My wife, Nee, my cats, Pee Wee and Roy, and I finally made the trek to Jacksonville, Fla., my old Navy stomping ground, and taken up residence in a new home in a very nice part of the biggest city, geographically, in the United States.  It’s been in the works for well over a year,  but we’re sure this will be our home for the rest of our days. The weather in Knoxville was a bit too cold for Nee and her chronic bronchitis, and I’ve always wanted to return to Jacksonville, where I learned the nuts and bolts of newspaper reporting as a Navy journalist at NAS Cecil Field for two years in the early 1980s.

More nonsense from Rich Martini 

In his latest “Earhart on Saipan” blog entr, Rich Martini advances even more incredible falsehoods in his attempts to gain attention for his Saipan efforts to prove Amelia Earhart died on Saipan.  Though Martini is on the right side of the issue, his methods, which included digging holes, willy nilly, at the old Aslito Airfield site in a blind search for the long buried and destroyed Earhart Electra, as well as his writing illiteracy, as exemplified by his constant errors in grammar, syntax and his insistence on renaming Fred Goerner’s classic bestseller “Searching for Amelia” have done little to add credibility to what Goerner established in 1966 with The Search for Amelia Earhart, and what Truth at Last confirms in spades — Earhart and Fred Noonan’s presence and death on Saipan following their 1937 loss. 

Martini says he’s “speaking with the very first eyewitness to come forward, a Saipan native who lives in the US [sic],” and he displays an old photo of Josephine Blanco Akiyama, though he doesn’t name her.  He notes that “no one bothered to put her on film.  We will.”  The most outrageous lie to come out of Martini’s Saipan foray has been recorded by TIGHAR drone and pretend journalist Alexie Villegas Zotomayor, who reports in a March 28 Marianas Variety (Saipan newspaper) story that a Martini associate,  “said more than 200 eyewitnesses offered stories” about seeing Earhart on Saipan to the Martini group.  

This ridiculous falsehood, uttered by “Captain Cooper,” who stayed to dig at the old Aslito Field while Martini and Harris had already realized the absurd nature of their search and split Saipan weeks ago, undermines anything positive that might have been accomplished.  Why do these people find it so necessary to fabricate disinformation when the case for Earhart on Saipan is already so strong?  It does bear repeating that not a single story about Martini’s Saipan antics can be found in the American media.  Do we need any more evidence that the establishment hates the truth in the Earhart case, when so many ignore all attempts, misguided though some of these efforts might be, to prove it?

George Cepeda’s Amazon review

At my request, a discerning reader of Truth at Last, Ohioan George Cepeda, recently revised his already complimentary review of the book, adding a star to the four he had earlier awarded it, and rewriting several sections of his fine review.

Especially gratifying is his conclusion, which I couldn’t have written better myself: “This is by far the most authoritative and exhaustive book written on the Earhart mystery and provides the best round table of facts leading to the most probable conclusions,” Cepeda wrote. “It is as close to an expanded and THIRD revised edition of  The Search for Amelia Earhart as we will probably ever see.  I think Fred Goerner would have been proud to see how well the results of his research and others in this small investigatory community have been used.”  

Thanks George!