A New Theory on Amelia Earhart : 50 Years After Disappearance, Experts Puzzle Over Flyer’s Fate

A half-century after the landing or splashdown, more than two dozen books beyond the death or survival of the principals, maybe a million questions, theories, reports, rumors, investigations, lies and honest mistakes later . . . there is a fresh shred of evidence concerning the disappearance of record-forging aviator Amelia Earhart.

A veteran State Department employee says she has a copy of an unpublicized government telegram indicating that the famed flier was a prisoner of the Japanese until the end of World War II.

Patricia Morton, 52, a deputy examiner of foreign service applicants for the State Department in Washington and an Earhart hobbyist, said she found the telegram and related correspondence three years ago in an obscure National Archives file on World War II American POWs in Asia.

It implies that Earhart, who disappeared over the South Pacific on July 2, 1937, while attempting to be the first woman to fly around the world, was interned by the Japanese at Weihsien, China, at least until Aug. 24, 1945.

Telegram to Washington

That was the date (10 days after the Japanese surrender) on a telegram dispatched to Washington for domestic delivery by U.S. Naval radio. It was routed from Weihsien through the U.S. Embassy in Chunking and read: “CAMP LIBERATED ALL WELL VOLUMES TO TELL LOVE TO MOTHER.”

It was unsigned and made no mention of Amelia Earhart.

But it was addressed to the late George P. Putnam, Earhart’s husband, at 10042 Valley Spring Lane, North Hollywood.

That address, in the Toluca Lake district near the Lakeside Country Club, was listed as the couple’s home when Putnam filed his wife’s will in December, 1938.

Fred Goerner, 62, a San Francisco broadcaster and 1966 author of “The Search for Amelia Earhart,” confirmed that he also has a copy of the telegram. He obtained it, he said, when World War II State Department records were declassified in 1975. To his knowledge, only he and Morton among dozens of serious Earhart researchers have seen the telegram.

And according to Goerner and Morton, two weeks after the State Department’s Special War Problems Division dispatched the telegram, a reply was received from Putnam.

“I have just received the message sent recently from your office and would like to file with you my new address in the event any other messages are sent me from overseas.”

It was signed George Palmer Putnam, Shangri-Putnam, Lone Pine, Calif.

Morton, who has a top secret security clearance but who has been working on the Earhart disappearance as a mild hobby, has taken the telegram no further. “But I’m talking with the State Department in hopes of doing some serious research,” she said. “On my own time, but with their records. It (the telegram) is only a thread, not a whole fabric. But it gives us an indication that maybe the whole story hasn’t been told . . . and hope that if we keep searching, we will carry it through.”

Goerner, who has been researching the Earhart mystery for 27 years, says he has checked every available military record for Weihsien, spoken with OSS personnel who liberated the camp and checked with survivors of Putnam, who died in 1951, but has been unable to build on the lead.

“It (the telegram) is intriguing, it’s fascinating, but it doesn’t prove doodly,” he said last week. “I personally don’t believe it was sent by Amelia, but I don’t know who did send it. I believe she died or was executed on the island of Saipan.”

Is the telegram an authentic message from Earhart? Or a hoax? It certainly raises more questions that it settles. If Earhart was repatriated, why was it done in secret? Does Amelia Earhart live? Is the telegram some government red herring? Could it have been from a close male friend or some military relative of Putnam?

And that’s the true complexion of the Earhart issue on this eve of the 50th anniversary of her disappearance.

Confusion and contradiction.

The only truth is that the search hasn’t paused since the enigma began.

In 1937, the initial search was a full hunt by the U.S. Navy that covered more than 260,000 square miles and consumed most of July. It found no trace, not one stick or slick of the Burbank-built, twin-engined Lockheed Electra of pilot Earhart, 39, and her navigator, Fred Noonan, 44.

Official verdict: The round-the-world flight of Earhart and Noonan ended when the couple ran out of fuel, crashed and were lost at sea.

Official denial: Since scuttlebutt first surfaced as early as 1938, every Washington administration from Roosevelt to Reagan has consistently rejected suggestions that Earhart (already a household heroine) and Noonan (a Navy Reserve commander and former navigator for Pan American) were using the record attempt as a cover to overfly a suspected Japanese military buildup in the South Pacific. Nor were they captured, imprisoned or executed by the Japanese.

