NatGeo, Ballard in new phony Earhart “search”

It appears that after 13 fruitless trips to Nikumaroro by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), the Powers That Be have finally decided to turn this tar baby over to someone who can bring real gravitas to the longstanding Earhart myths and lies.  (Boldface and italics emphasis mine throughout.)

Ric Gillespie is out, Robert Ballard is in, and we can all now rest assured that the “Earhart Mystery” will be solved in short order.  If you doubt this, I refer you to the National Geographic’s July 23, 2019 story:  “Robert Ballard found the Titanic. Can he find Amelia Earhart’s airplane?” subheaded, “Ocean explorer Robert Ballard will lead a major expedition to the remote Pacific in hopes of discovering the famed aviator’s fate.”

With the same breathless tones that accompanied countless announcements that preceded so many of TIGHAR’s Nikumaroro boondoggles over the past 30 years, National Geographic’s Rachel Hartigan Shea writes, “Now Robert Ballard, the man who found the Titanic, is planning to search for signs of the missing aviators.  On August 7, he’ll depart from Samoa for Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island that’s part of the Micronesian nation of Kiribati.  The expedition will be filmed by National Geographic for a two-hour documentary airing October 20.”

Bob Ballard, undated, from his Wikipedia page.

This is the same National Geographic Channel that produced and aired a much-anticipated (among some Earhart researchers) Amelia Earhart special in late 2006 to debut its short-lived Undercover History series, for which writer-co director Quinn Kanaly talked to me twice at length via phone.  At my insistence, she took her crew to Woodbridge, Conn., to  interview Robert E. Wallack about his summer 1944 discovery of the Earhart briefcase in a blown safe on Saipan, a segment that was included in the program that aired on Nov. 29, 2006, and which also depicted eyewitness Bilimon Amaron’s 1937 encounter with the fliers at Jaluit, as well as a thorough forensic debunking of the Irene Bolam-as-Amelia Earhart lie. 

Only the slightest trace of that program can now be found on an Internet search, an IMDb entry that’s been swept clean of any meaningful information, as has the rest of the Internet.  To see for yourself, please click here.  Did National Geographic go to great lengths to cover the history of its past productions on the Earhart disappearance to protect the “credibility” of the current Ballard search?  Just askin’.

Fox News, which has led the way in the Earhart deception business for several years now, followed the same day with their own story, and on July 26, a reader told me, “Ballard’s second in command was just on Fox News in studio with Harris Faulkner.”  Another bunch allergic to the truth, Coast to Coast AM, did their part for the bad cause with their own story July 24.

In its July 23 story, National Geographic wastes no time, and starts right in with the lies that have so characterized the popular myths about the “great aviation mystery” for so many decades.  In its lead paragraph, we’re told, “After taking off from Lae, New Guinea, in Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E, the pair aimed for tiny Howland Island, just north of the Equator.  But they couldn’t find it, and despite many attempts, no one has been able to find them.”

“No one has been able to find them”?  No one, that is, except the prewar Japanese on Mili Atoll and Saipan in 1937, Bilimon Amaron on Jaluit, Mera Phillip, John Tobeke and others on Kwajalein’s Roi-Namur, and many native Chamorros on Saipan that same year, beginning with the still-living Josephine Blanco Akiyama. 

How about the numerous members of the American military, including Brig. Gen. Graves Erskine, during its summer 1944 invasion of Saipan, when the Electra was discovered in a Japanese hangar and was soon burned beyond recognition, according to several witnesses including Thomas E. Devine and Earskin J. Nabers?  Sixteen years later, Fred Goerner and Joe Gervais found the fliers through numerous eyewitness and witness accounts, and soon Vincent V. Loomis, Don Kothera and other researchers added their own witnesses and findings to the growing volume of evidence, solidly establishing the presence and deaths of the fliers.  The foregoing is just for starters.  No point in going further here, when the entire content of this blog is devoted to these and so much more that attests to the hated truth.

The research vessel E/V Nautilus will soon search the waters off Nikumaroro Atoll in the Phoenix Islands in an attempt to find what we all know has never been there, the Earhart Electra 10E, which was destroyed on Saipan in July 1944 and now lies buried under Saipan International Airport.  (Courtesy Wikipedia.)

National Geographic continued with its latest propaganda:

The National Geographic Explorer at Large brings a state-of-the-art research vessel, the E/V Nautilus, and extensive underwater expertise to this historic search.  In addition to locating the Titanic, Ballard discovered the remains of John F. Kennedy’s World War II patrol boat in the Solomon Sea, the German battleship Bismarck in the Atlantic, and many ancient ships in the Black Sea, as well as hydrothermal vents near the Galapagos.

