As a blogger, you get to know your reading audience a bit over time, and perhaps get some sense of what they like and probably expect you to write about. For me, the range of topics I’ll delve into is a bit eclectic, but posts about the smoke of Satan in the Vatican or missing aviators always prove to be sure-fire winners.
I first blogged in soundingsjohnbarker (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com) about Amelia Earhart in a post headlined “Missing aviators: Our continuing fascination” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/missing-aviators-our-continuing-fascination/) on Sept. 8, 2014, although I had written some earlier newspaper columns over the years about the story.
On July 2, 1937, the Lockheed Electra 10E aircraft carrying 39-year-old American aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Frederick Noonan, 44, was reported missing near Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean.
The pair were attempting to fly around the world when they lost their bearings during the most challenging leg of the global journey from Lae, the capital of Morobe Province and the second-largest city in Papua New Guinea, to Howland Island, a tiny uninhabited coral island 2,227 nautical miles away, located just north of the equator in the central Pacific Ocean, about 1,700 nautical miles southwest of Honolulu. The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca was in sporadic radio contact with Earhart as she approached Howland Island and received messages that she was lost and running low on fuel. No trace of Earhart or Noonan was ever found.
The disappearance of international aviator Earhart and navigator Noonan – in the midst of the worldwide Great Depression and concomitant with the rise of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism in Germany, Benito Mussolini and fascism in Italy and the Greater Japanese Empire of Imperial Japan in the Far East, soon to collectively form the Axis powers of the Second World War – would prove riveting beyond even human interest, as something of a cautionary tale perhaps about entente d engagement to Isolationist America.
Journalists love anniversary dates to generate new takes on old stories, and never more so than during the summer, when new news is often slow and hard to come by.
Earhart disappeared 80 years ago last Sunday. Yesterday, NBC News and other media outlets had a flurry of stories on a newly discovered photograph from an Office of Naval Intelligence file in the U.S. National Archives that some believe suggests Earhart and Noonan survived a crash-landing on Jaluit Atoll in the then Japanese-controlled Marshall Islands.
“The photo, found in a long-forgotten file in the National Archives, shows a woman who resembles Earhart and a man who appears to be her navigator, Fred Noonan, on a dock,” says NBC News (http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/amelia-earhart-may-have-survived-crash-landing-never-seen-photo-n779591). “The discovery is featured in a new History channel special, Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence that airs July 9.”
Shawn Henry, a former executive assistant director for the FBI and an NBC News analyst, believes the photo is undoctored and shows the famed pilot and her navigator.
“When you pull out, and 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,” Henry told NBC News.
Les Kinney, a retired government investigator who has spent 15 years looking for Earhart clues, said the photo “clearly indicates that Earhart was captured by the Japanese.”
Leave it to those picky fact-checking Brits to throw cold water on the story. BBC News in a story earlier today headlined “Amelia Earhart: Does photo show she died a Japanese prisoner?” (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-40515754) quotes Ric Gillespie, author of Finding Amelia and executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), as being unconvinced: “This photograph has people convinced. I’m astounded by this. I mean, my God! Look at this photograph… Let’s use our heads for a moment. It’s undated. They think it’s from 1937. Okay. If it’s from July 1, 1937 then it can’t be Amelia, because she hadn’t taken off yet.
“If it’s from 1935 or 1938 it can’t be her…. This photograph has to have been taken within a very narrow window – within a couple of days of when she disappeared.
“And what does the photo say that it shows? … Jaluit Atoll – Jaluit Island. It doesn’t say ‘Amelia Earhart in Japanese custody’!
“If this is a picture of Amelia Earhart in Japanese custody, where are the Japanese? There are no soldiers in this picture. Nobody in uniform,” Gillespie observed.
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