The History Channel is set to air a documentary on Sunday called Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence which renews the claim first advanced by the late CBS journalist Fred Goerner more than 50 years ago that Earhart and her navigator were captured by the Japanese.
The centerpiece of this claim is a photo found in the National Archives purportedly showing Earhart, Noonan and the Lockheed Electra on a Japanese dock.
I am not convinced.
As Mary Lovell, one of Earhart's biographers, pointed out in her book The Sound of Wings if Earhart and Noonan were captured by the Japanese then why did they keep that a secret? The Japanese were, after all, master propagandists.
Besides it wasn't so long ago that Earhart and Noonan were supposed to have crash landed on Gardner Island. In March 2012, at a press conference attended by none other than Hillary Clinton, the State Department announced federal funding for a renewed search of Gardner Island based on photographic evidence taken three months after Earhart and Noonan disappeared purportedly showing a part of the Lockheed Electra was protruding out of the water.
So what happened to Earhart and Noonan?
I think the simplest explanation is the most plausible. Namely the "crash and sank" theory from Elgen and Marie Long. Earhart and Noonan were supposed to land at Howland Island to refuel. It was a dot in the ocean they couldn't find and ran out of fuel before they could find it. They crashed and have resided at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean 16,000 feet below for the past 80 years. No, Earhart and Noonan haven't been found, but it doesn't mean they aren't there.
And as for that photograph? We only see the back of a woman's head. Who can say that woman wasn't native Japanese?
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