Conclusion of Rafford on radio in AE “Mystery”
Today we present the conclusion of Paul Rafford Jr.’s fascinating and thought-provoking analysis of Amelia Earhart’s final flight, “Amateur radio’s part in the Amelia Earhart Mystery,” previously unpublished. Rafford sent this gem to the Amelia Earhart Society’s online forum in 2008, too late for admission to the AES Newsletters.
Conclusion of “Amateur radio’s part in the Amelia Earhart Mystery”
by Paul Rafford Jr.
Government records claim that after the shore party was hastily called back to Itasca, four radio operators remained behind to man the Howland direction finder. They were Yau Fai Lum, Henry Lau, Frank Cipriani and Ah Kin Leong. The latter three were part of the shore party while Lum was the resident radio operator. Supposedly, they operated the station for nearly two weeks, keeping nightly vigil on 3105 kHz. Their logs can be found in the government’s Earhart files.
However, close inspection of the records shows that Cipriani signed off with Itasca at 0802 July 2, stating “No signals on 3105 and impossible to work.” The shore party was ordered to return at 0826 and arrived aboard Itasca at 0912. There is no evidence indicating that Cipriani and the others were told to remain behind. No reference to the group appears in the records until July 5. At 0001 a message is allegedly received by K6GNW from Itasca. It orders the Chinese boys to assist Cipriani in manning the direction finder during Itasca’s search. Are we to believe that Cipriani and the others, having made a last-minute decision on their own to stay on Howland are now, three days later being pressed into service to man the direction finder?
A close-up look at the Howland Island camp, taken Jan. 23, 1937, that Amelia Earhart never enjoyed. (National Archives.)
When John Riley questioned Lum, he was vehement in declaring that Cipriani, Leong and Lau had returned to the ship as soon as word was received that it was about to leave on a search for the missing flyers. In a letter to Riley dated September 4, 1994 Ah Kin Leong backs up Lum. He declares, “No idea who wrote the false log. Stood no watches on Howland Island. Cipriani, Henry Lau and me were on the Coast Guard cutter Itasca when it left Howland Island looking for Earhart.”
In October 1994, Lum wrote Riley as follows, “This letter from Ah Kin Leong proves that I am right and Captain Thompson’s report is not accurate. If we were watch standers we would have spoken to Cipriani at least 16 times when we change shifts in monitoring Earhart. This never happened. I have never seen the CG equipment nor did Cipriani ever come over to look at my equipment. I stand by my previous statement, ‘The radio report is false!’ ”
In his answer to Lum, Riley sums up the situation as follows: “Unfortunately, if the Itasca log is partly fraudulent, it means that all research since Earhart disappeared, whether conducted by Coast Guard, U.S. Navy, or by private parties, has been based on deliberate misinformation put out by a few. The radio logs of the Itasca are the most fundamental, most primary, of reference material. Nothing else compares. They supposedly tell us what is known of this tragedy.” If, as it appears, the Howland logs are forgeries, what would have been gained by such a subterfuge and who would have directed it?
[See my March 30, 2022 post, “Rafford and Horner on the bogus Howland log” for the full story on Yau Fai Lum’s claim that challenged the veracity of the Howland radio log, and thus the Coast Guard’s version of the final hours of the Earhart flight.]
Exactly three years after Earhart and Noonan disappeared, I joined Pan American Airways as a flight radio officer. I soon met several people who were involved one way or another in the mystery and/or knew Fred Noonan. My first boss, Harry Drake had shared bachelor quarters with Fred in Miami during the mid-1930’s. Later, Harry was the station manager at Caripito, Venezuela where the flyers spent their second night. He offered to collect the latest weather forecasts along the route they would follow the next day. Earhart rebuffed him with, “I don’t need that! I got it all back in California.”
Amelia Earhart is greeted upon her arrival at Caripito, Venezuela, June 2, 1937. “A muddy river wound through the mountain pass we followed, a reddish-brown snake crawling among tight-packed greenery,” Earhart wrote in Last Flight. “A few miles inland lay the red-roofed town of Caripito, with squat oil tanks on the outskirts. There was a splendid airfield, with paved runways and a well-equipped hangar. It is managed jointly by Pan American Airways and the Standard Oil Company.“
“The latest weather?” Harry mused to himself. Nevertheless, he sat up all night collecting the weather as promised. But to no avail! Just as he pulled into the airport parking lot he heard the roar of her engines as she took off. The thought struck him, “I wonder if I’ll ever see Fred alive again?”
My first assignment with Pan Am was on the training plane flying with John Ray, instrument flight instructor. John had been moonlighting an aviation radio service business when he was contracted to remove Earhart’s trailing antenna. She had just arrived from California at the start of her round-the-world flight. Her explanation to reporters was that she had it removed to save weight and the bother of reeling it out and in. But the weight saving would be little more than a gallon of gas, while Noonan was familiar with the operation of trailing antennas aboard our Pan Am planes.
For years I wondered why Earhart would have discarded her trailing antenna. I even built a model of her plane on a scale of 9 to 1, transmitting on a frequency 9 times 3105 kHz. I equipped it with both a trailing antenna and a fixed antenna. I discovered that transmissions on 3105 kHz with the small, fixed antenna would have been 20 dB (decibels), weaker than with a quarter wave trailing antenna. To check the experimentally derived measurements, I referred to the antenna formulas in my engineering hand books. After working the equations, I found the theoretical values very closely matched my experimental values. Earhart’s fixed antenna radiated only one-half watt on 3105 kHz.
