More on Nina Paxton’s compelling Earhart claims

An interested reader recently reminded me about a 1943 letter from Nina Paxton to Walter Winchell, which led me think once again about Nina’s claims, and if, as she so vehemently insisted in more than 100 letters over the years, that she actually heard Amelia Earhart’s distress calls on her radio in her Ashland, Ky., home.  (Boldface emphasis mine throughout.)

In the latter half of my July 30, 2018 post, “Did Nina Paxton hear Amelia’s calls for help? “Absolutely,” says longtime researcher Les Kinney,” Kinney introduced us to Ms. Paxton and her fascinating story:

Until her death on Christmas Day, 1970, Nina Paxton told anyone who would listen that Earhart had crash landed in the Marshall Islands.  She tried to remember everything she heard that day.  She began standing vigil over her radio listening to the shortwave band hoping to hear Amelia again.  A few years later, Nina wrote to Rand McNally looking for information on the Marshall Islands.  She developed a guilt complex and believed she hadn’t done enough to save Earhart’s life.  She searched for new memories, words or phrases Amelia might have said on that early July afternoon that might have previously escaped her.  No one seemed to believe her.  In the mid-1940s, she wrote to the Office of Naval Intelligence, Walter Winchell, and the FBI.  Toward the end of her life she corresponded with Fred Goerner, the bestselling author of The Search for Amelia Earhart.  Nina’s letters always carried the same general message: Amelia Earhart landed in the Marshall Islands.

In a letter to Fred Goerner describing her July 3 radio reception, Nina Paxton wrote, “We lost our course yesterday and came up here.  Directly Northeast of a part of Marshall Islands near Mili Atoll.”  (Photo courtesy Les Kinney.)

. . . At about 2 p.m. on July 3, 1937, local time, Nina Paxton heard Amelia Earhart’s distressed voice announce she had gone down in the Marshall Islands.  Nina had no idea where the Marshall Islands were located.  Nor did she know the call sign for Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra wasn’t KHABQ.  After hearing Earhart on her radio, Nina went to the Ashland Police Department and then to a nearby Coast Guard Station to report what she had heard.  They laughed at her and said the call sign for Earhart’s Electra was KHAQQ.  It was for this reason that Nina didn’t tell the local press of Earhart’s distress message until July 9, 1937.  Nina had no idea the call sign for Earhart’s previous plane, a Lockheed Vega, was KHABQ.  A tired, exhausted, worried and emotionally drained Amelia Earhart blurted out her old call sign the day Nina heard the distress message on July 3, 1937.  It would have been an easy thing to do.

None of those who claimed to have heard radio messages from Amelia Earhart were more persistent than Nina Paxton, and this quality alone has lent a certain credibility to her story.   

“The Paxton papers tell us Earhart and Noonan went down in the Marshall Islands,” Les Kinney wrote, adding that “Mars Hills University recently put a few of Nina Paxton’s letters on the internet: http://southernappalachianarchives.org/ /show/4.”  Among Paxton’s early letters on the Mars Hill site was this one to famed newsman Walter Winchell, which included an attachment that was full of provocative information:

The reader I referenced at the top of this blog sent me the 56-page FBI file that was published separately online in March 2011, which offered little of interest except the below 1943 letter — again to Walter Winchell.  (Click on images of all letters for larger view.)

After reading Les Kinney’s presentation of Nina Paxton’s claims, my skepticism about them had lessened considerably, and in closing my July 30, 2018 post, I wrote, “For what it’s worth, I think Nina Paxton’s account could be the most compelling of all these alleged messages, and should be taken seriously at the very least.”  

This has now changed somewhat since I recently came upon another of Nina’s letters, this one to Fred Goerner in August 1968.  Its bizarre content reflects badly on whatever credibility she may have attained through her many letters to various personages, at least in my opinion.  I present it here for your scrutiny, so that you can form your own.  My comments follow.

What are we to make of this weird missive, bordering on incoherence, with its references to hearing Adolf Hitler speak via “Short Wave various times, apparently without his knowledge, before his disappearance” and of the “same intonation etc., as the first lengthy message from Amelia Earhart”?  (Italics mine.)  I don’t know what the “late edition about Hitler” was, and I don’t have the letter she was replying to, but this one is off the charts for strangeness.

Hitler was known for his rabble-rousing speeches, bellowed out to full stadiums and arenas, and broadcast to the masses via radio, so for Nina to hear a few would not have been unusual.  But Nina apparently had inside information as to Hitler’s “knowledge” about whether his speeches were being broadcast via radio — or something else perhaps, who knows? — and these broadcasts occurred “before his disappearance,” whenever that was, because it’s anyone’s guess what disappearance Nina was referring to. 

If this wasn’t far enough off the wall, her next declamation surely was, as she then informed Goerner that Hitler’s speeches she heard on “Short Wave” were of the “same intonation etc. as the first lengthy message from Amelia Earhart.”  Whatever that meant to Nina, it escapes me and probably most readers who lack her special insights. 

