Five years ago we marked the 75th anniversary of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, if it’s appropriate to use the word “anniversary” to commemorate such a ghastly atrocity as the barbaric murders of Earhart and Fred Noonan by the prewar Japanese military on Saipan.

The diamond anniversary of Amelia’s loss, as it were, came nearly simultaneously with the June 2012 publication of Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last, thanks to Sunbury Press publisher Larry Knorr.  Now we’ve arrived at the 80th, or “oak” anniversary of the fliers’ last official message, and though nothing in the big picture has changed, I suppose it’s appropriate to write something.  A personal retrospective seems manageable, if nothing else.

The near-total media blackout of The Truth at Last continues, but anyone who seeks the truth can find it without any help from a mainstream media that in recent years has distinguished itself only by removing all doubts about its irredeemably corrupt nature, as well as its anti-American agenda.

A rare sepia photo of Amelia in 1937, highlighting her freckles.

Dominating the Earhart situation, as I see it, is the overwhelming aversion to the truth displayed by the American and international media, an antipathy that’s never been worse than in recent years.  Wikipedia, the Net’s repository of conventional wisdom, refuses to include any mention of The Truth at Last or my name in its Amelia Earhart entry, and relegates the truth to a buried subsection, the old standby, “Japanese capture theory.”  Fred Goerner is fleetingly mentioned; otherwise, Wikipedia omits the mountains of evidence presented in The Truth at Last.  Wikipedia speaks for the entire establishment when it in sneers, “Many ideas emerged after the disappearance of Earhart and Noonan.  Two possibilities concerning the flyers’ fate have prevailed among researchers and historians.”  These, the punctuation-and-grammatically challenged Wikipedia declares, are the “Crash and sink theory,” and the “Gardner Island hypothesis.”  (Italics mine)  The insight is overpowering, is it not?

Fox News, our “fair and balanced” news source, is no better, and excludes all mention of The Truth at Last  in its website’s comments section whenever they post their Earhart propaganda, usually in support of TIGHAR’s endless boondoggles to Nikumaroro, but in other cases as well.  In fact, not one of the so-called “truth tellers” in our alternative media – not Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Alex Jones, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin or anyone else who claims moral and ethical superiority in the conservative talk world will go anywhere near the truth in the Earhart story.  Amelia Earhart’s fate has turned them all into cowards and liars.

These are just a few of many blatant examples clearly demonstrating that the truth about Amelia Earhart is among the most hated of all sacred cows by the U.S. establishment-media complex.  Is more evidence necessary?  “What is this truth that’s so hated and avoided by our media?” new readers of this blog might ask. In the Conclusion of The Truth at Last, I write:

Whether it was an intelligence mission that went sideways or for still unknown technical reasons, the fliers landed at Mili Atoll, were picked up by a Japanese fishing boat, transferred to the Japanese survey ship Koshu, and taken to their Marshall Islands headquarters at Jaluit. From Jaluit, they were flown to Roi-Namur on Kwajalein, and later to Saipan, where imprisonment, possible torture, and certain misery were their daily companions until death released the doomed pair from their torments.

This story appeared at the top of page 1 in the July 13, 1937 edition of the Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) Globe- Times.  The story was quickly squelched in Japan, and no follow-up was done.  (Courtesy Woody Peard.)

Multiple witnesses every step of the way attest to a reality that is transparently obvious to the rational observer, but one that our agenda-driven media despises, refuses to acknowledge and withholds from the public as a matter of policy.  The legendary Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932, and briefly as acting chief justice in early 1930, might have been seeing into the future and describing the Earhart case when he wrote, “It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.”

Nagging questions remain, smaller “mysteries,” if you will, chief among them are why and how the fliers reached and landed off Barre Island at Mili Atoll in the afternoon of July 2.  Some are certain Earhart overflew Truk on a mission of “white intelligence,” as Fred Goerner described it more than once, while insisting that “didn’t make her a spy.”  Sure, that might have happened, but we still can’t prove it.