During World War II, I discussed the Earhart disappearance with our Miami radio engineer, Charlie Winter. He had offered Earhart the services of the Pan Am direction finding net in the Pacific if she would carry a Pan Am frequency. She rejected his offer with a terse, ”I don’t need that! I’ve got a navigator to tell me where I am.” Charlie wasn’t offering to send the positions back to her. He was merely offering a flight following service in case of an emergency. But Earhart would have none of it! Why? Didn’t she want anyone to know where she was?
Also during World War II, I met Bill Galten after he came to work for Pan Am. He had been the Itasca radio operator assigned to contact Earhart. Despite his more than fifty calls on all his frequencies, she never answered him. Her method of operating was to suddenly come on 3105 kHz. without a call-up, deliver a brief message and be off, all in less than ten seconds. [Navy] Radioman Cipriani, manning the portable direction finder on Howland, never had a chance to get a bearing.
Many thousands of “Gooney birds” like these pictured on Midway Island posed a real threat to plane landings or takeoffs on Howland, another factor that led many to believe that Amelia Earhart never intended to land there.
Bill Galten expressed his opinion to me, “Paul, that woman never intended to land on Howland!” There were several reasons. Chief among them was the bird problem. Howland, the tip of an extinct underwater volcano, was the home of thousands of sea birds, many as large as turkeys. They found its runways an ideal nesting spot.
Yau Fai Lum wrote me how he had watched an attempt to disburse the birds by setting off a dynamite charge the day before Earhart’s expected arrival. “The birds leaped in the air, fluttered around for about ten seconds and then settled right back down again.” Because of the bird problem, Howland’s runways were never used except in emergencies. Today, the island is a bird sanctuary. Visitors, such as ham DX-peditions, must be accompanied by U.S. Government officials. For a DX-pedition, how far away from the rest of the world can you get than the intersection of the equator and the International Date Line?
While working for Pan Am in Miami I had known Bob Thibert when he was head of Pan Am’s electronic overhaul shops during the 1970’s. But it was not until the early 1990s that I learned he had installed and calibrated a radio direction finding loop on Earhart’s plane the day before she left Miami. But pictures of the plane arriving at Miami from California show that it already had a loop. What was going on here! When I queried Bob he was quite surprised. No, he hadn’t seen any evidence that a loop might have been installed previously.
I realized we must be dealing with two different planes, but why the great secrecy? And where could that second plane have come from? Also, Thibert was surprised to learn that John Ray had worked on Earhart’s plane before he did. Why hadn’t Pan Am’s radio shop removed the trailing antenna at the same time it performed the other work?
It was not until just recently that I got some answers. The publisher of my book, AMELIA EARHART’S RADIO, Douglas Westfall of the Paragon Agency (SpecialBooks.com) uncovered some interesting historical facts. Less than a month before Earhart and Noonan left Miami, a sister ship of their Electra, the Daily Express had flown round trip between New York and London. It carried pictures of the Hindenburg disaster to London and returned with pictures of King George’s coronation. It was billed as the first commercial flight to fly the Atlantic.
Pictures show the Daily Express had no radio loop or trailing antenna during the London flight. I maintain it was secretly swapped with Earhart’s Electra after John Ray removed the trailing antenna. Earhart didn’t want a trailing antenna but she did need a direction finding loop. This is where Bob Thibert came into the picture. As he told me, the morning before she left Miami his boss handed him a new loop and told him to install and calibrate it immediately.
This primitive looking device is the main chassis of an RA-1 manual direction finder, which was installed on Earhart’s Electra, according to Paul Rafford in his book Amelia Earhart’s Radio. The RA-1 control head was mounted in the cockpit. The loop drive wheel was above Earhart’s right shoulder, Rafford wrote.
But why swap the original plane for the Daily Express? There were two reasons. Primarily it had 100 gallons greater fuel capacity and had already flown round trip between New York and London, non-stop each way. Secondly, on Earhart’s first attempt to circle the globe she had cracked up at Honolulu. Although Lockheed had repaired her plane, it was no longer a factory fresh model. By contrast, the Daily Express was a proven flyer. But why all the secrecy?
There is evidence that Earhart finally came down in the Marshall Islands, occupied by Japan. She could have reached them without Noonan’s help by homing in on the high-power AM broadcasting station on Jaluit with her loop. After over heading it she could have followed a bearing from it to the only land plane field in the Marshall Islands, Roi Namur. But legend has it that she was forced down by a carrier-based fighter pilot before she could reach it. In any case it was a very inappropriate time for an American to land in the Marshalls — Japan went to war with China just five days later!
Fast forward to 2004. Little had I realized that my fellow engineer on the Space Program, James Raymond Knighton, W4BCX would later work on Roi Namur when I delivered my Earhart speech to our Pan Am Management Club. Later, he provided me with a fascinating story:
I was on Kwajelein from 1999 to 2001, living on Kwajelein Island but working on Roi-Namur, which is 50 miles north of Kwajalein. I flew back and forth each day to work.
One day during lunch I was walking around Roi and I happened across an old Marshallese who was very friendly. He was back visiting Roi after a long time. He was very talky and spoke pretty good English. He was excited because he was born on Roi-Namur and lived there during the Japanese occupation and the capture by the Marines in 1944. Of course I was interested in his story of how it was living under the Japanese and the invasion. I was very inquisitive and he was happy to talk about old times.
Then he said he saw Amelia Earhart on Roi when he was a young boy. It was the first white woman he had ever seen and he could not get over her blond hair. Basically, he told me that Earhart crashed on the Marshall Island of Mili. The Japanese had gotten her and brought her to Roi, the only place that transport planes could land.
Sadly, John Riley joined silent keys before we had a chance to work together in writing this article. However, he had already shared his files with me so at least I have been able to work with his notes as well as my own.
Paul Rafford Jr., July 23, 2008 (End of Rafford article.)