Army of Private Researchers

Yet such resoluteness has not detoured today’s private sector search, an equally stubborn sifting of declassified military intelligence files and archives by an estimated 100 private researchers: airline pilots, former military officers, professors, journalists, an ex-Secret Service agent, a real estate developer, a Las Vegas educator, a well-placed State Department officer, a retired aerospace engineer. . . .

Many projections are fatuous, good only for cheap books and quick sales. Some leads appear factual and well worth following. In total, the Earhart detectives have formed a solid presentation of intriguing possibilities, maybe even probabilities:

- Elgen Long, 62, of San Mateo, an airline captain, has decided to go public after 20 years of guarding precise details of his massive computer and documentary research of the Earhart mystery. His work has not produced a publisher for the book he hoped would help finance an expedition to locate and recover the Earhart plane. So he is prepared to show his hand.

He believes incompatible radio equipment and negligent procedures prevented Earhart and Noonan from making vital radio contacts with the Coast Guard cutter positioned near Howland Island (a tiny mid-Pacific refueling point) to monitor the leg of their flight from Lae, New Guinea.

Further, Long states, the combination of an uncalibrated compass, faulty chart coordinates that actually misplaced Howland by several miles, plus headwinds unnoticed by Noonan, placed the fliers west and well beyond visual range of the island. He concurs with the official finding: They ran out of gas and crashed northwest of the island. Long also believes that their remains are still inside the airplane and likely could be recovered from a depth of 16,800 feet.

- But author-broadcaster Goerner continues to follow the thrust of his work--that Earhart and Noonan crash-landed in the ocean, but were picked up and imprisoned by the Japanese.

New proof, Goerner says, may well be buried in about 14,000 reels of microfilm of pre-1945 still-classified Navy and Marine Corps records recently discovered at the U.S. Naval Supply Depot at Crane, Ind. In April, Goerner corresponded with Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger who said 6,000 reels have been examined and “thus far reveal no mention of Amelia Earhart.

“Should any information be discovered in the remaining reels, however, it will be reviewed for release through established procedures and made available . . . promptly and as appropriate.”

- Jim Golden, 62, of Las Vegas, a Marine Corps intelligence officer in the South Pacific during World War II, a six-year Secret Service agent, and a former investigator of organized crime for the Justice Department, has spent 43 years probing the Earhart disappearance. He currently is pursuing two firm beliefs based on recurring and overlapping leads: that there still exists a Navy intelligence file (one he says he read in 1945) containing statements from natives who say they saw an American woman on Roi-Namur Island near Kwajalein in 1937; and that there lives in Japan a Hawaiian-born interpreter who was part of a team that interrogated Earhart.

- Last month, Thomas Devine, 73, of Connecticut, published “The Amelia Earhart Incident” and claimed that in World War II, as an Army postal clerk on Saipan, he saw the Earhart plane in a hangar and watched it test flown. But he offers no corroboration. This fall, James Donahue, 67, of Inglewood, a retired aerospace engineer, plans to publish “The Earhart Disappearance: The British Connection,” which claims a British agent spirited Earhart and Noonan into U.S. Navy custody after they had landed on Hull Island. But Donahue has no documentary proof.

Snippets without a thread. Educated guesswork. Then there are the left fielders. One New Jersey writer has claimed Earhart became a prostitute in Nagasaki after World War II. Another says she was smuggled back to the United States as one among a planeload of bogus nuns, was given a false identity and died in 1982 as Irene Bolam of Princeton, N.J.

In life, Bolam consistently denied being the famed aviator. She sued the authors, former military officers Joe Klass and Joseph Gervais. Their book (“Amelia Earhart Lives” by McGraw-Hill) was withdrawn from stores.

When Bolam died, Gervais, now a school district employee in Las Vegas, sought permission to photograph and fingerprint the body. His request was denied. That, states Gervais, is further evidence of government collusion.

Earhart’s believed and published ends have been various. Dysentery in captivity. Beheading. Shooting. Also drowning after clinging to her floating airplane for two weeks while talking to a teen-aged ham radio operator in Oakland. The same fates for Noonan. With a new addition. A Cincinnati man (“call me another bankrupt Earhart chaser”) said last week that Earhart blamed Noonan for getting her off course and brained him with an empty whisky bottle.

From fear of a murder prosecution, he claimed, Earhart surrendered to the Japanese, became a citizen of their country in 1939 . . . and then helped draft the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

But for researchers who prefer the duller version of the Earhart saga--that she had no government ties, that she splashed down in the ocean and drowned--there is J. Gordon Vaeth.

