This Just In: Amelia Earhart Still Missing

As you think of Amelia Earhart, listen to a haunting tribute by Joni Mitchell inspired by Mitchell's cross-country road trip (solo) in the 1970s.

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"Amelia" (1976)
By Joni Mitchell

In his defense, this blogger was encouraged by this tribute to a blogger (and history buff) to demolish still more nonsense from The History Channel. That cable TV outlet managed to tear itself away from Hitler/Nazi programs ad nauseum. If she were living in 2017, The History Channel would be Leni Riefenstahl's favorite TV channel. If this is a (fair & balanced) rejection of WWII militarism, so be it.

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How A Blogger Exploded The Hot New Theory About Amelia Earhart With 30 Minutes Of Online Searching
By Ruth Graham


TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing

amelia analysis area around atoll believed blogger bone captured catfish channel clearly confronted decided disappeared dock earhart file final flight found fred funders harbor history image islands japanese learned lost military minutes month national noonan nothing online photo photograph piece printed published purportedly research scents search seems theory yamano years

created at TagCrowd.com

Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared in a twin-engine plane 80 years ago this month. Since then, seemingly every piece of flotsam and jetsam in the South Pacific has been analyzed for connections to the fatal flight: bone fragments, sheets of aluminum, “ointment pots,” and scents perceptible only to dogs. In 2011, researchers announced they would harvest the aviator’s dried saliva from envelopes and use the DNA to test future bone discoveries. One of that project’s funders, meanwhile, was the grandson of the author of Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved (2000, 2009), a book based on “long-lost radio messages from Earhart’s final flight.” In other words, Earhart speculation has been around long enough to become a multigenerational hobby.

This past Sunday, the History Channel aired a documentary that trumpets yet another new piece of evidence: a blurry black-and-white photograph that purportedly shows Earhart and Noonan milling around on a dock in the Marshall Islands. A retired US Treasury agent named Les Kinney found the photograph in a “formerly top secret” file in the National Archives in 2012. Believers say the photograph proves the theory that Earhart and Noonan were not killed in a crash, but instead were captured by the Japanese, who controlled many islands in the area at the time of their flight. “When you see the analysis that’s been done, I think it leaves no doubt to the viewers that that’s Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan,” said Shawn Henry, a former assistant director for the FBI who hosted the History Channel special.

Unfortunately, the History Channel’s analysis now seems to be crumbling under 30 minutes of internet research by one military history buff. Kota Yamano, a Tokyo-based blogger, found the same photograph printed in a Japanese-language travelogue published in 1935, almost two years before Earhart and Noonan disappeared. The caption underneath the photo says nothing about the identities of the people in the photograph, which apparently depicts a regular old harbor, rather than a harbor and two missing celebrities.

Yamano told the Guardian that he had never believed the theory that Earhart and Noonan were captured by the Japanese, so he decided to look for more information on his own. He did an online search of Japan’s national library for images of the Jaluit atoll between 1930 and 1940, and voila: The “lost” Earhart photo was the 10th search result. Clearly the History Channel learned nothing from Catfish: When confronted with a photo of a woman who seems too good to be true, always do a reverse image search. # # #

[Ruth Graham is a regular Slate contributor. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, Al Jazeera America, The Wall Street Journal, Politico Magazine, The Awl, Marie Claire, and many others. Graham received a BA (political science) from Wheaton College (IL).]

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