Rafford, among the last of the original members of Bill Prymak’s Amelia Earhart Society, passed away on Dec. 10, 2016 at age 97.
“Requiem for Amelia Earhart” published in Poland
The truth about the disappearance of Amelia Earhart has finally come to Poland. Requiem for Amelia Earhart now available to the Polish audience, and anyone else who can read the language. Readers will immediately recognize the similarity of the title with Paul Briand Jr.’s 1966 essay “Requiem for Amelia,” his last published piece, a summary of his work in the years since Daughter of the Sky was published in 1960.
Slawek, 59, who lives in a small town a short distance southwest of Warsaw with his wife, teenage son and daughter (another daughter, 28, lives in Warsaw with his mother) contacted me a few years ago about his Earhart project. We’ve spoken via Skype — his English is excellent, my Polish nonexistent — and his knowledge, experience and sincerity are most impressive.
“I’m a little worried that I didn’t write it as well as I could have,” Slawek told me in a late July email. “It is difficult to write something completely new after such notable predecessor authors. You have written so much about the case that it is difficult to create something novel, but in Poland this will be the first book about Amelia, and I treat it as an encouragement to my compatriots to buy your books and explore the details that are already there. . . . Once again, thank you very much for everything.”
Slawek has established a new website for his book, Requiem for Amelia Earhart: Repository, and from all I’ve seen, Slawek needn’t worry that Requiem isn’t a quality product. Everything I know about this book, and the rest of his work, tells me this is a first-rate tome from the pen of a true professional. Though Requiem for Amelia Earhart isn’t available in English, I’m nearly certain the big picture he presents to his readers is based on the same series of well-established events and facts we know well, events that culminated in the wretched, lonely deaths of the fliers on Saipan, abandoned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his own political expediency. If FDR ever regretted his betrayal of Amelia Earhart, he never told anyone who leaked it.
On Aug. 4, Slawek’s 36-minute video presentation, “Requiem for Amelia Earhart,” made its debut on PL1.TV, an independent Polish video platform where Slawek’s work has been prominently featured for years. It’s an excellent recap of the history of true Earhart research, a high-quality production delivered with authority, complete with English subtitles and featuring photos and graphics that compare favorably with anything ever done in this country on the Earhart disappearance.
Please take the time to watch Slawek’s presentation; it has English subtitles and I can’t recommend it strongly enough.
UPDATE: On Sept. 26, Slawek sent a new video presentation of 31 minutes titled “SHE WAS KILLED BY PASSION AND POLITICS” that adds more perspective to his previous presentation, also with English subtitles. Both are highly recommended viewing.
The publication of Requiem is an encouraging development, since any hint of the truth is lacking in nearly all mainstream media in America. I’m pleased that any serious author — foreign or not — has closely studied the mountain of facts uncovered since Briand Jr. and Fred Goerner so dramatically broke the ice in 1960 and presents them along with the obvious conclusions that follow without equivocation or ambiguity. Finding the truth anywhere besides this blog is a rare phenomenon.
In an Aug. 13, 2021 email, Slawek sent me the prologue to Requiem, noting that he was far from finished “working on it, because I keep seeing how much more I should write. . . . It is a pity, that my book will in Polish only and I will not be able to repay you in equal measure for your book on Amelia and your blog.” I assured him no repayment was necessary, and his efforts on behalf of the truth were all the compensation I could ask. Following is an excerpt from the prologue of Requiem for Amelia Earhart:
On the back side of the cover is a quotation from Art of War (Sun Tzu): “It always happens, that you have to bear some losses. A small loss will result in a great profit.”
PROLOGUE
When the Germans were dropping tons of bombs on Poland in September 1939 and most of the world’s governments had not yet noticed, Salote Tupou III, the monarch of the Kingdom of Tonga, indignantly declared war on Hitler. This country in the Polynesian archipelago of the South Pacific, 16,500 kilometers from us, consists of 170 islands with a total population of just over 106,000 people, about the size of the population of Tarnów. The more beautiful seems to be the astonishing gesture of unknown islanders, which was a spontaneous collection of money for the purchase of two Spitfire fighters for Polish pilots. True friends are said to be made only in poverty.
. . . It is not for this reason, however, that we are driven to the other side of the world, because it is just a longing historical-political insertion, which allowed us to move to the vast waters of the Pacific Ocean, where the end of her earthly journey, after a life spent largely in the air, found a completely different woman, the heroine of our story, Amelia Earhart. . . . In doing so, we will also travel back in time to the 1930s, as this is the most appropriate period to tell our story.
I invite you to take a trip.
Slawomir (“Slawek”) M. Kozak
On Slawek’s Oficyna Aurora page, he offers readers a brief glimpse of Requiem for Amelia Earhart, which follows with minimal editing. Boldface emphasis mine:
In mid-April 1937, Amelia Earhart was met twice by Special Counsel to President Roosevelt Bernard Baruch (!) and General Oscar Westover, Head of the U.S. Army Air Corps. The meeting was held at army headquarters in Riverside, California, in strict secrecy. Not even Amelia’s husband was allowed. Interestingly, at the first attempt to fly around the world, the crew intended to get it by flying west, through the Pacific, and after mysterious meetings with the above-mentioned gentlemen, the decision was made to completely change plans and fly east, across the Atlantic. Such a 180-degree volte-face even today would be a real challenge for the pilot and navigator of such an aircraft, because it would have to assume completely different weather conditions, but above all it would be necessary to carefully set a new route and subsequent landing sites, taking into account the ranges and refueling. This required new logistics solutions. Let us recall, however, that three ships of the U.S. Navy were deployed to support the navigation of this expedition. Coast Guard Cutter Itasca moored off the coast of Howland Island, the tug USS Ontario was halfway between Howland and New Guinea, and the small aircraft carrier USS Swan was stationed between Howland and Hawaii. What influences would even the most famous traveler have to use to organize all this for her?