Shortly after The Truth at Last  was published, I began contacting every talk radio host in the United States; almost none of them extended me the civility of a negative response – they simply ignored my queries.  A few others initially expressed interest, but once they learned the unpleasant truth, they disappeared faster than the Electra on July 2, 1937.   I lost track of the numbers, but certainly upward of a thousand of these media types wanted nothing to do with this story; you can find a list of the rare few who actually stepped up to help on my blog’s Media page.

I developed a stand-up presentation when a women’s group in Knoxville asked me to speak, eventually turning it into a power-point program that’s been well received by the few who have invited me.  Over the past four years, I’ve contacted virtually every American Legion and Veterans of Foreign War chapter, Kiwanis and Lions Clubs, men’s and women’s clubs of various types, aviation group, public and private high school, seniors assisted living facility — you name it, within 120 miles of Jacksonville, with anemic results.  For these groups it’s just a lack of interest born of ignorance, but allegedly well-educated media people have no such excuse.  Their resistance to the Marshalls-Saipan truth is palpable and hostile, and simple ignorance is not what motivates them.  I expected serious resistance following publication of With Our Own Eyes: Eyewitnesses to the Final Days of Amelia Earhart in 2002, but never imagined the depth and breadth of the abject rejection that’s become the dominant feature of the public aspect of this work.

Still, in a war that’s unwinnable before my time down here runs out, we’ve taken a few steps forward, small victories, but enough to keep me focused on this worthy cause.  I met the brilliant news analyst David Martin (DCDave.com) in 2005 when I found his 2004 book-length exposé  “Who Killed James Forrestal?”  in which Martin proves that our first secretary of defense was murdered at Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 22, 1949, and did not commit suicide, as is commonly held as gospel.  Since Martin and I share the unenviable mission of trying to slay inviolate sacred cows, I wanted to let him know about my Earhart work.  Martin was sympathetic, and agreed to review The Truth at Last, introducing his Aug. 7, 2012 piece, “Hillary Clinton and the Amelia Earhart Cover-Up,” with this snappy limerick:

Few things are more unsettling,
From experience I know,
Than to feel a building shaken
By quaking ground below.

But I’ve felt one discomfiture
Of almost comparable size,
Discovering that our “free” press
Purveys official lies.

About a year after The Truth at Last hit the street, my piece, “The truth in the Earhart “mystery” is a sacred cow” appeared on Veterans News Now, went to No. 1 on the site within three days and stayed on the site’s top 25 for many months.  I didn’t post this commentary on my blog, but it’s an excellent primer for anyone with interest in the Earhart story.

The Admiral Nimitz Museum, in Fredericksburg, Texas, where the truth about the disappearance of Amelia Earhart as told by Admiral Chester W. Nimitz to Fred Goerner, and all books that reveal the mountains of evidence that attest to this truth, are forbidden.

As if to confirm my contention about the verboten status of the Earhart truth, in early January 2013, no less an establishment stronghold than the National Museum of the Pacific War, which houses the Admiral Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg, Texas, refused to stock The Truth at Last in its bookstore, decreeing that the book’s “subject matter is not part of our mission of WWII in the Pacific Theater at this museum.”  Retired Army Maj. Glenn MacDonald, editor-in-chief of the popular military-oriented site, MilitaryCorruption.com, chronicled the Nimitz Museum travesty with a story headlined “Admiral Nimitz Museum Betrays Namesake,” which was also ignored by the Nimitz Museum’s enlightened leadership.

If this weren’t enough, in early 2014, a friend, professional educator and Earhart researcher from Maryland visited the museum, hoping to ask its president and CEO, retired Marine Gen. Michael W. Hagee, why his bookstore refused to carry The Truth at Last.  Not only did Hagee refuse to meet with this man, he sent a minion to tell him that Nimitz’s immortal words to Goerner, “Now that you’re going to Washington, Fred, I want to tell you Earhart and her navigator did go down in the Marshalls and were picked up by the Japanese,” which once adorned a conspicuous archway in the museum but were removed at some undetermined time years ago, are now suspect because Fred Goerner was “probably lying about what Nimitz told him.”  You can read more on this outrage in my April 11, 2014 post, “Nimitz Museum continues disgraceful Earhart policy.”

