This afternoon I was at the local fitness center, trying unsuccessfully, as usual, to work off my latest frustrations, this time at being ignored by over 100 American newspapers I recently emailed and invited to review Truth at Last.  Around 2 o’clock I heard the voice of Knoxville’s  local drive-time talk show host Phil Williams, asking listeners, “When are we going to find Amelia Earhart’s airplane? Let’s talk about it at 3.”

That was all I needed to hear. Williams had pushed the only button possible to get me out of the gym and back home to call him from my downstairs office, short-circuiting my steam-room torment time to only six minutes vice the 15 or so I normally subject myself to.  After listening for 20 minutes to the phone ringing, Shelley, Phil’s sidekick, answered and told me that although Phil had mentioned the Earhart plane earlier, since Andy Griffith had just died, he would probably switch to that.  I told Shelley that was fine, but wanted to tell Phil about what was really happening with the Earhart disappearance.  In no time, Phil had me on the air, and I was telling him about Thomas Devine, Saipan and the discovery of the Electra there by American forces in the summer of 1944.

“WOW!” Phil said, and soon he invited me to come in and talk about it for an hour on the air. I gladly agreed, but insisted he read the book before I come in, and he said he would do so. I dashed to the Post Office pronto, mailed the book,  and now we wait for Phil to read the book, hoping and praying this might be the match that touches off the blaze we’ve always imagined. Without the help of people like Phil Williams, Truth at Last will wallow in the netherworld of literary obscurity, known only to Earhart buffs and other researchers, like my first book, With Our Own Eyes.  Stay tuned.

Kind Words from Bill Prymak, the Old Master

Bill Prymak, founder of the Amelia Earhart Society of Researchers, is among the last of the old vanguard of Earhart researchers that once included such luminaries as as Ron Reuther, Thomas Devine, Rollin Reineck, Vincent V. Loomis and Joe Gervais, and at 85, he is still sharp as a tack.  His hand-bound two-volume collection of Amelia Earhart Society Newsletters, produced from December 1989 to March 2000 in his Broomfield, Colo. office  is without question among the the greatest collections of original Earhart research extant, rivaled only by Fred Goerner’s papers, 900 files on hand at the Admiral Nimitz Museum, in  Fredericksburg, Texas.

Bill has never been one to seek the limelight but his three Marshall Islands expeditions in the late 1980s and early 1990s resulted in some of the finest original Earhart eyewitness and witness testimony ever recorded.  I try to do justice to Bill’s work in Truth at Last, but probably fall short in doing justice to this fine, generous soul. I hope he has at least 10 more years of quality time left, because IF this book is going to have any effect on the public’s perception of the Earhart disappearance, it might well take that long to produce any significant and lasting effect.

Such is the damage that has been inflicted by the the disinformation program our government has executed for 75 years.  After receiving the book yesterday in the mail, Bill, who’s seen many versions of the manuscript as we worked on it through the past five years, sent the AES Internet forum a message most kindly expressing his feelings about the book:

Everybody must get a copy of Mike Campbell’s just-arrived book AMELIA EARHART: THE TRUTH AT LAST.  It’s a fascinating, scholarly book digging like no researcher has ever done before, over 100 credible witnesses strongly supporting the Saipan-Mili answer to the mystery.  Mike has included some research I have never released before.  A must read for AE aficionados.