Unlike this blog’s editor, Slawek is a true aviation expert, and his 33 years of experience as an air traffic controller only begins to describe his bona fides. What immediately jumped out when I saw Slawek’s bio page, which reads like a “Who’s Who” of Polish aviation, is that he’s a member of the Pilots For 9/11 Truth Organization and has written and spoken extensively about 9/11, which has become even more of a protected sacred cow in American and world culture than the Earhart travesty. A number of his 9/11 and other video presentations can be found on the Aurora in the Media page; we’ll look at some of his many books soon.
Here’s a sample from his bio:
In the years 1991 to ’95 he was the Chairman of the Association of Polish Air Traffic Controllers (POLATCA), the originator and organizer of the First Meeting of Air Traffic Controllers of Eastern European Countries in Warsaw, in 1993. In 1994, he organized in Warsaw the first ever European Conference of the International Federation of Air Traffic Controllers Associations (IFATCA) in the country of the former Eastern Bloc, which was attended by representatives of 30 countries. During this term of office, POLATCA joined the Federation IFATCA. From 1994 to 1996 he was a member of the Employee Council of the State Enterprise “Polish Airports.” In 1997 he prepared the first and so far the only Worldwide Rally of Polish Air Traffic Controllers, for controllers in Poland and those living outside their homeland.
. . . Since 2021, he has been a member of the editorial board of the weekly Warsaw Gazette, a columnist for the monthly Forbidden History and hosts the author’s program “Straight” on the Internet PL1 TV, where he periodically invites some interesting guests.
There’s much more of Slawek’s huge résumé on his bio page, linked above.
“This image will be on a special website, Requiem for Amelia Earhart: Repository, that will be dedicated to my book,” Slawek wrote in an early August email. “The link to it will be on a bookmark that will be included in the book, Slawek said. “The website will include some photographs and videos that I could not include in the book. There will also be a table of contents with all the references, so that readers of the paper version of the book will be able to read the contents of each footnote with a click.” (Art courtesy of Artur Szolc.)
To this observer, it’s Slawek’s prodigious literary output that stands out above all, and marks him as a singular talent. He’s written so much about the 9/11 travesty that he easily qualifies as Poland’s David Ray Griffin, authoring and publishing no less than seven books on “the greatest lie of the 21st Century” on successive anniversaries: Operation Two Towers, Eye of the Cyclops, Demons of the Doom, Project Phoenix, Black September, Intercepted and Operation Terror. The books, written in Polish, come with videos produced by Pilots for Truth.
In 2020 Slawek turned his lights on another massive lie, the so-called Covid “pandemic,” which some believe may prove to be the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated, and wrote Covid Hedgehogs.
Two years later, he wrote and published Terramar: Elite Utopia:
It shows the state of today’s global “elite,” their moral decay, often downright perversions, but also their interests and business ideas, which show that people outside their circle are treated objectively, only in the context of potential profits and satisfaction of daily needs. Of course, it is impossible to describe even some of them, so I focus on those whose names are well-known and directly associated with other “greats of this world.“ These include Jeffrey Epstein, Robert Maxwell, his daughter Ghislaine, Lex Wexner, Harvey Weinstein, and Hunter Biden. I am also revealing the plans of the so-called globalists, which are not mentioned in the media, but which, for at least a decade, have already been implemented with great commitment. They do not augur a future for us that is not only prosperous or peaceful, but even simply bearable. Nonetheless, I hope they remain just a utopia.
He also created the “Polish Wings” series, telling the stories of outstanding Polish pilots and designers, publishing and co-authoring From Sky to Heaven, Tethered Angel, Requiem for the Eagles and Effendi.
Now Slawek is bringing the Earhart Truth to Poland; I salute him and sincerely thank him for everything he’s doing to enlighten his countrymen. Though most of us can’t read Polish, we can wish this remarkable international truth seeker all the success he richly deserves in any language we like.
Lae radio operator recalls Earhart flight in ’61 letter
More has been written about Amelia Earhart’s final flight and the hours immediately preceding and following it than any other aspect of her disappearance. With the 85th anniversary of Amelia’s last flight now in our rear-views, we hear from Harry Balfour, the radio operator at Lae, New Guinea, officially the last person to carry on a two-way conversation with the doomed flier.
The following letter appeared in the July 1998 edition of the Amelia Earhart Society Newsletters. I don’t have Joe Gervais’ letter that elicited this response from Balfour. Boldface emphasis mine throughout.
“A Letter to Joe Gervais from Harry Balfour, Radio Operator at Lae, New Guinea July 1937″
Cairns, Australia
March 4, 1961
Dear Captain Gervais,
I received your letter and the log copy of the Itaska [sic] upon my arrival at Cairns. Both are very interesting, BUT THE LOG IS CONFLICTING. I feel I must give you a picture of the radio setup at Lae and what took place before and after AE arrived at Lae.
The radio equipment [on Lae] was composed of two transmitters, one of 300 watts phone fed into a dipole antenna cut to 3 megacycles [3000 kilocycles or kcs]. This transmitter was remotely controlled from an operating position in the cargo store on the airstrip and was normally operated by the cargo superintendent (Mr. Farnham) for the purpose of getting cargo information from Salamoa, Wau, and Bulolo on phone usually on 6540 kcs; a separate receiving antenna was swung between the hangar and the cargo store.
Harry Balfour, circa 1937, the radio operator at Lae, New Guinea, the last person to carry on a two-way radio conversation with Amelia Earhart.