In 1966, Vaeth was director of Systems Engineering for the National Environmental Satellite Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“My thought was that someone from within the government might be able to get more access to any information concerning Earhart,” he said.

Vaeth, 65, said he explored rumored connections between Earhart and the U.S. Army Air Corps and the possibility that she was issued government insurance. His contacts were admirals and generals, service secretaries, intelligence agents and even the late Harry Manning who, as a navigator and Navy captain, had assisted the Earhart flight.

“After 10 years I was at a total dead-end,” Vaeth explained. “I came away fully convinced this was absolutely no spy mission and that all such stories were based on double-talk, ignorance and supposition.”

Vaeth even checked on that Hawaiian-born Japanese interpreter who supposedly had been part of the Earhart interrogation team.

“Army intelligence told me that they had spoken to him and he said he had no recollection of this (an Earhart interrogation) whatsoever.”

Each generation produces a new legion of Earhart sleuths that continues to visit the National Archives and burrow into history branches of the Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard.

They can obtain radio logs of the Coast Guard cutter Itasca that watched for Earhart, a transcript of her final transmissions, reports of the Navy search, a precise inventory (down to the degree of wear on a pencil eraser) of items carried on the final flight, even seven spools of microfilm from the Office of Naval Intelligence.

Typically, the film contains raw, unproven, declassified data no more sinister than a report of a conversation mentioning Earhart overheard in a hotel room in Manila in 1939.

“We get three or four requests for Earhart information every week,” said Bernard Cavalcante, head of the operational archives branch, the Department of Navy. “They’re still hearing her voice on the airwaves, they continue to dream about her.”

Cavalcante recognizes other indicators of the permanent obsession surrounding Earhart.

“We (Navy) get so many requests for information we reply by form letter and the same statement I wrote in the early ‘70s,” he noted.

Earhart was born in Atchison, Kan., and Thursday’s 50th anniversary of her presumed death will be centered there.

US 73 passing east of the town is to be dedicated Amelia Earhart Highway; Atchison’s baseball and football grounds and airport already bear her name. There have been stamps, songs, several streets, a fox-trot, movies, poetry, libraries, 20 schools, a California mountain, hamburgers and, last year, a line of luggage named for Earhart.

Such fascination is to be expected “because Amelia dared to be something so unique to that period of time, to be a woman in aviation when nobody wanted women in aviation,” said Hazel Jones of Dallas, a spokesman for the Ninenty-Nines, an organization of women pilots that Earhart helped form in 1929. “Stand on any street corner and ask about (astronaut) Sally Ride and people may or may not know of her. Ask about Amelia Earhart and they’ll all know.”

Earhart, indeed, was everything. Nurse. Author. Social worker. Fashion designer. A Columbia student who dropped premed studies in 1922 to move to California and learn to fly.

1932: Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. 1935: First woman to fly alone from Honolulu to Oakland. First woman . . . to make a non-stop trancontinental flight, to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross, to fly from Newark to Mexico City.

By today’s standards, the marks may not seem exceptional.

“But in those early days, each flight was like taking off from LAX and hitting the 9th hole of a golf course in New Jersey with only a wet (fluid-filled) compass to go on,” Jones insists.

Through aviation, say the historians, Earhart exemplified and promoted a creed that, as noted in one of her speeches, was “looking for the day when women . . . will be individuals free to live their lives as men are free.”

She became an aviation career counselor for women. She suspected men would rather vacate theaters of war rather than share it with women. On the 1931 day of her wedding she wrote her husband a letter that was her plea for an open marriage: “In our life together I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. . . .”

Wrote one journalist of those ‘30s: “Amelia has become a symbol of a new womanhood, a symbol, I predict, that will be emulously patterned after by thousands of young girls in their quest for the Ideal.”

Some, like Jones, even feel that the strength of Earhart’s example could be damaged by resolution of her disappearance.

“At this point, I don’t think it really matters what happened,” Jones said. “What does matter is that if we did find out, some of the mystique and aura of Amelia Earhart would fade away.”

In San Francisco last month, the Court of Historical Review and Appeals (Municipal Court Judge George T. Choppelas presiding) ruled that Amelia Earhart was not captured and imprisoned by the Japanese.

