Government disinformation and the truth about the disappearance of America’s First Lady of Flight
by Mike Campbell
The American people have been thoroughly misled about the fate of iconic aviatrix Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, her navigator, since the day they failed to reach Howland Island during their world-flight attempt. Contrary to the Navy’s conclusion that Earhart’s Electra 10E “most probably” crashed and sank within 120 miles of Howland Island on July 2, 1937, the lost fliers were picked up by the Japanese in the Marshall Islands and taken to Saipan, where they suffered cruel, ignoble deaths, falsely accused as spies.
This idea isn’t new, but a deeply entrenched, ongoing program of disinformation perpetrated by the U.S. government and its media allies has relegated the truth in the Earhart disappearance to the dustbin of myth and conspiracy theory. Among the most visible evidences of this vast propaganda effort is the two-decade-long phenomenon of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. TIGHAR has been the media’s preferred agent of Earhart misdirection since its first failed excursion to Nikumororo, formerly Gardner Island, in the South Pacific’s Phoenix Group, in 1989.
Although not a single piece of the flotsam, jetsam and garbage TIGHAR has recovered from the island during ten forays there has been forensically connected to Earhart or Noonan, the average citizen knows nothing more about Amelia Earhart than TIGHAR executive director Ric Gillespie’s baseless claim that she and Noonan landed and perished there. Almost never does a gullible, compliant press mention the hundreds, if not thousands of people who lived and worked on the island for decades after Earhart and Noonan’s alleged landfall, or the various searches that turned up no trace of the lost fliers.
Many unanswered questions about Earhart’s final flight remain, but the so-called “Amelia Earhart Mystery” is anything but an unsolvable riddle to those familiar with the facts of the case. Two generations have passed since Fred Goerner’s forgotten 1966 bestseller, The Search for Amelia Earhart, electrified the nation with the San Francisco newsman’s astonishing discoveries about the American aviators’ deaths on Saipan. But rather than disclose the truth in response to the outcry that followed the publication of Search, the establishment dismissed Goerner’s findings, smearing him and anyone else who questioned their false dogma.
This institutionalized policy of deceit and disinformation has denied Earhart and Noonan “the justice of truth,” as Goerner often described it, and left their legacy in tatters. Instead of being recognized as hapless victims of the barbaric prewar Japanese military, Earhart and Noonan were sacrificed at the altar of political expediency, often portrayed as inept bunglers or stunt fliers whose luck finally ran out.
Unknown to the public – then and now – no less an authority than the late General Alexander A. Vandegrift, former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and Saipan veteran, told Goerner in 1971, “Miss Earhart met her death on Saipan.” Former flag officers including Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz and Marine General Graves Erskine, another Saipan veteran, uttered similar statements to Goerner and his associates, confirming the fact that Earhart and Noonan met their ends on Saipan.
Following Thomas E. Devine’s plea for support at the conclusion of his remarkable 1987 book, Eyewitness: The Amelia Earhart Incident, more than two-dozen former GIs contacted him to share the knowledge of the presence of the American fliers and the Earhart Electra on Saipan they gained during the 1944 invasion. Their accounts can be found in my 2002 book, With Our Own Eyes: Eyewitnesses to the Final Days of Amelia Earhart (Lucky Press), and are re-presented in a new format, along with many other, heretofore unknown eyewitness testimonies that corroborate the Saipan truth, in my new, unpublished book, The Earhart Deception: Government disinformation and the truth about the disappearance of America’s First Lady of Flight.
Besides the reports of former American servicemen, The Earhart Deception contains many previously unknown documents and revelations from Goerner’s files that further establish the fact of Earhart and Noonan’s untimely demise at the hands of the Japanese. Since Goerner began his investigation in 1960, upward of two hundred native witnesses have told researchers about the presence of the fliers in the Marshalls and their deaths on Saipan – not at the bottom of the Pacific, as the government has claimed for more than 70 years. For the first time ever, these witnesses and their compelling stories are presented in one book.
The Earhart Deception shatters the popular myth that Amelia Earhart’s Electra 10E, NR 16020 crashed and sank in the central Pacific on July 2, 1937, and shines the bright light of truth on the countless unknown facts surrounding the most misunderstood and mispublicized disappearance of the 20th century. No book on the Earhart mystery has ever taken such a bold, uncompromising stance, and none has reached a more certain conclusion.
Chapter by chapter, The Earhart Deception presents the most compelling case for Amelia Earhart’s presence and death on Saipan ever compiled. From the most comprehensive collection of all significant American and native witnesses ever interviewed, to the most extensive analysis of the disinformation techniques employed by the American government-media complex to suppress the facts about the first American casualties of World War II, The Earhart Deception brings the reader face-to-face with the stunning, undeniable truth in the Earhart matter.
Mike Campbell’s second book on the Earhart disappearance, Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last, will be published in the spring of 2012 by Sunberry Press, of Camp Hill, Penn. Interested readers can contact him at [email protected].
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