The second radio transmitter was in the cargo store for the purpose of receiving early morning weather reports from inland, and for communication with Rabaul and Salamoa coast stations which sent and received all our commercial traffic. All AE’s weather reports were received over this circuit from stations on her route, and weather forecast and past weather from Howland. This transmitter was both phone and key, power one kilowatt. The company had one Lockheed and one 5AT Ford fitted with radio. The three Junkers G31 and the Junkers W34 were open cockpit machines, and therefore were not fitted with radio although plans were, I understand, that these machines were to be fitted by the previous manager. But when Eric Chater took over the management he was not so progressive. Although he was a pilot, he had never, to my knowledge, flew a radio equipped aircraft, nor had any other of the pilots in the company.
I had two jobs at Lae: Radio Operator in Charge, and Electrician in charge. Our power supply was a diesel electric generator 3 phase 50 cycle AC 150 kw. This power was more than adequate for the day and night load at Lae. I was also Flight Engineer at weekends occasionally.
We received messages of AE progress from Java onwards to Lae. A message was finally received from Darwin, giving information that she had finally taken off for Lae and giving her estimated ETA. I called the aircraft on 6540, but received no reply at any time, but that was explained later; she had no knowledge that we were equipped for aeronautical communication. On arrival, she was met by all the necessary big shots and plans were made to give them both a great social round-up. She acknowledged the welcome, and was very nice to everybody, and was photographed quite a lot by an amateur photographer, T. O’Dea, who was a part-time manager of Stephens Aircraft Co., a pilot, and a publicity seeker also. But at that time he was not in the employ of Guinea Airways. AE eventually snubbed him; she disliked him.
AE and Fred eventually settled into the hotel at Lae and would not see anyone, but sent a message that she particularly wanted to see me. I went down to the hotel and she wanted all the weather, plus her private messages that had stacked up for her. I went over all these with her in detail, and she asked me if I could come to the hotel every day and bring the weather reports, and any other traffic for her. Fred trotted around quite a bit, I cannot remember everywhere he went, but AE was so enthusiastic over the flight that she did not want to go anywhere or be entertained by the local ladies (much to the anger of the local ladies)! She never even dressed like a woman while she was in Lae.
She had her hair cut short like a man, and wore trousers and checked shirt, and from a short distance looked like a slim, freckled-faced youth. But to talk to, she was very charming and seemed to take in all that was said to her. She was an excellent pilot, and won the respect of our pilots for the way she handled the Lockheed.
In this rarely seen photo taken from Last Flight, Amelia Earhart is shown shortly after her arrival at Lae, New Guinea on June 30, 1937.
I made arrangements to keep the station open for long periods in the evening in case any extra traffic came in via Rabaul. She was very grateful for the extra service, but the management did not like it. However, it was on my own time, and I felt that anything I could do was my business, and that the radio communication was going to be an important factor in the flight. I was anxious to prove to AE that my transmit could (under normal conditions) hold communication with her to the end of her flight (modulation was always very clear on phone). She seemed to be very happy and relieved to know this. The only thing was that it took 15 to 20 minutes to change frequency to 3 megacycles. It meant that I would have to walk to the station, change coils, tune, and walk back to the control room. This I explained, and if she wanted to go to the night frequency she was to allow me that time before coming on again. I was not happy about it because I had never ever used 3 mcs — only for testing with our own Lockheed.
Now comes a very interesting part. During one of our conferences between AE, Fred and myself at the hotel, I was explaining to them how they could make use of shipping along the route, and that I could arrange that she could communicate with ships in range. Also that Rabaul and Nauru could warn ships and keep a lookout for them on 500 kcs or give them weather en route. It was then they both admitted that THEY COULD NOT READ MORSE * and were only able to pick out an individual letter!
* (Prymak note) AES DOES NOT BUY THIS. . . BALFOUR OBVIOUSLY HAD PERSONAL SELF-AGGRANDIZING MOTIVES TO SPREAD THIS LIE. . . . SEE PG. 6 FOR FRED NOONAN’S TRUE MORSE CODE CAPABILITY.
And the night before the flight, they were seriously thinking of making an offer to take me with them. She asked me if I would go along if they decided they could manage with the extra weight. I said that I would consult my wife about it, and let her know later in the evening. However, my wife thought it would be all right. I told AE, and she decided later that I would be of more use to the flight by looking after her interests at this end at the radio station. Furthermore, they would have to sacrifice gas load. I still maintained that a radio operator would have been more use than the extra gas, and that handling a fully loaded machine in any weather is a full-time job unless there are adequate radio facilities along the route. Before she had arrived at this decision she informed me that they were going to arrive in the US [sic] on the 4th of July, if all went well, and that it would be the National Holiday, and that if I had to lose my job by coming with them, she would see that I got a job with PAA.
Apart from the test flight which I mentioned in my letter to you, I checked her DF on the ground. But only two points were checked 000 degrees and 090 degrees, with Salamoa radio station on 500 kcs. The plane at that time was not loaded. Fred was quite happy about it. AE was around the aircraft quite a lot during the day, watching our mechanics going over her engines, and asking quite a lot of questions. I do not recollect what was done to her machine mechanically. That part of the job was in charge of a chap by the name of Herman Hotz, who was an excellent mechanic and a thorough tradesman in every way. The mechanic in charge, or Chief Engineer, was Ted Finn, also a very capable man. Mr. Chater did not like her about the workshop, but he never got around to telling her. He did not appear to go out of his way to help, but only to do the necessary things and no more — or the things HE considered ought to be done. Mr. Chater seemed to consider that the flight was a bit of a nuisance, and that they were upsetting the routine of the company, and that is where I tangled with him.