The dead body of Benito Mussolini (second from left) next to his mistress Claretta Petacci and those of other executed fascists, on display in Milan on April 29, 1945, in Piazzale Loreto, the same place that the fascists had displayed the bodies of fifteen Milanese civilians a year earlier after executing them in retaliation for resistance activity.   The bodies, from left to right, are: General Giuseppe Gelormini, Benito Mussolini, Claretta Petacci, Alessandro Pavolini, Achille Starace.  Photo by Vincenzo Carrese.

Nina then jumps to Hitler’s Axis buddy Benito Mussolini, whose death she claims she heard reported via her magic radio by unknown persons on an unidentified station:  “We have just shot Mussolini, Madame, and eight co-patriots” and that this had happened just “twenty minutes ago.”  Next, Nina hears the unidentified culprits announce, “We are going to get Hitler.  Perhaps it will take forty-eight hours.  WE ARE GOING TO GET HIM.”

From William L. Shirer’s classic 1960 reference, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, we see that:

On the afternoon of 29 April, Hitler learned that his ally, Benito Mussolini, had been executed by Italian partisans.  The bodies of Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, had been strung up by their heels.  The corpses were later cut down and thrown into the gutter, where they were mocked by Italian dissidents.  These events may have strengthened Hitler’s resolve not to allow himself or his wife to be made a “spectacle” of, as he had earlier recorded in his testament.

Hitler committed suicide the next day, Aug. 30, 1945, in his Berlin bunker, a fact that was widely reported and has been disputed only by a few true fringe types, including the History Channel and its failed “Hunting Hitler” series, so the timing of the events Nina claimed she heard reported was accurate, if nothing else.  The rest is just too much for me to buy.   

Out of left field and after a brief comment about Thomas E. Devine’s gravesite beliefs, Nina then tells Goerner that at some time “after the war ended,” she saw a photo of “a displaced woman in Germany,” who, she wrote, if “the person was not Amelia Earhart, she bore an identical twin likeness to the Flyer”   This simply doesn’t wash after Nina’s years of insisting Earhart came down in the Marshalls.

Finally, we have Nina’s signature block, in which she types “Nina L.M. Patton” (Italics mine).  This letterhead is similar to another of her letters to Goerner, and in the same stylized font that I can’t identify, is “Mrs. C.B. Paxton,” which can be found in other Paxton letters I have.  This must reference her married name; Les Kinney can probably confirm that.  I don’t know about you, but to me, misspelling your name in a serious letter like this one is very bad sign, and the “t” is not next to the “x” on typewriters keyboards, not in 1968 or any other time that I’m aware of.

Thomas E. Devine on Saipan in 1963.  Devine found the gravesite that he was shown in 1945 by an unidentified Okinawan woman, but didn’t trust Fred Goerner enough to share the discovery with him.  Devine never returned to Saipan as he planned to do in 1963, and his decision to keep the gravesite information to himself was one of the worst he ever made.  (Photo by Fred Goerner, courtesy Lance Goerner.)

This eerie, disjointed letter, introducing several unrelated subjects in an incoherent stream of consciousness making little sense with the exception a brief reference to Devine, which she could have easily seen in Goerner’s The Search for Amelia Earhart (1966), has eroded my confidence in Nina Paxton’s claims.  By itself, it cannot ruin or cancel all she had written previously, though it pushes one’s tolerance and makes one wonder. 

In an earlier letter to Goerner, dated July 22, 1968, Nina wrote, “The first SOS message was heard on July 3, 1937, in which Miss Earhart stated, ‘We lost our course yesterday and came up here.  Directly Northeast of a part of Marshall Islands near Mili Atoll.’ ”

I’ll leave Nina Paxton to the readers of this blog, including her most vocal advocate, Les Kinney, to sort out. I can’t do much more than this.

A 622-page collection of Earhart documents was published in 2010 by BACM Research/PaperlessArchives.com, which contains a “FBI/Navy/State Dept. Files and other material, including the 1943 Paxton-Winchell letter above.  These files can be downloaded for a small fee, and I’ve done so -better late than never — and found very little that I didn’t already have through other means over the years.

Among the BACM material you can find: “Elanor [sic] Roosevelt-Earhart, Amelia Correspondences, 1933-1936; Radio Log of Amelia Earhart’s Last Communication; Navy – Report of Earhart Search by U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard 2-18 July 1937; Navy – Report of Earhart Search U.S.S. Lexington July 1937; and 125 pages of State Department files.” 

You can also find an extensive discussion of the significant post-loss messages in the three posts I wrote on this subject in 2014:

Earhart’s “post-loss messages”: Real or fantasy?” published April 30, 2014, followed by “Experts weigh in on Earhart’s ‘post-loss’ messages” two weeks later, and finally “Amelia Earhart’s alleged ‘Land in sight’ message remains a curiosity, if not a mystery | Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last” on May 27, 2014.