People have been looking for Earhart ever since she went missing.  The U.S. Coast Guard and Navy scoured the area by ship and plane for two weeks. George Putnam, Earhart’s husband, enlisted civilian mariners to continue the hunt.  Eventually the U.S. government declared that the plane had most likely crashed and sunk into the Pacific.

“Eventually”?  How about within three weeks of the fliers’ disappearance, when the commanders of the Coast Guard Cutter Itasca and the U.S.S. Lexington group filed their search reports?  Please see “The Search and the Radio Signals,” pages 38-59 in Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last for the facts without the hype.

The Ballard news is highly reminiscent of the clatter that surrounded the similarly hyped 2017 Nauticos search for the Earhart plane in the waters off Howland Island.  Here’s how I began my March 27, 2017 post on that time waster:

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.”

For more on my Nauticos post, see “Nauticos continues Earhart ocean-search insanity.”

It’s fair to ask why someone with Ballard’s impressive resume and fame is suddenly so interested in the rotten can of worms that the “Search for Amelia Earhart” has become, thanks to the ceaseless disinformation and distractions of the U.S government-media establishment.

We know, of course, that he is very much a highly regarded member of said establishment, and if you doubt that, here’s a YouTube video of Ballard’s remarks at a special event on March 20, 2012, at the U.S. State Department, announcing TIGHAR’s July 2012 expedition “to search for the remains of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra”:  “Dr. Ballard endorses TIGHAR.”

The battleship USS Colorado joined the Earhart search July 7, focusing her search on the Phoenix Islands, 350 miles southeast of Howland. On July 9, three Vought O3U-3 Corsair float planes were launched from the battleship’s three catapult rails to make an aerial inspection of three locations: McKean Island, Gardner Island (now the infamous Nikumaroro), and Carondelet Reef.  Nothing unusual was seen during the flyovers of these islands; neither Amelia Earhart nor her Electra were ever on Nikumaroro, contrary to the incessant propaganda efforts by our establishment media.  A total of 262,000 square miles of Pacific Ocean was searched by the Itasca, USS Lexington and her group, and the USS Colorado; not even an oil slick was reported.

We also know that Ballard won’t find anything at Nikumaroro, and so does he, unless he is far more uninformed about the Earhart disappearance than the average reader of this blog, which is just too much for me to bite off.  As with nearly everything in this hard world, it’s always about the money, and Ballard is no exception, but does he really need the gelt so badly that he would purposely taint his legacy with the certain stain of failure in the phony Earhart chase? 

(As an aside, for readers who don’t know me, this has never been about money for me, another reason why you can believe what you read here.)

Perhaps Ballard let his ankle show when he told National Geographic, “Maybe some things shouldn’t be found,” he says.  “We’ll see if Amelia is one of them.”

The switch from Gillespie to Ballard indicates, at least to this observer, that this latest machination from the establishment has the potential to be very big.  Endless empty claims and wasted trips to Nikumaroro have stripped Gillespie of all credibility among the masses, but Ballard is an entirely different story, and most will believe what he says uncritically. 

Thus, the forthcoming Earhart disinformation operation is far more disturbing than the usual, as we wonder why the famed ocean explorer would allow his name to be associated with this transparent charade, proven over 30 years to be nothing more than a huge mendacity that even casual observers of the Earhart case are now sick of watching. 

Further, and worse, would Ballard knowingly be a part of a scheme in which he would discover planted material on or off Nikumaroro?  It might be a piece of an engine or something else that can somehow be plausibly, though briefly, linked to the Electra, something that they can make plenty of noise about, but which would ultimately fail, because we know where the ruined remains of the Earhart bird are buried — under the Saipan International Airport.

I don’t know, but at this point, after nearly 32 years of studying this story, nothing would surprise me, except seeing anything resembling the truth coming from anyone in our thoroughly corrupt national media.

This constant barrage of lies and misinformation is proving two things: One, the U.S. establishment remains committed to protecting the Earhart sacred cow and keeping the truth from the masses, and two, that they rightfully believe in the overwhelming ignorance and indifference of America to the Earhart disappearance.  The comments below the story on Fox News reveal this fact, as they always do.  Why do they even bother, then, when the few who actually do care are in their dotage and dying daily?

