Nauticos continues Earhart ocean-search insanity
One of the better-known definitions of insanity has been attributed to Albert Einstein, who described it as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” I wonder how many times it would take Nauticos, or the rest of clueless crashed-and-sankers to search the Pacific floor without finding the Earhart Electra before they admitted they might be wrong about what happened to Amelia and her plane. Based on past performances, the answer is, sadly, “Never.”
I didn’t even know about the current search until today, when David Billings told me about it in an email from his home in Nambour, Australia. Billings, of course, has his own, far more credible theory about where the Earhart Electra lies, and it’s certainly not on the bottom of the Pacific. More about David in a moment, but this latest from Nauticos is just a bit too clever, a bit too slick, and more than a bit too much.
Albert Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Thanks to Nauticos, we have a brand new example of modern-day insanity at work in the latest underwater search for Amelia Earhart in the vicinity of Howland Island.
Nauticos has fancied up its website for the new search, with lots of bells and whistles, and even sports a special Expedition Portal, wherein fans can get near daily updates on this latest foray into crash-and-sank futility, dubbed the “Eustace Earhart Discovery Expedition.” Rather than further comment on this inane voyage, I’ll quote Dave Jourdan, Nauticos’ coordinator and publisher, as he describes his latest boondoggle in the lead paragraph on Nauticos’ Amelia page:
On February 18, 2017 a team from Nauticos with stratospheric explorer Alan Eustace and aviation pioneer Elgen Long departed Honolulu for the vicinity of Howland Island, 1,600 miles to the southwest, to complete the deep sea search for Amelia Earhart’s lost Lockheed Electra. Adding to the work conducted during prior expeditions in 2002 and 2006, the team plans to complete a sonar survey of about 1,800 square miles of seafloor, an area believed to contain the aircraft. The expedition will use autonomous underwater technology provided by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to image the ocean floor nearly 18,000 feet below.
“We left Honolulu February 18 and expect to be at sea for 30-45 days,” writes. “I hope you enjoy sailing with us. This portal will be updated frequently and will be the best way to keep abreast of the progress of the expedition.”
What is really going on here, one might ask. Can these otherwise well-educated, highly skilled men be so stupid as to actually believe their own press releases about the Electra lying on the bottom of the ocean? Not likely. As I wrote in Truth at Last (page 304 Second Edition), “Is it coincidence that the majority of Nauticos’ lucrative contracts accrue from the largess of the Navy, whose original Earhart search report remains the official, if rarely stated position of the U.S. government? Here we see yet another establishment effort to maintain and perpetuate the myth that Earhart and Noonan ‘landed on the sea to the northwest of Howland Island’ on July 2, 1937.”
So what we have, in my view, is just another Earhart disinformation exercise wrapped up in a glorified ocean floor mapping project. Don’t forget, we’re rapidly approaching the 80th anniversary of Amelia’s disappearance, and the sheeple must be kept misinformed, lest they get any funny ideas.
Now, thanks to Nauticos and its intrepid team of high-tech adventurers, we have a new example of modern-day insanity at work — in the latest Pacific-floor quest for Amelia Earhart’s Electra. If anyone out there can tell us how many of these ridiculous searches have been undertaken since 1960, you not only have too much time on your hands, you’re a far better researcher than I’ll ever be. With the exception of TIGHAR, of course, and its 11 fruitless excursions to Nikumaroro, it doesn’t get any worse than this in the Earhart hunt.
The offshore supply ship Mermaid Vigilance, currently searching for Amelia Earhart’s Electra in the waters off Howland Island. Don’t expect to see headlines when she returns empty-handed, with Nauticos members claiming to have made great progress in mapping the ocean floor. But Amelia’s plane will have eluded the intrepid Nauticos team once again, for the glaringly obvious reason that it’s never been there.
On the other hand, David Billings and his New Britain theory stand alone among all so-called theories, in that it poses a real, unanswered question about a credible scenario, one that needs to be resolved with finality before we can proceed without second thoughts. Let’s briefly return to my Dec. 6, 2016 post, “New Britain theory presents incredible possibilities,” so that new readers can better understand:
Of all the various theories and searches regarding the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, Fred Noonan, and their Lockheed Electra, only one endeavor has the tangible documentary evidence and eyewitness accounts to buttress the conclusion to their final resting place – the jungle floor in Papua New Guinea. In 1945, an Australian infantry unit discovered an unpainted all-metal twin-engine aircraft wreck in the jungle of East New Britain Island, in what was then called New Guinea.
The Australian infantry patrol was unsure of their actual position in the jungle and were on site for only a few minutes. Before they left the site they retrieved a metal tag hanging by wire on an engine mount. The Australians reported their find and turned in the tag upon return to base. The tag has yet to be recovered from the maze of Australian and American archives, but the letters and numbers etched upon it were transcribed to a wartime map. The map, used by the same Australian unit, was rediscovered in the early 1990’s and revealed a notation “C/N 1055” and two other distinctive identifiers of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra Model 10E.
