We continue with Part II and the conclusion of the 2000 Amelia Earhart Society Symposium, held at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas from Feb. 3-5.  Bill Prymak must have manually underlined the names after he’d printed the pages, and though it might reflect Bill’s enthusiasm for the attendees, I can’t say it adds to the presentation.  (All photos except Don Kothera are in the original AES Newsletter story.)

Joe Gervais (L) and Bill Prymak share a light moment in the “control room” at the 2000 Amelia Earhart Society Symposium, held at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. 

Don Kothera’s often-overlooked contributions to the Earhart saga were chronicled in Joe Davidson’s underrated Amelia Earhart Returns from Saipan.  (First of three editions, 1969, Third Edition, 2002.)

End of 2000 Amelia Earhart Symposium Part II.  Virtually all of the major issues mentioned in this free-for-all, anything-goes discussion has been covered somewhere on this blog.  Simply insert your search item in the red box on the right side and hit enter.  Comments are welcome, as always. 

To my knowledge, the 2000 Amelia Earhart Society Symposium was the last time the AES got together as a group.  This document, compiled by Bill Prymak from a lengthy email by Irene and John Bolam, appeared in the March 2000 edition of the Amelia Earhart Society Newsletters and is the only record I have of that event.  

You won’t find any significant answers in this piece, which is offered for your entertainment more than anything else.  As you will see, by 2000, a number of the older, disparate characters in the Amelia Earhart Society were devolving, and strange ideas and weird scenarios were sometimes favored over hard facts.  This did not enhance the reputation of the Amelia Earhart Society, but this strange bunch never had a strong public image or projected a unified message.  Several of its members, however, such as Joe Klaas, Joe Gervais, Rollin Reineck and Bill Prymak were relatively well known and had long established themselves through their writings and research — not always accurately.

This article is presented in its original newsletter format; photos are added by this editor unless specified.  This is the first of two parts.

Louise Foudray, former director of the Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum, circa 2004.  Photo courtesy Alex Mandel.

Undated photo of Ron Reuther in front of the Western Aerospace Museum in Oakland, California, where Amelia Earhart’s plane was kept prior to her 1937 flight.  Reuther was a founding member of the Amelia Earhart Society, and was a committed naturalist who directed the San Francisco and Philadelphia zoos, among others.  (Photo by Lea Suzuki, San Francisco Chronicle.)

Joe Gervais, the father of the Earhart-as-Bolam theory, and Joe Klaas, his right-hand man and author of Amelia Earhart Lives, in a typical news photo from 1970, when Amelia Earhart Lives was creating an international sensation.

       Carol kept his manuscript.  Joe asked to read it and she refused — saying                             she was going to publish it.  (End of Part I.)

Thanks again to William Trail, today we bring you more entertaining and (mostly) informed speculation from the late Col. Rollin C. Reineck (U.S. Air Force, retired), who wrote several popular articles for Air Classics magazine.

We return to Air Classics, May 1994, for Reineck’s  “Did Amelia Get Lost On The Wrong Day?” 

To bring more realism to the article, we present the original pages as published, photocopied and sent by Mr. Trail.  Some may be hard to read, but if you left click on each page, it will enlarge and you can easily read it, especially with another left click to make it even bigger. 

For more background, see Air Classics, October 1993: “Inside the Earhart Flight: Government Conspiracy?.”  

For a complete collection of Rollin Reineck’s stories you can find in this blog, please click here.

Today we return to the recurring and off-putting topic of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), as always with an eye toward educating the laggards who may yet harbor any slim beliefs that this opportunistic bunch has ever made any credible claims about the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

This article appeared in the October 1999 edition of the Amelia Earhart Society Newsletters, and is presented in its original format.  This is just a snapshot of AES President Bill Prymak’s mind circa October 1999, and nothing resembling any comprehensive summary of TIGHAR’s claims at that or any other time is being advanced in this post.  You can click on each image for a larger, clearer view. 

Bilimon Amaron, whose eyewitness account is widely considered to be the most important of the Marshall Islands witnesses, relaxes in the recreation room of his home in the Marshalls capital of Majuro, circa 1989, with his guest Bill Prymak.  As a Japanese hospital corpsman in 1937 Jaluit, Amaron’s ship-board treatment of an injured white man, surely Fred Noonan, accompanied by an American woman the crewmen called “Meel-ya,” is legendary among the Marshallese.  (Courtesy Bill Prymak.)

Robert Reimers, the top businessman in the Marshall Islands in 1991, told Bill Prymak that the Mili Atoll landing of Amelia Earhart in 1937 was common knowledge among his people. Reimers passed away in 1998.

For more on TIGHAR’s long, inglorious history of investigations into the Earhart disappearance, please see my March 9, 2018 post, “Les Kinney joins ‘The Truth at Last’ conversation, Shreds TIGHAR’s latest false Earhart claims,” or click here for results of a complete search of this blog.

In more than 36 years on the Earhart story, it’s not uncommon to hear the uninformed, naive and even well intentioned ask whether others or I have sent letters to current or past presidents laying out the stark, undeniable facts in the Earhart case and appealing — even demanding — that the truth be finally publicly released and the so-called “great aviation mystery” finally be put to rest.

Firmly convinced of the sacred cow status of the truth in the Earhart matter and equally certain that any such letter would be immediately picked off by screeners and never be seen by anyone higher than a GS-12, I’ve not bothered wasting my time.  Others, however, could not be so dissuaded.  Retired Air Force Col. Rollin Reineck, well known to readers here, was especially active in this regard, and actually drew a response from an official at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense to a letter he wrote to Bill Clinton in June 1997.  For more details on this, see my Aug. 16, 2021 post, “Reineck’s 1997 Earhart plea to Bill Clinton rejected: ‘Our tax dollars at work in Washington.’ ”

Reineck’s June 1997 letter appeared in the March 1998 edition of the Amelia Earhart Society Newsletters and is presented below in its original format; inserted photos are mine.  You can get a larger, clearer image by left clicking on each page.

General Alexander A. Vandegrift, eighteenth commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, confirmed Amelia Earhart’s death on Saipan in an August 1971 letter to Fred Goerner. Vandegrift wrote that he learned from Marine General Tommy Watson, who commanded the 2nd Marine Division during the assault on Saipan and died in 1966, that “Miss Earhart met her death on Saipan.” (U.S. Marine Corps photo.)

(Editor’s note: No. 8, the Earhart-at-Weihsien, China civilian internment camp claim by Reineck was later proven to be absolutely false by Earhart researchers Ron Bright and Patrick Gaston.  The telegram was actually sent from the Weihsien Camp by a man named Ahmad Kamal, a close personal friend of George Putnam.)  For a complete rundown, please see my Jan. 3, 2017 post, “Weihsien Telegram: Another sensation that fizzled.”

For much more on Rollin Reineck’s attempts to break down the stone walls Washington long ago erected around the Earhart case, please see my Jan. 28, 2020 post, “Rollin Reineck’s 1990s Earhart work bears fruit: Hawaii senator pledges to open secret Earhart files,” and “Senator Inouye’s Earhart legislation would ‘declassify any records that have been classified’” of Feb. 11, 2020.