View of group posed in front of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Model 10-E Electra (NR 16020) at Lae, New Guinea, July 1937. From left to right are Eric Chater (Manager, Guinea Airways), Mrs. Chater, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.
My own personal opinion about the flight was that it was not particularly hazardous, because she had a good machine, good radio, a navigator who was an ex PAA man, with radio assistance at both ends, plenty of fuel, and up-to-date weather reports with an excellent forecast before take-off. I have since flown with Quantas many trips 3,600 miles non-stop, carrying mail and passengers on twin engine Catalinas through Japanese occupied territory from Perth to Ceylon — 29 to 30 hours from take-off to landing. I would consider our conditions almost similar to hers — just a flying gas tank. But we had to put up with radio silence. I did remark to AE one day, looking inside the fuselage, that even if she had to ditch, that enormous cylindrical gas tank that she carried inside would keep them afloat. I doubt it would ever sink — that is if it did not break up on landing.
Now with regard to the airmail covers, I have no reason to doubt that they were on the inside. I did notice a couple of bags or sacks in the tail end. They were not very big, but I don’t know what they contained.
The items she left with me were: radio facilities, books, personal telegrams, pistol and ammunition, a spare jacket, and clip board. These items are all scattered; I don’t remember what happened to the jacket, the radio facilities book with her notes, and telegrams. As far as I know, they are still in Sydney. I have not seen them for a long time. I did not have time to try and get them in Sydney as our stay was too short, and also my wife and I have been separated now for some years. She still has them — also photos. With regard to the log, I have written Mr. [Jim] Collopy, who may be able to dig it up from the archives at civil aviation headquarters in Melbourne. He was at that time Govt. Aircraft Inspector, living in Salamoa, but more about that when I see you. My log and my report was handed over to Mr. Chater, and it was shortly after that I had a big disagreement with the management, resigned, and went to sea until I joined Quantas. I did criticize the company in my report for not allowing me more time in which to carry out further checks on her radio equipment, and that I was told to close the station after 8 P.M. the day of her take-off. We had no means of taking any radio bearings at Lae, but I felt that if I had stayed on all night, I may have been able to pick up something or QSO [contact] the Itasca.
My last schedule with her was at either 7:15 or 7:45 PM Lae time, in which she reported everything O.K. and on course at 7,500 feet — and she would change to 3105 [kcs] for next schedule. In the meantime, I rushed home and had something to eat and drove back to the strip as soon as possible. Without my log I cannot remember whether it was 7:15 of 7:45 that I last contacted her on 6210/6540 [kcs], but she was loud and clear. I particularly asked her not to change frequency because there was no need to do that. Communication up to that time was excellent, and during the day people working in the cargo store could hear her over the loud speaker.
AES Newsletter caption: A rare photograph of Amelia and Fred with local mechanics checking out the ship. . . Lae, N.G.”
My opinion why she wanted to change frequency was to try and contact the Itasca, thinking that the night frequency was better. I did hear her voice through the static, but unable to distinguish any sense from the signal. In fact I could not even say if it was her. The signal I received may have been from the Itasca. It was a night of fairly heavy static for phone operation, but a radio operator using Morse could have gotten through.
With regard to AE’s papers, I could obtain them, or you could, as they are of no use to anyone else but you. If you do go to Australia, you certainly could get them. I will fix that up.
Yours very sincerely,
H. Balfour
Regarding Bill Prymak’s note that readers should “SEE PG. 6 FOR FRED NOONAN’S TRUE MORSE CODE CAPABILITY,“ he’s referencing a 1988 letter from Alan Vagg, a radio operator at Bulolo, New Guinea, 40 miles southwest of Lae, to Fred Goerner, in which he makes some confusing, even conflicting statements, the truth of which remains fuzzy. In writing about this letter in Truth at Last, I made the mistake of omitting a key sentence, which I will include now.
On page 46 of Truth at Last (2nd Edition), I wrote:
Although most researchers believe the Electra carried no telegraph key on its flight to Howland Island — a reasonable assumption based on Earhart’s own statements — we cannot be certain. Noonan could have kept a telegraph key for emergency use without telling anyone. Alan Vagg, the radio operator at Bulolo, forty miles southwest of Lae, claimed he had radiotelegraph communication with Noonan during the Electra’s flight from Darwin, Australia, to Lae. In a 1988 letter to Fred Goerner, Vagg said he “was impressed with the quality of Noonan’s Morse. Slow but very clear and easy to read. This is based on the first contact made with the plane when I contacted it on its flight to Lae from Darwin. This was done following an instruction from our Head Office in Sydney to endeavor to contact them.“
The foregoing could easily influence the reader to believe that Noonan used Morse code to communicate with Alan Vagg during his approach to Lae, but I inadvertently omitted statements by Vagg in the same letter to Goerner that might contradict his assertion about Noonan’s Morse usage.
“Re the Amelia Earhart case,” Vagg wrote in the second paragraph, “I found the copies of correspondence that you sent of great interest, and realize that it is quite possible that I was wrong in stating that Morse was used. I am surprised that Balfour did not mention that we both worked in it together, and took alternate turns to work the aircraft throughout the day.”
Much later in Vagg’s letter, he returned to the subject of Noonan’s alleged Morse usage:
As Harry and myself were communicating with each other frequently during the day in question and taking it in turns to work the aircraft, we could have been constantly changing from voice to aircraft and Morse between stations, which was normal. This and the time lapse could account for my mis-statement [sic] re the methods of communication.