Perhaps news of Marie Castro’s efforts on Saipan to build the Earhart Memorial Monument has created some small anxiety among the deep-state operatives responsible for managing the Earhart deception.  These vermin understand that the memorial’s possible success on Saipan, as unlikely as it seems now, would bring more heat for disclosure to bear on Washington, something they want to avoid at all costs.  Just a thought.

Nikumaroro Atoll, once known as Gardner Island, is one of eight atolls in the Phoenix Islands, Republic of Kiribati, in the central Pacific Ocean.  It is a remote, elongated, triangular coral atoll with profuse vegetation and a large central marine lagoon. It’s approximately 4.7 miles long by 1.6 miles wide and has gained international notoriety as the “most probable” landing place of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.  No real evidence has ever been presented to support this false idea, because neither Amelia Earhart, Fred Noonan nor the Electra 10E that they flew during their last flight were ever anywhere near it, but crash-landed at Mili Atoll at about noon, July 2, 1937, as established by eyewitnesses and other undeniable circumstantial evidence.

In light of Ballard’s forthcoming search, it might be an appropriate time to re-introduce readers, old and new, to the basic truth about the Earhart disappearance, by way of the Earhart Disappearance Position Statement I first presented in last year’s post commemorating Amelia’s final flight, “July 2, 2018: 81 years of lies in the Earhart case.”  I’ve extracted and slightly edited the most germane paragraphs; to see the entire statement, just click on the blue link.

The very idea that the disappearance of Amelia Earhart is a “great aviation mystery” is among the most despicable of all the prevailing myths of mainstream American history.  So effective have the U.S. government and its media allies been in creating, maintaining and protecting this straw man as the unquestioned narrative, that it has become a piece of our cultural furniture, a triumph of propaganda that would make even Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels proud. 

Because of its universal acceptance by the gullible, incurious masses, the false phraseology “Earhart mystery” defines and dominates all public dialogue about the Earhart case, while the fact of Amelia’s wretched and unnecessary demise at the hands of the prewar Japanese on Saipan is ignored or labeled “conspiracy theory,” advanced only by and for the fringe conspiracy lunatics of society.  Among our media – even our so-called conservative media – no story is as hated and demonized as the truth about Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan’s deaths at the hands of the Japanese on Saipan.

But in the deepest bowels of the U.S. government security apparatus, some are well aware of the fliers’ true fate, and they oversee and protect the physical evidence that would reveal the truth, known only to these scant few custodians of this precious evidence.  I explain all this in my book and in my blog, and won’t go on at length here.

Discerning individuals who examine the popular Earhart “theories” soon find not a scintilla of evidence for either crashed-and-sank or Nikumaroro that doesn’t break down under the slightest scrutiny.  Not a single artifact in a dozen trips since 1989 that’s been scrounged up from the Nikumaroro garbage dumps has been forensically linked to Amelia Earhart or Fred Noonan, despite the constant drumbeat of our corrupt media establishment telling us to buy this snake oil.  Many of the ignorant and gullible have indeed bought it, much to their chagrin as they realize the Nikumaroro bill of goods is rotten at its core.

In fact, no real “theories” exist in the Earhart disappearance, as the word is properly defined.  We have the truth — supported by several dozens of eyewitnesses, witnesses, documents, letters and other evidence — that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan crash-landed in the Marshalls, were picked up and taken to Saipan by the Japanese, and died there at some unknown date before the American invasion in June 1944, likely as many as six years before the Battle of Saipan.  Several small details remain unknown, most importantly the how and why behind the Electra’s Mili Atoll landing — but the big picture is lying in plain sight, as clear as the nose on Fred Noonan’s face, obvious to all but the blind and the agenda driven.

And we have enormous, transparent lies.  First came the original crashed-and-sank myth born in 1937 with the Navy-Coast Guard’s search findings — briefly logical until quickly overcome by the facts — which finally became so ludicrous and unacceptable by the late 1980s that a new deception to distract the sheeple was necessary.  Thus was born the current Nikumaroro virus, which continues to be the media’s default position, infecting virtually everything Earhart.  Even most of the brain-dead are no longer fooled, but that doesn’t stop our media from continually trying to force this lie down our collective throats.  

Just as they are doing now, courtesy of National Geographic and Bob Ballard.  We’ll know soon enough if these miscreants are up to more than the usual high-tech dog-and-pony show, with much sound and fury going in and nothing at all coming out, empty as usual.  I do hope that’s all it is, but we have a new player in this game, and we don’t know yet what he’s got up his sleeve.  You’re welcome to check in here whenever the spirit moves you; I’ll do my best to keep you informed and up to date — and will never lie to you.