All was not as bleak.  Mrs. Kay Alley, the vice chair of the Kansas Chapter of the Ninety-Nines, invited me to address the South Central Section Fall 2014 Meeting of the Ninety-Nines in Wichita, Kan.  It was the highlight of my year, and I wrote about it in my Oct. 4, 2014 post, “99s welcome “The Truth at Last” to Wichita.” Unfortunately, no other Ninety-Nines chapter has expressed any interest in learning the truth.  Recall this is the group that Amelia herself co-founded in 1929 with Louise Thaden, but based on my experience with the South Central Ninety Nines in 2014, sadly, it appears that the blanket ignorance affecting our general population has infected today’s Ninety-Nines as well.

In early November 2014, Smithsonian magazine writer Jerry Adler sent me an email to request my cooperation for a story about the Earhart disappearance.  According to Adler, the magazine’s interest in doing the article had stemmed from the latest Ric Gillespie-Nikumaroro announcement, but he said his piece would “cover the gamut of explanations, including your own.”

The January 2015 issue of Smithsonian magazine, with its classic photo of Amelia and the standard sales pitch, “New Clues, New Controversy,” designed to sell copies and misinform the public.

Knowing the Smithsonian’s history of propaganda and deceit in all things Earhart, Adler’s request immediately raised my suspicions, but I decided it would be better to cooperate with him, hoping he might be fair with me, as he said he would.  My skepticism was well founded, and Adler’s hit piece, “Will the Search for Amelia Earhart Ever End?” the cover story of the Smithsonian’s January 2015 issue, was anything but fair and honest. Adler deprecated whatever he thought he could get away with, left out any mention of the massive evidence that supports the truth, strongly suggested that I am a “wild eyed obsessive” and conspiracy theorist, yet in his conclusion was still forced to admit that I was “onto something” after all.

I couldn’t let Adler and the Smithsonian get away with this underhanded attack without at least one good counterpunch, and in my 5,000-word rebuttal, I dissected his trash line by line.  I strongly urge anyone who hasn’t read my Jan. 18, 2015 post, Smithsonian mag throws “Truth at Last” a bone: Says, “it’s possible . . . Campbell is on to something,” to do so.

In early May 2016, David Martin returned to review the second edition of The Truth at Last, adding his own unique perspective to the piece.  To read Martin’s review, “Amelia Earhart Truth Versus the Establishment,” please click here.

Finally, in mid-May 2017, thanks to Mr. Ben Willingham, a retired Navy pilot, captain and chairman of the Bald Eagle Chapter (www.baldeaglesquadron.org) of the Association of Naval Aviation, I was honored to address this distinguished group at the Naval Air Station Jacksonville Officers Club.  Going into this engagement, I anticipated some pushback from a group that included retired admirals, captains and even the executive officer of NAS Jacksonville.  I was pleasantly surprised, however, by the kindness these former and current Navy warriors accorded me, and my power-point presentation was well received.  It was videotaped and produced into an MP4, and I might make it available here at some point. 

Thirty-six years earlier, as a lowly enlisted journalist working on the base newspaper at Cecil Field, Fla., just down the road, I never dreamed that someday I’d return to speak to such an elite gathering of Navy aviators.  Contrary to my expectation that some of these Navy types might take offense when I revealed to them the depth of the Navy’s role in the Earhart cover-up, no one protested, and more than a few approached me afterward to shake my hand and express their appreciation – a rare good day in the Earhart wars, one that I’ll always remember.

Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, would have envied the success the U.S. government has had in thoroughly brainwashing the American public with 80 years of lies about the so-called “Earhart Mystery.”