Others were more familiar with Noonan’s radio capabilities, including Almon Gray, who, with the possible exception of Paul Rafford Jr., was qualified to discuss Amelia Earhart’s radio arrangements and behavior. In Gray’s “Amelia Earhart and Radio” his lengthy analysis that first appeared in the June 1993 issue of the Amelia Earhart Society Newsletters, he wrote in part:
From personal observation the writer knows that as of late 1935 Noonan could send and receive plain language at slow speeds, around eight to 10 words per minute. Recent research by Noonan biographer Michael A. Lang has revealed that circa 1931 Noonan held a Second Class Commercial Radio Operator license issued by the Radio Division of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Second Class licenses of that vintage certify that the holder has been examined and passed the following elements:
. . . (c) Transmitting and sound reading at a speed of not less than sixteen words a minute Continental Morse in code groups and twenty words a minute in plain language. (Italics mine.)
So much for Noonan’s alleged Morse code usage during the world flight attempt, for what it’s worth. For many more discussions by experts on various aspects of the final flight, please click here.
85th Anniversary of Last Flight arrives quietly
On July 2, 1937, 85 years ago today, Amelia Earhart and her intrepid navigator Fred Noonan rolled down the unpaved runway at Lae, New Guinea at 10 a.m. in Amelia’s twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10E, NR 16020, officially headed for Howland Island, a tiny speck 2,556 miles to the east-northeast, about 1,900 miles southwest of Honolulu and 200 miles east of the International Dateline. They would be crossing two time zones and the International Dateline, flying into yesterday, so to speak, scheduled to arrive July 2 at Howland several hours before the time they departed Lae on the same date.
Perhaps the last photo taken before the flyers’ July 2 takeoff from Lae, New Guinea. Mr. F.C. Jacobs of the New Guinea Gold Mining Company stands between Amelia and Fred. Note that Fred looks chipper and ready to go, not hung over from a night of drinking, as has been alleged.
At 0844 Howland time, 20 hours, 14 minutes after departing Lae, Earhart sent her infamous last message: “WE ARE ON THE LINE 157-337, WILL REPEAT THIS MESSAGE, WILL REPEAT THIS MESSAGE ON 6210 KCS. WAIT LISTENING ON 6210 KCS.” After about a minute’s pause, she added, “WE ARE RUNNING ON LINE NORTH AND SOUTH.” The message was received on 3105 at signal strength 5 of 5. “She was so loud that I ran up to the bridge expecting to see her coming in for a landing,” Itasca Chief Radioman Leo Bellarts told Elgen Long in 1973.
As we all know, the fliers were never heard from again — officially, that is. Instead of reaching their intended South Pacific landfall en route to a world aviation record, Earhart and Noonan allegedly “vanished” into legend, myth and haunting immortality — a special status reserved for rare sacred cows that continues to this day, thanks to the deceitful machinations of a government-media establishment determined to deny the truth about the fliers’ wretched deaths at the hands of the pre-war Japanese on Saipan from a world that’s long since moved on to more trendy “mysteries.”
This July the media atmosphere is substantially thinner than in past years; for some reason we’re not being subjected to another big media disinformation campaign, which has been nearly always the case. Among the most memorable of recent deception operations, of course, was the July 2017 History Channel travesty, “Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence,” which premiered July 9, 2017 on History, better known as the History Channel.
Robert Ballard’s search for Amelia Earhart off Nikumaroro was far less successful than his triumphant Titanic endeavor. (Courtesy Encyclopedia Britannica.)
We’ve also seen the ballyhooed summer 2019 Robert Ballard-National Geographic search, yet another transparent pretense meant to distract the public and get the surprisingly attention-starved Ballard another payday and more publicity. After the search, one would have been hard pressed to find any news announcing its failure, as is always the case with these Earhart boondoggles.
Also as always, I ensured that readers here were informed, doing so with my Aug. 27, 2019 post, Ballard’s Earhart search fails; anyone surprised?
The obvious question was why someone with Ballard’s impressive resume and fame would be so willing to join the long list of fraudsters selling the putrid can of worms that the “search for Amelia Earhart” became long ago.
The Ballard hoopla was reminiscent of the clatter attached to 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.”
Guinea Airways employee Alan Board is credited with this photo of the Electra just before leaving the ground on its takeoff from Lae, New Guinea on the morning of July 2, 1937. This is the last known photo of the Earhart Electra.
. . . 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.”
No discussion about Amelia Earhart and media treatment of her disappearance is complete without mentioning The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (which has never recovered an aircraft, historic or otherwise, to my knowledge), better known as TIGHAR, and its executive director Ric Gillespie.
TIGHAR has been fairly inert for the past few years, possibly because even a corrupt, compliant media deeply in the tank for the big scam might have its limits. In TIGHAR’s case, for more than 30 years our corporate media has pushed a credulous, gullible public to buy the most ridiculous assortment of dredged-up garbage imaginable as “evidence” that Earhart and Noonan landed on the central Pacific island of Nikumaroro, formerly Gardner Island, and died there of starvation within a relatively short time, despite abundant food and water sources.
The most perilous leg of Amelia Earhart’s world-flight attempt was the 2,556-mile stretch from Lae, New Guinea to tiny Howland Island, a daunting journey over the vast Central Pacific that had never been attempted. Note distances from Howland to Mili Atoll in the Marshall Islands, and from Lae to Saipan, key locations in the Earhart saga. (Courtesy Linda D. Pendleton.)
