Recent find on Mili Atoll called “Concrete proof”: Chances artifacts not from Earhart Electra “remote”

Two small airplane parts discovered on Mili Atoll by Australian surfing legend Martin Daly and Earhart researcher Dick Spink, an aluminum boat kit manufacturer and high school teacher in Bow, Washington, should go a long way toward answering whether Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan landed on Mili Atoll after they went missing on July 2, 1937.  Please note that I wrote, should go a long way, because the sad reality is that nothing at all will likely change, thanks to a media determined to ignore and suppress the truth. (Boldface and italic emphasis mine throughout.)

If the headline of this story appears familiar, it should. Readers have been inundated with similar claims for the past 25 years, lies that trumpet the bogus “discoveries” of Ric Gillespie and his International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) in thousands of national and international media organizations, until it became no more than a ridiculous charade long ago.

But when a credible, legitimate find is made by a different group in a different location, one that supports the truth in the Earhart disappearance and doesn’t fit our media’s agenda, nobody will go anywhere near the story, with the exception of one solitary newspaper, the Kansas City Star.  No, dear reader, not FOX News, not Rush, not Savage, not Levin, not Drudge — none of our trusted media gatekeepers, conservative or liberal, have ever wanted anything to do with the facts in the Earhart case.  Will that change now?  This observer has serious doubts.

The circular metal dust cover from a landing-gear wheel assembly found by Martin Daly of Dick Spink’s search group on one of  Mili Atoll’s Endriken Islands, where Amelia Earhart is believed to have landed her Lockheed Electra 10E, according to eyewitnesses accounts that are accepted as fact by the Marshallese people.  “It is a dust cover off one of these Goodyear wheels,” aircraft analyst Jim Hayton said.  “Since I had the other two [same] wheels, I’m very familiar with this dust cover.  I know exactly what it is.”

The parts, a small aluminum cover plate for an auxiliary power unit (APU) and a circular dust cover from a landing-gear wheel assembly have been tied to the Earhart Electra in ways that should prove quite compelling to any objective analyst.  The evidence, if it’s eventually fully authenticated, would confirm Earhart’s Mili Atoll landing scenario first introduced in Fred Goerner’s 1966 classic, The Search for Amelia Earhart, corroborated by many Marshallese witnesses over the years and presented by researchers and authors such as Vincent V. Loomis, Oliver Knaggs, T.C. “Buddy”  Brennan and Bill Prymak, and which  Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last discusses at length.

In a Nov. 23 story,“Scrap metal from Marshall Islands supports Amelia Earhart theory, group says,” the Kansas City Star and reporter Brian Burns part with the longstanding, nationwide media agenda and present information that runs counter to the worthless “Nikumaroro hypothesis” made infamous by Ric Gillespie and TIGHAR.  The story announces the discovery of hard evidence that puts Earhart, Noonan and the Electra down on the reef off Barre Island, beyond what appears to be any reasonable doubt.

“… the chances of having another Lockheed on Mili Atoll in the Marshall Islands other than Amelia Earhart’s is pretty remote. So it’s pretty doggone concrete proof that there was a Lockheed 10 that landed there on that part of the island.” — Jim Hayton   

Since 2011, Spink has made four trips to the Mili Atoll area around Barre Island, pictured in Loomis’ 1985 book, Amelia Earhart: the Final Story, as the general area where Amelia crash-landed her Electra on July 2, 1937 after failing to arrive at Howland Island, more than 800 miles to the south-southeast.  Working with his friend Martin Daly and up to 30 native Marshallese armed with metal detectors on each of the three Endriken (Marshallese for “little”) Islands, about a mile east of Barre Island, Spink’s group recovered what appear to be pieces of the legendary lost Electra.  In fact, Spink said Daly personally found both the APU cover plate and the circular metal dust cover in the same area during two different searches.

The aluminum cover plate for an auxiliary power unit (APU) found on one of the tiny Endriken Islands at Mili Atoll during the first week of April 2012 by Martin Daly of the group led by Earhart researcher Dick Spink. Though further testing will be done to confirm the type of aluminum in the plate, it appears probable that it came from Amelia Earhart’s Electra 10E.