The Big Lie: The Great Aviation Mystery

Since publication of The Truth at Last, a few more might have accepted the truth that the Earhart disappearance is not the “Great Aviation Mystery” that’s been forced down our throats for eight decades. Make no mistake, this enormous falsehood has taken its place among the pantheon of great American lies that would be the envy of Nazi propaganda master Joseph Goebbels, and became an immovable piece of our cultural furniture very long ago.  I devoted a subsection to summarizing this theme, “The Big Lie: The Great Aviation Mystery,” in the conclusion of the second edition of The Truth at Last (pp. 322-324), and it cannot be overemphasized.

An American public that has been thoroughly deceived for 80 years about Amelia Earhart is completely ignorant of the fact that there is no “mystery” and no real “theories” in the Earhart case.  We have only the truth, which is surrounded and buried by glorified lies masquerading as theories.  Neither crashed-and-sank nor Nikumaroro has any semblance of plausible evidence to connect the fliers or the Electra to the Pacific floor or the former Gardner Island, and both ideas dissipate into smoke upon the slightest scrutiny.  Neither of these lies has a single eyewitness to lend it even the slightest credibility.

Some have suggested that our new president might be the one who will finally declassify and disclose the top-secret Earhart files.  Joel Freedman, of Canandaigua, N.Y., a longtime supporter of the truth and prolific local op-ed writer, was among them.  His letter, “Next president should disclose Amelia Earhart’s fate,” appeared in the Aug. 23, 2016 online edition of the Daily Messenger, and appeared a month later in the Sept. 21, 2016 online edition of the Atchison (Kansas) Globe, the newspaper of Amelia’s birthplace.

I’ve always kept politics out of this blog, except as it relates to the Earhart disappearance.  But it’s no secret that the America’s Fourth Estate is also its Fifth Column, and for decades our media have been the most effective appendage of America’s worst internal enemy, the Democratic Party, and recently we’ve seen far too many establishment Republicans silently standing by and thus silently endorsing the radical, statist, poisonous ideology that is now threatening to tear apart the very fabric of our society, once the envy of the civilized world.  Considering this current zeitgeist, the chances for government disclosure are virtually nonexistent.

Under different circumstances than now prevail in a broken U.S. establishment that is determined to nullify the 2016 election in any way possible, President Donald Trump might be the one to break down the 80-year government stonewall in the Earhart disappearance.

Under different circumstances, Donald Trump, more than any president in recent memory, appears to be the ideal outsider to break down the 80-year Earhart stonewall.  But Trump has too many enemies on both sides of the aisle, and infinitely more pressing issues on his plate to bring off a sea change in the Earhart matter.  And who among Trump’s inner circle would possibly bring this historical travesty to the president’s attention, as something worthy of his consideration?  His liberal daughter, Ivanka?  Or perhaps her young husband, Jared Kushner?  Pigs will fly.

The Ugly Bottom Line

In the conclusion of Chapter XIV, “The Care and Nurture of a Sacred Cow,” in The Truth at Last, I address the biggest Earhart question of all as directly as possible:

FDR knew his sanitized legacy as the New Deal savior of the American middle class, the commander in chief who saved the world from the Nazi and Japanese menaces, could never withstand public knowledge of his abandonment of America’s First Lady of Flight, not to mention Fred Noonan, an accomplished navigator and well-known figure in his own right.  FDR’s cowardly failure to initially confront Earhart’s captors, and his subsequent decision to keep the truth from the world, cemented his own culpability in their tragic, unnecessary ends. Roosevelt had no stomach for the national outcry and endless questions that any revelations after the fact would have spurred, and his alleged secret executive order that permanently embargoed the truth was his best solution to a situation that should have consigned him to a prominent position in history’s all-time rubbish heap of betrayal.  The world has been left with the phony Earhart “mystery” ever since.

If protecting Franklin D. Roosevelt from the infamy he justly deserves might no longer be enough to ensure that the Earhart secrets stay secure under lock and key, we also have our friends in the Pacific, the Japanese, to consider, and this factor has obviously sealed the deal, very possibly forever.

