask me where I think the money to fund these unending Pacific cruises comes from.

The Mail Online article saved the worst for last, dismissing the truth in two sentences, which actually is more than most “news organizations” will spend.  “A few theorists reckon that she Earhart was spying on Japan and had been captured and executed,” the unnamed Daily Mail reporter wrote.  “This theory has been discounted by the American authorities and press.”  Just WHY American authorities and the press have discounted this “theory,” of course, is not mentioned, nor is the location of Earhart and Noonan’s deaths — SAIPAN.

 If you’re curious, and you’ve somehow stumbled upon this blog, I suggest that the truth about these and other questions about the so-called “Earhart Mystery” can be found in my book, Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last.