“To me, this is the Holy Grail,” said Jim Hayton, who’s been rebuilding and repairing old airplanes since he was a teen and owns North Sound Aviation in Sedro Wooley, Washington.  Hayton said the dust cover was part of the Goodyear Airwheel assembly from the left-side landing gear on Earhart’s Electra.  The Airwheel assembly included a “soft” tire manufactured especially for landing on rough terrain.

In a Nov. 24 interview, Spink who not only told the Kansas City Star that he “hasn’t made a penny on this,” the day before, told me that he’s spent $50,000 of his own money on his Earhart investigations.  He said that after studying old tidal records for the area, he’s virtually “certain that Amelia made a wheels-down landing” on a rough, Endriken Island beach, very near the water.”  This contrasts slightly with the account of Jororo that was related to Loomis by Ralph Middle (see p. 140 Truth at Last) that concerned the fliers entering a “yellow boat which grew” after landing “on the reef near Barre Island, about 200 feet offshore,” but certainly does not nullify his claims.

“It is a dust cover off one of these Goodyear wheels,” Hayton said in a videotaped analysis.  “Since I had the other two wheels, I’m very familiar with this dust cover.  I know exactly what it is.  That’s why I was so excited when Dick brought this for me to look at because there’s so few airplanes in the world back in the 30s that had these type of wheels on them, and the chances of having another Lockheed on Mili Atoll in the Marshall Islands other than Amelia Earhart’s is pretty remote.  So it’s pretty doggone concrete proof that there was a Lockheed 10 that landed there at that particular part of the island.”

Hayton has worked with the FAA and NTSB, and even testified before Congress.  His bona fides are beyond reproach, and although further analysis of the artifacts undoubtedly needs to be done, this observer has little doubt that Hayton’s verdict will stand up to any scrutiny that the skeptics will throw at it.

Dick Spink stands on the rocky beach near Barre Island where he believes Amelia Earhart landed her Electra 10E on July 2, 1937. Spinks’ compelling discoveries on Mili’s Endriken Islands have been met with abject silence by a media that refuses to face the truth in the Earhart disappearance.

As for the plate, Hayton said, “This plate appears to be a cover for an APU (auxiliary power unit) plug. . . . After the crash at Honolulu, this area was extensively damaged on her airplane and so they moved the APU plug as they rebuilt the airplane to a little bit safer location, so that’s why it ended up being tainted red instead of silver as it originally was.  I think that this red APU plug cover is the first evidence we have that she did indeed land [at Mili].  There are lots of eyewitness reports and I think she landed at Mili Atoll and then was captured by the Japanese.”

A satellite view of Mili Atoll, with Barre Island (note slight markings “Barre” and “here”) to the north-northwest, where Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan landed on July 2, 1937.

“Red on the leading edges of the wings and the tail was the color scheme of Earhart’s Electra,” Spink added.  “The red paint on the APU plate gives us a lead in establishing the fact that the electrical cover at Mili Atoll came from Earhart’s airplane.  There were no known Lockheeds with red electrical covers except Amelia Earhart’s L-10.  And to add more fuel to the fire, how many airplanes crashed at the Endriken Islands adjacent to Barre Island at Mili Atoll?  The Marshallese people will tell you there was only one. It was Amelia Earhart’s airplane.”

“There’s no evidence of any U.S. or Japanese aircraft being shot down or disabled in that part of Mili Atoll,” Les Kinney, a researcher and former government investigator told Burns.  “So where would this have come from?  In all likelihood, it came off Earhart’s plane.”

I asked Kinney to elaborate on his statement to the Star, because if it can absolutely determined that no other aircraft came down in the area where Spink found the artifacts, pure deduction can tell us that the parts came from the Earhart plane.

“There were 26 U.S. aircraft down over Mili Atoll (that does not mean all from gunfire),” Kinney told me in an email.  “There were 11 documented Japanese planes shot down over Mili Atoll.  Most Japanese planes were destroyed or damaged on the ground at Mili Island. . . . Natives, according to Spink, said there were no plane wrecks in that area [near Barre Island]. Knaggs reports a woman [the guide Dominick’s wife] who said she recalled a wreck in that area of the atoll.  However, Knaggs specifically looked for a plane wreck on the islands adjacent to Barre and said there were none (from the book as I recall).  Any remnants of wrecks would still be there.