In September 1951, when the dust had cleared from the phony war trials, the United States and Japan signed a Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security with 48 other nations that became known as the San Francisco System, and this arrangement has defined relations between the two nations ever since. Would the San Francisco System have proceeded as smoothly if President Harry S. Truman had stepped up and broken ranks with his deceased former boss and revealed Japan’s guilt in the deaths of Earhart and Noonan, as well as Roosevelt’s gag order to permanently kill public knowledge of it?

“Japan and the United States are strong allies sharing basic values and strategic interests, with the Japan-U.S. Security Arrangements at the core,” Steven K. Vogel wrote in the introduction to the 2002 Brookings Institution-published U.S.-Japan Relations in a Changing World.  “Under such a strong alliance, both countries are closely working together and sharing roles and responsibilities not only on bilateral issues, but on regional issues in the Asia-Pacific and global issues as well.”

By itself, the United States’ paternal attachment to its former hated enemy might have been enough to keep the secrets of the Earhart disappearance buried in the deepest recesses of our national security apparatus.  But since the FDR factor preceded our permanent Japan protectorate policy, we’ll never know for sure.

Though the world is changing all the time, one aspect of the United States-Japan alliance seems destined to remain the same forever — their mutual agreement to remain silent about the truth in the Earhart disappearance.

Ask yourself this: Why has no establishment journalist of any repute – or any kind at all, for that matter – ever attempted to do a serious story or investigation into the Earhart case since Fred Goerner’s 1966 bestseller The Search for Amelia Earhart, was panned by Time magazine as a “Sinister Conspiracy?”  If I’ve shown that anything is true since The Truth at Last was published in 2012, it is that Goerner was the last and only public figure — a radio newsman — to honestly search for Amelia Earhart.  But when he found her on Saipan in the many eyewitnesses and witnesses whose accounts he presented, he was severely marginalized following the Time attack of his book.  Goerner passed away from cancer in 1994 at age 69, all but forgotten, never realizing the great potential of “solving the Earhart mystery” that his book so richly promised, and that he so badly wanted to fulfill.

But it wasn’t Goerner or his book that failed to deliver; the entire American government-media establishment declared war on him, his book and everyone else with the temerity to follow up on the KCBS newsman’s groundbreaking Saipan investigations.  The word came down that the Marshalls-Saipan truth was off-limits, and so nobody went anywhere near the sacred cow, and this quarantine continues to this day.  An Amazon.com search for Amelia Earhart books will bring more than 1,350 results, but more than 99 percent of these are biographies, novels, fantasies and all manner of children’s books, by far the top sellers in the Earhart market.  Of all these books, no more than about 10 are legitimate investigations into the truth, and all but Goerner’s were written by obscure individuals who ignored the establishment boycott of the truth for their own intensely personal reasons.

Former Air Force C-47 pilot Vincent V. Loomis and his wife, Georgette, traveled to the Marshalls in 1978 hoping to find the wreck of a plane Loomis saw on an uninhabited island near Ujae Atoll in 1952.  Loomis didn’t find the unidentified aircraft he hoped was the Earhart Electra, but in four trips to the Marshalls he gathered considerable witness testimony indicating the fliers’ presence there.  His book, Amelia Earhart: The Final Story was hailed by some at a time when big media’s rejection of information supporting Earhart’s survival and death on Saipan had yet to reach its virtual blackout of the past few decades.  The Final Story’s most glowing review came from Jeffrey Hart, writing in William F. Buckley’s National Review.  Gushing that Loomis “interviewed the surviving Japanese who were involved and he photographed the hitherto unknown Japanese military and diplomatic documents,” Hart then announced, “The mystery is a mystery no longer.”  Obviously, Hart’s declaration failed to elicit the faintest response from an indifferent establishment.