The mock court convenes over lunch hours. In the past, it has adjudicated such weighty issues as Wyatt Earp’s alleged fixing of a boxing match (not guilty) and Jack London’s oyster poaching (guilty). It is no fortress of conclusive, judicial renderings.

Still, the session did bring together the most senior and most popular schools of Earhart thought and their opposing advocates.

Fred Goerner, a former newsman and talk show host with WCBS, San Francisco, has been pursuing the Earhart solution since 1960. He continues to state there is a “strong possibility” that Earhart and Noonan crash landed near an atoll southeast of Howland Island and were picked up by the Japanese.

Elgen Long (represented at the hearing by Marie Long, his wife and co-researcher) became interested in the Earhart miasma in World War II when he was a teen-aged radioman aboard a Navy PBY amphibian in the South Pacific. Long is a 747 captain for Flying Tigers who now expresses “a 95% probability that the aircraft lies on the ocean floor . . . 35 miles West North West of Howland.

“With regards to all the other theories . . . I have difficulty with them because of the fact that she was within 50 miles of Howland at 8:40 a.m. and said she was out of fuel. How does she get from there to Japanese custody or to some other island or atoll without fuel?

“Our government says she wasn’t on a spy mission. The Japanese have said they didn’t capture her. After all these years, I can’t think of any reason why we’d be concealing it or why the Japanese would be concealing it.”

No one, not even Goerner, doubts that Long has done his homework. He has interviewed dozens of surviving crew members of the Itasa, including radiomen Bill Galton and Tom O’Hare who monitored the final, blurting radio transmissions from Earhart. He can count more than 200 hours of tape recorded interviews and 1,000 slides of the Earhart venture and six filing cabinets stuffed with documents.

Using the same charts that Noonan used for the first half of the flight, Long has reflown, on paper “every minute of the flight from takeoff to splashdown.” In 1971, Long, a graduate of USC’s school of aircraft accident investigation, succeeded where Earhart failed: He flew a Piper Navajo alone, around the world.

“Now, all the pieces fit,” he says.

Long says he determined the general area of Earhart’s final position by examining radio logs of the Itasca. They measured the signal strength of Earhart’s last transmissions as “Strength 5.” That, he said, placed her airplane within 50 miles of the cutter.

It always has been known that the Itasca could hear Earhart’s transmissions but was unable to establish two-way contact. Long’s study of communications documents covering other stations within radio range of the Itasca spells out why: The cutter was experiencing transmitter or antenna failure during the final hours of the flight.

There was modern direction-finding equipment on the Earhart plane, on the Itasca and on Howland Island. But no fixes were established. Long says equipment aboard the airplane and the cutter were incompatible. And batteries powering the direction finder set on Howland Island failed before bearings could be established.

“Thirty five years later, even (radioman) Tom O’Hare didn’t know what the hell they’d done,” explained Long. “When I explained it all to him, it was like he’d been hit in the stomach by a sledgehammer.

“There were several official reports. They blamed the failure on her (Earhart’s) lack of experience and lackadaisical approach to communications. They vehemently denied that the DF (direction finder) was at fault . . . that was accepted and it (the more detailed explanation) has lain dormant ever since.”

Yet even these difficulties, added Long, would have remained unimportant had navigator Noonan not been so far off course.

From examination of those charts for the opening legs of the flight--analyzing plotted tracks, the actual courses flown, and calculations where the navigator would note corrections for deviations inherent to all compasses--Long discovered that Noonan, working with a poorly calibrated compass, had made no corrections for an actual compass deviation of almost 4 degrees.

So when he reached his estimated time of arrival over Howland--he was about six miles short.

From studying the Itasca’s weather reports, Long knows that that the Electra was flying into a 7-mile-per-hour headwind.

That wasn’t enough to raise whitecaps on the sea below and from a calm ocean Noonan would have presumed a no wind condition--and that miscalculation kept him farther west of Howland.

Then, says Long, the tragic clincher.

Howland Island wasn’t where Noonan was told it would be. His chart, obtained from a San Pedro cartographer, positioned Howland at coordinates established by a 19th-Century whaling party. A Coast Guard vessel (ironically, the Itasca) resurveyed the area in August, 1936, and found Howland to be 6.5 miles east of its former charted position.

“The first chart with the new coordinates was HO1198 dated June, 1937,” said Long. “Earhart and Noonan left on the start of their world flight on May 20. Even the Colorado and Lexington (Navy ships that searched for Earhart) didn’t have the new, correct coordinates.”

