History special explores aviator survived landing in Marshall Islands only to be captured and executed by the Japanese.
Eighty years after she flew off into the wild blue yonder, never to be seen again, American aviator/hero Amelia Earhart was back in the news this week with a much-hyped TV special that revives a disturbing theory about her fate.
The theory goes like this: She was captured and executed on Saipan by the Empire of Japan. The U. S. government and military knew it (and even found and exhumed her body) . And both governments have been lying about it ever since. As such, History’s Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence, airing Sunday (9 ET/PT) , is an apt conspiracy theory for these anti-government times.
But add it to the conjecture about what happened back in 1937, the age of aviation antiquity, when Earhart set off with navigator Fred Noonan to circumnavigate the globe in a Lockheed Electra and vanished somewhere in the South Pacific .
Did they get lost, run out of fuel and crash into the ocean, as the U. S. Navy concluded after what was then the largest naval search? Did they crash-land on some obscure island and die as castaways? And was Earhart really a U. S. spy sent to report on Japanese activity ahead of World War II?
This two-hour special is a good yarn told with graphics and portentous music. But don’t expect the mystery to be solved beyond a reasonable doubt, despite the special’s claims. Other Earhart experts are already throwing shade on the speculation, floated since the 1960s, about the fate of America’s most famous missing person.
This new theory rests on an ambiguous photograph, said to have been taken in 1937, that might show Earhart and Noonan alive on a dock in the Marshall Islands, then controlled by Japan. Unearthed recently in a long-lost file in the National Archives, the photo dominated headlines this week.
But is that really them? Isn’t her hair too long and too dark? Why are there no Japanese guards visible? Is that really her airplane being towed by a Japanese ship? Wasn’t this picture included in a batch of photos in the Archives taken after 1940?
Shawn Henry, a former FBI official, hosts the special, leading a team that uses the latest recognition analysis technology. They examine plane parts found on Mili Atoll, an uninhabited island in the Marshalls where they believe Earhart crash-landed. They interview eyewitnesses (or their descendants) who claim to have seen a white man and a white woman after they landed or on Saipan in Japanese custody.
The team also offers a plausible hypothesis of how Earhart might have gotten lost and veered off course while heading to Howland Island in the South Pacific, and how she turned back but ran out of fuel and ended up in the Marshalls instead.
After that, the theory goes, the two aviators were taken by their Japanese captors to a prison camp where they were executed as suspected spies. The team retrieves testimony from a witness who claims to have seen the duo buried by the Japanese, and from two Marines who say they were ordered to dig up their bodies. What happened to the alleged remains? The team has no answers.
Japan has denied this account, back then and now. What’s less understandable is why the U. S. government and military, would conceal it — especially after Pearl Harbor and all that followed.
“This could be the biggest government cover-up of all time, ” Henry declares with the bombast that characterizes the special. What he doesn’t explain is why.
For all those who treasure the memory of Earhart and her courage, maybe it’s more comforting to believe she died a heroic death in the blue Pacific — and not an agonizing one at the hands of cruel captors.