Thomas E. Devine was not a writer; he was a sergeant in the Army’s 244th Postal Unit on Saipan who saw the Earhart Electra three times, once flying overhead, and actually climbed onto a wing to inspect it and finally saw it in flames, burned beyond recognition by Marines on Saipan.  Devine’s 1987 book, Eyewitness: The Amelia Earhart Incident, is among the most important disappearance books ever penned.  In Eyewitness, many years in the making, Devine told of his amazing Saipan experiences, and in its conclusion he reached out to his fellow Saipan veterans, urging them to report their own eyewitness stories that reflected the presence and death of Earhart and Fred Noonan on Saipan in the years before the 1944 U.S. invasion. Twenty-six former GIs heard and responded to Devine’s plea, and their stunning accounts were presented for the first time in With Our Own Eyes: Eyewitnesses to the Final Days of Amelia Earhart, our little-known 2002 book.

“I saw the [Earhart] plane,” Devine told me in February 1991 during my first visit to his West Haven, Conn., home.  “I know all about the plane.  The plane was there.  No matter what anyone would ever say, that plane was Earhart’s plane—positively, absolutely, 100 percent.  I can drop dead right now if it wasn’t so.  Nobody can change my mind about it, because it was her plane.”  It’s there that the remains of Electra NR 16020 can still be found, Devine said, bulldozed into a landfill with the assorted rubble and refuse of war, and buried under the tarmac of what eventually became Saipan International Airport.

Thomas E. Devine, circa mid-1980s.  Devine’s 1987 book, Eyewitness: The Amelia Earhart Incident, is among the most important of the Earhart disappearance works, and without Devine’s kind willingness to share his research with this writer, Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last, would have never been written.

A few others wrote valuable books that are virtually unknown today, such as South African Oliver Knaggs, whose Amelia Earhart: Her last flight (1983), strongly supports Loomis’ Marshalls findings; Joe Davidson’s Amelia Earhart Returns from Saipan (1969), presents Don Kothera and his Cleveland Group’s interviews with Anna Diaz Magofna and other Saipan eyewitnesses for the first time; and Dave Horner’s The Earhart Enigma (2013) is the most recent addition to the thin collection of works that present the unpleasant truth, none coming from an establishment journalist.

Since Goerner’s Search brought down the ire of a government-media complex caught with its figurative pants down, only Amelia Earhart Lives (McGraw-Hill, 1970), written by Joe Klaas but actually Klaas’ creative transcription of famed-but-seriously-flawed researcher Joe Gervais’ delusional claim that New Jersey woman Irene Bolam was actually Amelia Earhart returned from Japan, made any real noise.  The reason for all the commotion was transparently obvious.  Although the book offered solid new research that further established Earhart’s presence on Saipan in 1937, its outrageous assertion about Irene Bolam overshadowed all else, elicited a defamation lawsuit from Bolam, and forced McGraw-Hill to pull the book from circulation.

The public image of legitimate Earhart research has yet to fully recover from the damage Amelia Earhart Lives inflicted on all who have painstakingly pursued the truth – “crackpots, conspiracy theorists and nut jobs” — are a few of the more polite labels you will see and hear applied to the few of us who continue this work.  Although I complain ceaselessly, I can’t even imagine what I’d be doing now if this story hadn’t found me in 1988.

The foregoing should give you a good idea about where the Earhart disappearance currently stands in our upside-down society.  Although I’m sure Amelia is in Heaven enjoying this spectacle playing out beneath the celestial choirs — her patience may be wearing thin with the fools who continue to dishonestly seek fortune and fame at her expense.  Amelia and Fred were probably the first American casualties of World War II, and they deserve better than to be kicked around in national and international gutters as political footballs, or used as decoys for boondoggles and scams to line pockets already filthy will ill-gained lucre.

I’ve been taking all this quite personally since meeting Thomas E. Devine in 1988.  I saw firsthand the emergent TIGHAR plague’s insidious effects on this long-suffering soul, how it gradually wore him down as TIGHAR increasingly dominated nearly all media coverage of the Earhart case.  Ironically, the first Earhart story I ever wrote was for publication in Navy and Marine Corps newspapers at sea and around the world.  You can’t keep the Navy out of the Earhart story, no matter how hard you try.