More than six miles lost to compass deviation. Maybe five miles lost to the headwind. Another 6.5 miles due to incorrect coordinates for Howland Island.

“So now he (Noonan) is about 17 miles or more to the west and effectively out of visual range of Howland Island,” said Long. “Even when abreast of the island he’s looking into the rising sun. The Itasca, God bless her, was trying to make smoke to help guide him in but rather than go up, the smoke went down to the water and spread across the horizon like a brown haze.”

Goerner, of course, disagrees with Long. He says Earhart and Noonan did indeed have the new coordinates for Howland Island and that they were included in a copy of the U.S. Navy Pacific Air Pilot given them in Honolulu in March, 1937.

Long counters that he has examined the Electra’s detailed inventory for that precise period and there is no mention of the Pacific Air Pilot among contents of the Earhart-Noonan chart case.

There is much rivalry, grudging respect for the other’s depth of theory and breadth of research, but not too much hostility between Long and Goerner.

Despite his heavy research and wide travel (he has made 14 trips to Saipan, 5 to the Marshall Islands, 3 to Japan) and public presentations, Goerner since 1975 has allowed Long to assume higher visibility.

Goerner blames his retreat on a pack of Earhart hounds, recent, reckless and superficial researchers he says comprise “a clown act . . . a cottage industry.

“There are literally hundreds of people around this country who are pursuing answers, taking available evidence and surrounding conjecture and fitting it to their preconceptions.”

He spoke of one man, Dallas real estate developer T. C. (Buddy) Brennan, 62. In a book to be published in January, Brennan will tell of his visit to Saipan. He claims that a native directed him to the grave of Amelia Earhart and that he dug into the plot.

Brennan found no remains. He says the high lime content of the soil must have destroyed the body. But he did unearth a piece of khaki fabric (“like the sleeve of a uniform,” Brennan said last week) and now claims it is the blindfold given to Earhart before the execution.

“That’s like buying a button and then fitting it to a suit,” Goerner protested. “I swore to myself I wouldn’t write another book until I felt I could produce a definitive answer . . . or until I could say there is not a definitive answer.”

Yet Goerner has continued to pick. He has Secretary of Defense Weinberger checking on the forgotten Navy files. He plans discussions with Gen. Paul X. Kelley, former commandant of the Marine Corps, who may be more talkative in retirement.

“What I want, before I leave this vale of tears,” he said, “is that the Earhart story have some denouement.

“It will be done one day. But it won’t be done by raising $3 million for an underwater search of the bottom of the ocean to the west of Howland Island.”

That, of course, is precisely what Long hopes to achieve.

“But locating and recovering the airplane is only part of the resolution,” Long warned. “If the remains of Amelia Earhart and Fred aren’t in the airplane it will not dispute all the other theories.

“And we’ll be off and running again.”

Amen, Goerner says.

“But if Elgen goes out and finds that plane,” he said, “I’ll say to myself: ‘Freddie, you were wrong all these years. But thank God we’ve got an answer.’ ”

Some tangibles remain. Earhart’s letters to her mother from childhood to 1937 were found in boxes in an attic in Berkeley in 1980. One of her airplanes hangs in the Smithsonian Institution. Personal possessions--including an elegant good-luck bracelet that was forgotten for the final flight--are on display in the Ninety-Nines headquarters at Oklahoma City.

More personally, Neta Snook Southern--who taught Earhart to fly at what was Kinner Field at Long Beach Boulevard and Tweedy--is living in Saratoga.

And Muriel Earhart Morrisey, 87, the sister Amelia nicknamed Scrappy, lives in Medford, Mass.

She has heard all the suppositions, been amazed by the adventurous and hurt by the tawdry, but no longer is intrigued by fresh theories.

“I don’t have animosity toward all these people who shatter my feelings,” she said. “But Amelia was my beloved sister and we were very close and I think certain people forget that.”

They were so close, Morrisey added, that Earhart could never have accepted a spy mission without discussing it with her sister. Nor could Earhart have remained in captivity without getting some message to her sister or mother. So Morrisey supports the ditching and drowning theory.

“It’s not so sexy, not so dramatic,” she continued, “but we feel she ran out of gasoline and has been laid to rest with many of our New England ancestors.

“My husband’s family were seafarers. As it stands, it is a tragedy of the sea. What the sea has taken, the sea will keep.

“Amelia is at rest.”