David Martin, the erudite investigative journalist, poet and observer of the passing scene, whose groundbreaking work on James V. Forrestal’s alleged suicide has been assiduously ignored by our ever-more corrupt mainstream media, and whose review of Truth at Last in August 2012, “Hillary Clinton and the Amelia Earhart Cover-up,” remains the best done on the book, yesterday inadvertently informed me about an interesting but heretofore unknown thread in the Amelia-on-Saipan saga.

Martin, also known as “DC Dave” to his online readers, and whose website offers a lengthy, six-part 1996 study of the Vincent Foster murder, still officially classified as a suicide,  “America’s Dreyfus Affair: The Case of the Death of Vincent Foster.”  This study would have been published as a book long ago in a world more interested in truth, told me in a brief email that the current Wikipedia entry on Amelia Earhart contained references to Truth at Last and With Our Own Eyes.  I wasn’t aware of this, but as I told Dave, these are very tiny bones that the ultra-biased establishment organ Wikipedia is throwing our way, and mean very little until and unless Wikipedia changes its deprecatory tone about Amelia and Fred Noonan’s deaths on Saipan.

Wikipedia continues to deny the truth, presented in Truth at Last, and relegates it to nearly the bottom of its list of possible solutions to the mystery, calling it one of several “unsupportable . . . myths, legends and claims.”  There’s no need to expand here on the dismal and irresponsible stance Wikipedia takes toward Amelia’s tragic end, but one of the new citations did catch my attention.

Among the new anecdotal footnotes that Wikipedia offers at the bottom of its Earhart listing is an article titled,  “Cousin: Japanese captured Amelia Earhart,” written by David C. Henley, that appeared in the Oct. 31, 2009 Nevada Appeal, the Carson City newspaper.  In his piece, Henley writes about local celebrity Wally Earhart, who portrays Abraham Lincoln in Carson City historical events, and who claims to be Amelia’s fourth cousin, and Wally’s beliefs about what really happened to her:

Wally Earhart of Carson City, the fourth cousin of Amelia Earhart, says the U.S. government continues to perpetrate a “massive cover-up” about her mysterious disappearance in the Pacific 72 years ago.

Because of the current surge in interest about the pilot’s fate spurred by the recent release of the film “Amelia,” starring Richard Gere and Hilary Swank, it is time the American public “know the truth about Amelia’s last days,” said Earhart, who will portray Abraham Lincoln as grand marshal of the Nevada Day parade today.

Amelia and her navigator, Fred Noonan, did not die as claimed by the government and the Navy when their twin-engine Electra plunged into the Pacific on July 2, 1937, Wally Earhart said in an interview.

“They died while in Japanese captivity on the island of Saipan in the Northern Marianas,” claims Earhart, a 38-year Carson City resident who often portrays Lincoln and other historical figures at appearances sponsored by groups such as the Nevada Historical Society.

“The Navy and the federal government would have you believe that Amelia and Noonan died on impact when their plane ran out of gas while attempting to reach Howland Island during their flight around the world,” Earhart said.

“Their airplane did crash into the Pacific, but instead of dying, the pair was rescued by a nearby Japanese fishing trawler. The Electra airplane was still floating and the Japanese hauled it aboard their ship in a large net.

“The Japanese then transported Amelia Earhart, Noonan and the airplane to Saipan. Noonan was beheaded by the Japanese and Amelia soon died from dysentery and other ailments,” Wally Earhart continued. He added that the Japanese troops on the island cut the airplane into scrap and tossed the remnants into the Pacific.

Wally got most of he story that we’ve come to be familiar with correctly, but this last detail, that the Japanese destroyed Amelia’s Electra and threw it in the ocean, runs counter to the accounts of many eyewitnesses who spent the summer of 1944 on Saipan. The rest of Henley’s story can be found here.

An Earhart researcher who usually prefers anonymity told me that he was familiar with Wally’s 2009 account to Henley, had looked into it and found that Wally had no special knowledge or insight, but had acquired his opinion, mostly spot on, by reading books such as Fred Goerner’s The Search for Amelia Earhart and Thomas E. Devine’s Eyewitness: The Amelia Earhart Incident, which offer clear glimpses of the truth to anyone interested.

I will attempt to contact Wally Earhart, as well as Mr. Henley, who is the publisher emeritus of the Lahontan Valley (Nevada) News in hopes that he might be interested in reviewing Truth at Last for the local newspapers he regularly contributes to, including the Nevada Appeal.