Amazing, is it not? How can we possibly explain this C/N 1055 inscribed on a map case, and the string of numbers and letters, “600 H/P. S3H/1 C/N1055,” which remains the most significant historical notation found to date in the search for Earhart’s aircraft?
In an email today, Billings sounded more optimistic than ever, and says he’s getting closer to the plane wreck in the remote jungles of East New Britain that he’s been unable to locate in 16 searches thus far.
“We are in the middle of the planning stage for June this year,” Billings wrote. “The main target is a bare patch of earth I saw in late 1996 which wasn’t significant to us at that time, when we were looking for a wreck ‘on the ground.’ Now we know it is buried, and as the bare patch is in a very likely area from the description of the site by the Vets, it now becomes a principal target. If not there, then we spread outwards East and West in this likely area.
David Billings, an Australian adventurer of the old-school variety, is planning a June 2017 return to the remote jungles and waters of East New Britain in search of the wreck of Amelia Earhart’s Electra.
“One of my team keeps a diary,” Billings continued, “and he recorded that in late 1996 he cut his knee with his bush knife and I restricted him to the camp until the wound knitted, while we went out without him. It reminded me that when he was not with us, we saw the bare patch where a bulldozer had been working and we remarked on it at the time but thought no more of it. We now have been told that a bulldozer driver buried it out of ‘Tribal Jealousy’ (as described by the local people). Different picture now. The diary, which I was transcribing into MS Word, jogged my memory about the bare patch. There will be trees on it now, of course, but I will be able to find it as I know where it is. I have already got quite a collection of SAT photos and they’re graded into Lat/Long very accurately. I’ve had some help with that so our GPS units will be able to direct us to the plotted Waypoint.”
“Whatever the wreck is, it has to be eliminated,” he concluded. “If it is not the Electra, well, it will be someone else that has been found. That’s the pragmatic view I take on the matter. If not hers, whose is it?”
Whose, indeed? We wish David Billings all the luck he’ll need to be successful in his forthcoming search, so that once and for we might answer this nagging question, one of the true “mysteries” in the Earhart saga.
Jim Golden and FDR’s Amelia Earhart “Watergate”
In a March 2, 2015 post titled “Jim Golden’s legacy of honor in the Earhart saga,” I introduced the late Jim Golden, a close friend of Fred Goerner and, in the day, a near-legendary figure in Earhart research circles. Golden’s unique career included eight years as a Secret Service agent in the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, two years as Howard Hughes’ chief of security in Las Vegas, and a stint in the U.S. Justice Department, from where he tried to help Goerner search for the elusive top-secret Earhart files that President John F. Kennedy had allowed Goerner and California newspaperman Ross Game to see briefly in 1963, just before JFK’s assassination in Dallas.
Among the secrets Golden shared with Goerner was the revelation that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were brought to the islands of Roi-Namur, Kwajalein Atoll by air from Jaluit Atoll by the Japanese in 1937, a fact he learned from Marine Intelligence officers during the American invasion of Kwajalein in January 1944.
Private First Class James O. Golden, circa 1944. As a photographer assigned to independent duty in Marine Intelligence on Kwajalein in January 1944, Golden saw a report by officers of the 24th Marine Intelligence Unit that remains hidden in top-secret government files.
During several telephone conversations I had with Golden in the summer of 2008, he recalled his experiences as a 19-year-old enlisted Marine photographer in the intelligence section of the 4th Marine Division during the Kwajalein campaign.
“The Marines wrote up a detailed report capturing the info that related that in 1937 two white persons, a male and female were brought by plane to Roi,” Golden told me, “the man with a white bandage on his head and the woman with short-cut hair wearing men’s pants, who were taken across a causeway to the Namur Admin building. Three days later taken out to a small ship in the lagoon, which then departed. I read the report myself. This report would routinely be forwarded to 4th Div. Intel, then on to the U.S. Navy. This report must have been the first sighting [sic] of her capture by the Japanese by U.S. forces at that time.”
The following story, “FDR’s Amelia Earhart ‘Watergate,’” by one Leon Freilich, was published in the Jan. 3, 1978 issue of the Midnight Globe tabloid newspaper, which at some later date changed its name to the familiar Globe that adorns check-out racks in supermarkets and other retail stores nationwide, along with its better-known rival, the National Enquirer. The story later appeared in the Amelia Earhart Society Newsletter’s June 1992 issue. (Boldface emphasis mine throughout.)
“FDR’s Amelia Earhart ‘Watergate’”
The late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt covered up the truth behind aviatrix Amelia Earhart’s mysterious disappearance and created his own Watergate — nearly 40 years before Richard Nixon.
Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. She tried in 1937 to fly around the world and disappeared into the Pacific. Now a top-level Justice Department official, James Golden, charges that FDR withheld the facts of her disappearance for his own ends.
This is the headline of the Jan. 3, 1978 Midnight Globe story on Jim Golden’s bold charges of cover-up in the Earhart disappearance by Franklin D. Roosevelt as well as every subsequent administration to protect FDR’s checkered legacy, which would have never survived public knowledge of his failure to come to the aid of Earhart and Fred Noonan when they were in Japanese hands in 1937.
“Amelia Earhart was killed in the line of duty, and President Roosevelt refused to let it get out,” Golden, director of enforcement for the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in Washington, D.C., told MIDNIGHT GLOBE.
“She was a spy for the Navy. She didn’t just ‘disappear,’ as Roosevelt led the press and public to believe. Amelia Earhart was taking reconnaissance shots of Japanese naval facilities when her plane was forced down. She died at the hands of the Japanese.”
Similar accusations of a cover-up have been leveled in the past, and a book [Fred Goerner’s The Search for Amelia Earhart] detailed some of the charges several years ago. However, this is the first attack on Roosevelt’s credibility by a top figure in the federal government.
Why did FDR stonewall the facts? “Amelia Earhart was a glamorous aviatrix and America’s favorite woman adventurer,” Golden said. “For some reason, she’d agreed to use her round-the-world flight as a mask for a spying operation. In those days spying was considered the lowest of the low in this country. So when she lost her life, Roosevelt was afraid he would lose millions of votes in the next election. Consequently, he stifled the truth.”
How does the high-level government prober know this? “There’s a top-secret file with all this information in the White House,” he revealed to MIDNIGHT GLOBE. “It can’t be released, except by the President. “But two of my friends in the intelligence community have seen it. I consider them wholly reliable. They told me the file includes a four-page summary of Japan’s secret report on the Amelia Earhart case.
“This summary relates that she and her co-pilot [sic], Fred Noonan, were captured by Japanese forces on July 2, 1937, near Saipan, the Central Pacific headquarters for Japanese ships. The Japanese took the two there and kept them under heavy interrogation for a year and a half. Then they beheaded Noonan. Amelia Earhart died the very next day. The records said the cause of death was dysentery, but even if that’s true, the blame belongs on her captors, who kept her penned up in primitive conditions.”
Jim Golden, Washington, D.C., circa mid-1970s. As a highly placed U.S. Justice Department official, Golden joined Fred Goerner in the newsman’s partially successful search for the elusive, top-secret files that might have finally broken open the Earhart case. During his unique career, Golden led Vice President Richard M. Nixon’s Secret Service detail and directed the personal security of Howard Hughes in Las Vegas.
The file confirmed what Golden had learned first-hand during World War II. “I was a Marine intelligence officer [actually a private first class] and landed on Saipan [actually Kwajalein] in January 1944,” he said. “Some of the elders described to me in minute detail how a white woman and man had been seized from a fallen giant bird.
“That would be their plane. And the pair were kept on the island as prisoners until the Japanese chopped off the man’s head. The woman — Amelia Earhart, of course — was never seen again.
“The natives’ testimony plus the secret file fit together too neatly to spell anything but the full story. I’m telling you this not to embarrass the U.S. government. My motive is simply this: Amelia Earhart gave her life for her country, and it ought to have the good grace to thank her for it.” (End of Midnight Globe article.)
In an October 1977 Albuquerque (New Mexico) Tribune story on Golden, “Prober says Amelia Earhart death covered up,” Golden, then with the U.S. Justice Department, told reporter Richard Williams that President Franklin “Roosevelt hid the truth about Miss Earhart and Noonan, fearing public reaction to the death of a heroine and voter reaction at the polls. . . . What really bothers me about the whole thing is that if Miss Earhart was . . . a prisoner of the Japanese, as she seems to have been, why won’t the government acknowledge the facts and give her the hero’s treatment she deserves?” Golden asked.
Sadly, Golden passed away unexpectedly at his home on March 7, 2011 at age 85. As I wrote in closing “Jim Golden’s legacy of honor in the Earhart saga,“ in 2015, “We’ll never see the likes of Jim Golden again, and I hope someday we’ll meet in a much better place.”
More on Jim Golden’s amazing life and contributions to the Earhart saga can be found in the pages of Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last.
![This story appeared at the top of page 1 in the July 13, 1937 edition of the Bethlehem (Pennsylvania)-Globe Times. “Vague and unconfirmed rumors that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan have been rescued by a Japanese fishing boat without a radio,” the report began, “and therefore unable to make any report, found no verification here today, but plunged Tokio [sic] into a fever of excitement.” The story was quickly squelched in Japan, and no follow-up was done. (Courtesy Woody Peard.)](https://earharttruth.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/fishing-boat-story-5.png?w=616&resize=616%2C352#038;h=352 "Fishing boat story 5")
Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last 
Recent Comments