This is not the time to get into details about the countless TIGHAR forays to Nikumaroro or re-examine the garage full of so-called “evidence” that Gillespie and his minions have dragged back to continue their Earhart “investigations.” Here’s how I began my brief view of the TIGHAR phenomenon in a subsection titled “The Nikumaroro Hypothesis: Recycled Snake Oil” in Chapter 15: The Establishment’s Contempt for the Truth in Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last:
No one in the history of Earhart investigations has made so much from so little as Ric Gillespie. Since the bleak day in March 1992 when Gillespie baldly announced to a worldwide CNN audience at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., that the “Earhart mystery is solved,” he’s been universally hailed as the world’s leading expert on the Earhart disappearance. The real mystery is why, after eleven fruitless excursions to Nikumaroro, the media continue to treat Gillespie as if he’s the sole repository of knowledge in the Earhart matter? How has he gained such worldwide acclaim without producing a scintilla of evidence to support a fourth-hand theory rejected decades ago by researchers whose financial well-being didn’t depend on raising small fortunes for their next trip to Nikumaroro?
And here’s the closing paragraphs of the same subsection:
. . . The TIGHAR website contains an impressive collection of research, but for all its bells and whistles, not one of its documents offers the slightest trace of evidence that ties Amelia Earhart to Nikumaroro—and not one legitimate eyewitness is presented, because none exist. Ironically, [Fred] Hooven’s 1982 research paper, “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight,” also known as the “Hooven Report,” was added to TIGHAR’s archives in November 2002. “Last Flight” strongly supported the Saipan truth, ridiculed by Gillespie as a “festival of folklore,” but otherwise a subject assiduously avoided by the TIGHAR chief.
Contrary to his arrogant dismissal of the fliers’ Saipan demise as conspiratorial claptrap, the most ridiculous folk story to infect the Earhart search is that the erroneous ideas promoted by Ric Gillespie and TIGHAR have any relationship to the truth. But TIGHAR’s unending Nikumaroro searches have managed to reveal one undeniable fact: Amelia Earhart, Fred Noonan, and NR 16020 were never there.
I wrote above that the Earhart media atmosphere is “thinner” this year, but it’s not completely empty, null and void, either. On Sunday, June 26, longtime reader and photographer Phil Broda sent me a vile, studiously deceitful piece of Earhart disinformation from the left-leaning The Daily Beast, titled, “The Amelia Earhart Kimono That Spikes a Racist Legend,” by one Laurie Gwen Shapiro, who we learn is also writing an Earhart biography, one I will surely never read.
There’s no point in responding directly to Shapiro or The Daily Beast, as nothing would change, and they might even get a sick sense of satisfaction, that is, if they know anything at all about what honest researchers — few as we are — are doing these days. This despicable screed, among the most dishonest and twisted I’ve seen, shamelessly slings the old leftist standby, racism, as a weapon at the truth of the fliers’ Saipan deaths and the researchers who discovered it, actually naming and flatly dismissing the seminal work of Paul Briand Jr. and Fred Goerner, while extolling the serial lies of the crashed-and-sank poster boy Elgen Long. This perverse descent into an especially evil historical revisionism starkly illustrates the cold reality that the U.S. establishment continues to hate and deny the truth in the Earhart matter, perhaps now more than ever.
I will not quote from or reproduce anything from this contemptable hit piece, but if you want to see for yourself the depths to which some will descend to advance Earhart propaganda and mendacity, you can click on the link above, and tell me where I’m wrong. A warning: After a few free looks, The Daily Beast will shut you out and try to force you into subscribing before you can view this atrocity again.
As I told Calvin Pitts when I sent him The Daily Beast story, “It’s not much, but it’s not nothing either.” It’s just enough to remind us, on this the 85th anniversary of Amelia Earhart’s last flight, that the enemies of the truth are always out there, plotting and scheming ways to take advantage of the great lady’s name for their own selfish, nefarious purposes.
Rollin Reineck’s July 3, 1998 letter to ABC News: Calls “48 Hours” promoting TIGHAR “pure trash”
We continue our excursion into the world of the late Earhart researcher Rollin Reineck, who made his share of noise during his days as a member of Bill Prymak’s elite corps of theorists and truth-tellers in the Amelia Earhart Society.
This letter appeared in the July 1998 edition of the Amelia Earhart Society Newsletters, and gives us a taste of the reception that Ric Gillespie and TIGHAR’s ideas received from serious researchers who didn’t buy everything TIGHAR and the American media were shoveling down the throats of a gullible public about the fate of Amelia Earhart. I’ve screened the original article and present it here. By left clicking on each item, you can enlarge it for easy reading.
Rollin C. Reineck, circa 1945, served as a B-29 navigator in both the European and Pacific theaters during World War II, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal and Bronze Star. A true patriot in every sense of the word, Reineck passed away in 2007, but left some very controversial writings about the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.
Amelia Earhart Society President Bill Prymak’s brief comment in the editor’s note above is a small sample of the insightful, low-key statements that Prymak was known for during the 1990s when TIGHAR was all the rage in the “search” for Amelia.
You might recall a few of TIGHAR’s vapid claims our esteemed media dragged up to present to the nation, always in ridiculous, self-aggrandizing proclamations issuing in never-ending torrents from the yaps of Gillespie and his minions:
WE DID IT!
THE CONCLUSION IS INESCAPABLE: THIS IS A PIECE OF AMELIA EARHART’S AIRPLANE!
THERE IS ONLY ONE POSSIBLE CONCLUSION: WE FOUND A PIECE OF AMELIA EARHART’S AIRPLANE!
THERE IS NO CONFLICTING EVIDENCE: THE CASE IS CLOSED.
And so forth, ad nauseum. For now, we’ll conclude our brief visit with AES icons Rollin Reineck and Bill Prymak, as well as their favorite media darling TIGHAR chief Ric Gillespie, but there’s plenty more where that came from.
![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://i0.wp.com/earharttruth.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/fishing-boat-story-5.png?w=616&h=352&ssl=1 "Fishing boat story 5")
Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last 
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