“So, I think it would be very difficult to find from archival records exactly where each plane was specifically lost over Mili,” Kinney continued.  “It would be better if Spink analyzed the aluminum by comparing it to aluminum used by Lockheed from planes built during that time.  If they were from the same production runs, it would be easy to say the aluminum found on Mili matched the production runs of known planes built by Lockheed during that same period.  Spink also needs to make a 3D copy of that wheel hub,  then look for a Model 10 with the same Goodyear wheels and see if they are an exact match.”

Thus, for the for first time since 1981, when South African author and investigator Oliver Knaggs found the remains of a tin case buried on one of these small Endriken Islands (actually islets) by Fred Noonan soon after he and Amelia’s rough landing, in which Noonan injured his knee and head, we have solid evidence that confirms the Mili Atoll landing of the lost American fliers.

In informing the public about Spink’s findings on Mili, the Kansas City Star has been virtually alone in doing a job that all would do in a better world, so for that the newspaper should be commended.  Otherwise the piece is quite underwhelming.  The story’s lead sentence, “One person’s scrap is another person’s Holy Grail,” reflects the abjectly relativistic attitude that has permeated the Earhart case throughout its history, and which makes this story so maddening for those of us who’ve studied the Earhart case so long, and who are so convinced of the truth of their Mili landing. 

Burns presented Spink and Hayton’s findings and analysis, but he then dragged in Gillespie and Long for their obligatory misleading statements, to provide what he believes is the requisite “balance” in his story.  But the uninformed reader, instead of being enlightened, now has three “theories” to contemplate instead of two.  Many decades of successful government and media propaganda have thus achieved their desired effect: It’s simply an accepted truism, part of our cultural inheritance, that the disappearance of Amelia Earhart is an irresolvable mystery.

On this third trip to Mili Atoll, aboard the “XXXX” (named for the Australian beer) on the lagoon side of the Endriken Islands, where Dick Spink believed the Japanese loaded the Earhart Electra on a barge before transferring it to another ship en route to Saipan, Spink takes a break.

Here the real problem is on vivid display: Even the rare media outlet that’s willing to be “fair” in its coverage of the Earhart disappearance and present evidence to the public for the first time, such as this one in the Star, suffers from this preordained misconception.  All stories must be shoehorned into the false template that all theories in the Earhart “mystery” are equal, and as a result, the public remains confused and ignorant.

After reading the Star story, an astute observer told me, “I was not impressed by the article.  Really did not say anything . . . encourage further reading, etc.  Pointless.”  And as I told Burns in an email, “All theories are not equal, and there’s only one truth.”  Actually, I should have written, “All theories are equally worthless; there can only be one truth, one reality, and it’s the Mili-to-Saipan scenario.”  Sadly, this story from the Kansas City Star will not make a ripple in the nation’s perception of the Earhart case, and two days after its publication, not a single newspaper has picked up the story, a state of affairs that recalls the media blackout that accompanied the publication of Truth at Last two years ago and which continues unabated.

I’m also fully aware that by publishing this post, even on a relatively obscure blog like this one, I might be considered “too extreme” in my views to be considered for comments on future Earhart stories by the Star, and other media organizations as well.  If that’s the case, so be it.  To quote the great Barry Goldwater: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”  Simply insert “truth” for liberty above, and you have perfectly described the situation in the Earhart matter.

If we lived in a just world, Dick Spink’s discoveries would soon put Ric Gillespie out of the Earhart business forever, his nearly three decades of damage to the truth in the Earhart case finally, mercifully ended once and for all.  But the history of this entire phenomenon has never been about “solving the Earhart mystery,” as our nation of  incurious, apathetic lemmings has been led to believe for so long – not at all.

The Earhart disappearance has always been about politics – the politics of deceit and the politics of protecting the reputation of a dishonest, feckless president. Nothing found at Mili is going to change that, but that won’t stop those of us who care from continuing to tell the true story of Amelia Earhart’s sad fate.

         ****UPDATE****UPDATE****UPDATE****UPDATE

Researcher Les Kinney’s Google Earth photo showing approximate location of the artifacts and where the natives in July 1937 said they saw the aircraft ditch near one of the Endriken Islands within a short distance of Barre Island, near the area where Vincent V. Loomis, author of Amelia Earhart: The Final Story was told that the Electra landed.  Dick Spink and Kinney agree that based upon the early native accounts, the plane must have been dragged and pulled using the carts from north to south down the western interior side of the island, where the two small parts were found by Martin Daly of Spink’s search group. (Updated Dec. 24, 2014.)