The Undeniable Lure of the Amelia Earhart Disappearance

One of the most spectacular turns I took (of which there were many) while researching for Fate on a Folded Wing, was the surprise of getting pulled into the Amelia Earhart disappearance from a completely backwards angle, and experiencing a crash course in all things Amelia Earhart. That’s because, when I first got started on this project, one of the items related to the book that Trixie had saved—among others—was a 1963 letter written to her at the publication General Aviation News from a WWII veteran claiming to have met Amelia Earhart in the Marianas Islands in 1940. I simply had to explore it.

Now, let’s take a step back for a brief moment. My first impression upon reading the letter was “this is amusing.” But, I had zero context for it. I can’t emphasize enough that I didn’t have any real understanding of who Amelia Earhart was at that time, or what this letter meant, if anything at all. I also didn’t know anything much about Amelia’s flight accomplishments, her personal life, her ambitions, her world flight attempts, or what was happening in the world of geopolitics back in 1937. I simply assumed the one thing I had always heard to be true: that Amelia Earhart had tragically crash landed into the ocean and probably died as a castaway on some remote island. A tragic mystery: case closed.

If you’re like most people, you may have heard recently in the mainstream media that Robert Ballard, the man who found the Titanic, just wrapped up an initial search for Amelia Earhart’s plane in the Pacific. A video overview of this undertaking is below:

To date, as with all previous searches for Amelia’s plane, the search has thus far turned up turned up nothing. (You can read more about this undertaking in this National Geographic article from earlier this week entitled “‘Tantalizing clue’ marks end of Amelia Earhart expedition: While the location of the aviator’s plane remains elusive, an artifact re-discovered after 80 years may spark new avenues of inquiry.”) That’s because the questions most people are asking may simply NOT be the correct ones.

Digging into the Idea of a Japanese Capture

Once I started digging into the items that Trixie had left behind, as well as into Amelia Earhart’s own story, and of course into Joan’s own personal ambition to explore the Amelia’s disappearance for herself in 1964 in the region where she disappeared, things really started to become interesting. I soon started to wonder why I had always accepted the idea of a “crash and sink” theory as a simple fact.

In addition to the letter, another item Trixie saved was a copy of an article about Amelia’s disappearance from a 1944 issue of the American Weekly (click here to view a full-size image). In reference to Amelia’s disappearance, the article notes that Marion L. Brittain—academic administrator and president of the Georgia Institute of Technology from 1922 to 1944, who is credited with what is now the second largest aerospace engineering faculty in the United States—stated the following: “We got a very definite feeling that Miss Earhart had some sort of understanding with government officials that the last part of her voyage around the world would be over some Japanese islands, probably the Marshalls, which were only a little north of an airline from new Guinea to Howland Island.” In short, the article summarizes early speculation shared in support of a Japanese capture. The more I started to learn about the history behind this case, the more I wanted to talk to someone who was knowledgeable about it.

Enter: Mike Campbell, Author of Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last

As soon as I started digging around for someone reputable to talk to about this topic, I immediately came across the writings of Mike Campbell at his blog Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last. That’s because, unlike other Amelia Earhart researchers, much of what Mike was writing about seemed to match up with the materials that Trixie—as a well-traveled foreign news correspondent and fellow pilot—had saved.

As an award-winning print and broadcast journalist while on active duty with the U.S. Navy and as a civilian public affairs officer with the Air Force, Mike immediately stood out to me as someone who would offer some great perspective. While I am sure it was mind-boggling for him at first to hear from someone as uninformed as me, at the same time I was shocked to find that there was an actual, credible idea out there that supported the concept of Amelia Earhart having been captured by the Japanese. In short order, I received a copy of Mike’s book, Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last, and started reading.

Did you know that there are over 1,500 books available on Amazon related to the topic of Amelia Earhart? As it turns out, Mike Campbell’s book is the #1 ranked Earhart-related book on Amazon, and I highly encourage you to check it out. Mike’s book offers a fascinating perspective, stringing together a mountain of detailed evidence and personal accounts to drive home his point that “nearly everything the American public has seen, read and heard in the media for nearly eighty years about the so-called Amelia Earhart mystery is intentionally false or inadvertently misleading.” The book is informative, well-written and a must read for anyone interested in knowing more about the details, intricacies, and history regarding Amelia Earhart’s disappearance.

Recently, Mike was featured on an episode of the “1001 Hereos, Legends, Histories, and Mysteries” podcast. For those who are interested in learning more, I highly encourage you to listen to that podcast here. This conversation provides an compelling and comprehensive introduction to this topic.

While no physical evidence exists to support any one theory about Amelia Earhart’s disappearance conclusively, even though this case is now over 80 years old, one thing does remain for certain: Amelia Earhart was an American icon whose legacy remains ever-present within our culture, who surely deserves from each of us that we all take the time to explore for ourselves and to start asking better questions.