Earhart captured by the Japanese?

Parent Cafe
21

@doschicos that was my thought, too. People are able to pull out amazing details from what we see as grainy photos though. Whether that’s happening in this case- I don’t know.

I can see why they think she’s a woman. The torso looks shaped like a female torso rather than straight like a man’s. But it’s also possible that it’s just the way the shirt was laying for whatever reason.

But hey, what do I know?

That’s another thing that’s bugging me: if it was a spy, why wasn’t he caught and the film destroyed? They’re clearly staring straight at the camera so it’s not like they don’t know their picture is being taken.

22

My problem with this is that it is highly unlikely had the Japanese captured Earhardt and Noonan that it would have been kept quiet all this time. If the US knew about it when it happened (as one theory holds it), Roosevelt would have had every reason not to keep it quiet, Amelia Earhardt was a big deal,and if the Japanese had captured her like that, it would have gone a long way to change attitudes about the Japanese and the need to get the US prepared militarily. The other thing is this wouldn’t have been some local commander deciding to do this on his own, he would have known who he captured and the implications and would have gotten orders from the central command and likely even higher up if in fact they executed her, and given that the US had access to their records once the war was won, the odds of keeping this quiet for 70 years would be practically zero, there would be no reason to keep this quiet, like many conspiracy theories the biggest problem is it is very, very hard to keep something like this secret. I suspect we may never know what happened to her, the Pacific Ocean is huge, and the odds of finding proof of her fate as time goes on diminishes.

23

The NBC photo expert was especially struck not so much by Earhart, but by the similarity of the person he believes is Fred Noonan, her navigator, whose face you can see in the photo. They also said it was interesting that the Earhart figure’s face is turned toward what appears to be a large metal object onboard the ship – an object estimated to be 38 feet based on other objects in the picture – and 38 feet just happens to be near exact length of Earhart’s plane…

I think it’s a credible theory that the persons in the photo are Noonan and AE… but I also wouldn’t dismiss the idea the photo is a fake – their images “inserted” into it for whatever reason.

24

The more I look at the photo the more I doubt it. The sitting photo the hair just does not look like hers to me (her hair is very distinct in all other photos you see of her). The supposed “hairline” of the man would be the easiest of all the things to photoshop to try to fake a match. Even the “airplane” does not seem right to me. It looks too light, (her plane photographed quite dark in black and white) and if I look at it closely, it looks more like two small boats passing each other.

25

The Japanese militarists as aggressive as they were in Asia still had enough sensible heads in the high command that knew they weren’t ready to take on the US and more importantly, knew the US public’s isolationist sentiment when Earhardt disappeared.

Why would they want to provoke an unnecessary war before they felt they were ready…especially considering the US was a major supplier of the very oil and steel needed to maintain their military machine and growing empire?

There’s also the factor that the Imperial Japanese government was completely dominated by the Army and in that period prioritized the East Asian landmass and the Soviet Union as their main focus/enemy in terms of military preparations as shown by the border clashes between the IJA and the Soviet forces a few years later.

It was only after the IJA was mauled so badly by the Soviets in those border clashes it ran back with its tail between its legs and the US started threatening and eventually cutting off those oil and steel exports that the Army dominated militarist government started to give more leeway to the Navy’s preference for prioritizing the US as the main enemy which eventually led to them green lighting the Pearl Harbor preemptive strike and the rest is history.

26

I was obsessed with Earhart in elementary school (likely the dearth of female heroines to study in the 1960s had something to do with it) and was excited to hear of the possibility of an explanation with this photo. However, it shows so little I feel researchers are grasping at straws. That said, I plan to watch the History channel story on this on Sunday.

27

The F4U Corsair’s problems were worst when landing on aircraft carriers. Before modifications to reduce the problems, they were assigned to Marine units operating from land bases. Boyington’s VMF-214 (“Black Sheep”) was one such unit.

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@ucbalumnus:
The Corsair had more than a few pilots wondering if the maker was working for the Japanese lol. … it was very unforgiving, my uncle served on a carrier in World War II, and said he saw more than a few Corsairs where the pilot literally described landing it as wrestling with the devil (probably much more colorful language than that!).

29

And now this…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/07/09/researchers-may-have-found-where-amelia-earhart-died-days-after-a-photo-suggested-she-lived/

30

^ There it is. Part of my personal favorite Earhart demise theory.

31

Paywall, so can’t view this. :frowning:

32

I watched the show, and while it could not say it definitively proved anything (and I still have questions), it was interesting. With the photo, they had a professional photo analyst look at the pictures to detect if they had been tampered with, and the methods they are use are pretty intricate, the expert at the end said basically that it was around 99.7% certainty it had not been tampered with, ie people’ imposed and whatnot. Likewise,while they couldn’t say with certainty it was noonan and earthardt, using known images of noonan and earhardt superimposed over the photo in question, there are striking similarities, enough that the analyst and the guy who was the ex FBI high level guy would be willing in court to say they thought it was them.

The other thing that is weird is if the show is right, there is a ton of missing information that is supposed to be in the federal archives and isn’t. The photo in question was found with intelligence photos from 1940 of the Marshall Islands, and it seems that is the only way the guy found it. On another show I had been watching an ex CIA guy said that when stuff goes missing like that, there is a reason for it, it wasn’t some accidental oversight. Other communications and writings of the time refer to these files, and some of them indicate that the NIS thought Earhardt and Noonan had lived and were captured by the Japanese and died in their custody. If that stuff was missing, to me that indicates there was a reason for them to be missing, and the question then is why?

The other thing I didn’t know what the story of the two Marines who when the US took Saipan were told to dig up two bodies. People have poohed poohed this, said the two Marines said this to get some attention, but what I didn’t know was in the late 60’s there was an expedition top dig up where the Marines said the bodies were buried, and they came up with 180+ bone fragments that they sent for analysis, and they came back as caucasian and from the 1930’s, a time when there were no caucausians there. Obviously this was before DNA testing, and the businessman and the ex Cleveland cop who did the work apparently never asked for the fragments back, and they have disappeared (which is kind of suspicious as well, would figure that would have been in the university archives). If someone could find those, obviously they could test them.

The other big thing was the reports of the natives of the Islands, who cross confirmed things without knowing them. A native who was acting as a medic said he treated a man and woman on the kyushu (the ship in the photo), and mentioned that the man had a gash on his forehead and had an injured knee (the interview was done in 1983, long before this photo was found). Another person who saw a man and woman (actually, interestingly, originally thought earthardt was a man because of the short hair and pants) said the main appeared to be limping on the leg the other one had reported hurt. A girl who on Saipan was responsible for doing laundry for the japanese where the jail was reported seeing a caucasian woman in a cell there…another guys father (a reverend) was out fishing in the lagoon of the Island where they think they landed (I think it was called Miwi), and reported later on that the Japanese showed up and dragged the plane to the other side of the lagoon, where it was put on a barge, as in the photo. On the Island, there are these wheels that the Japanese used to transport ammunition like shells and such, which is weird cause the Island was never fortified with guns like that…but could have been used to move the plane (and there were 3 sets of them, which would have been used for the 3 wheels on the plane). These were people who didn’t know of this photo when they made these statements, they didn’t know each other or of each other…so why would they lie? I am more inclined to believe them then let’s say the Japanese author who claims to have seen the ship’s log for the Kyushu and that it was 1200 miles away at the time, since the author had a lot of reasons to try and distort the truth.

Another interesting thing was apparently the guy who was the commandant of the Marine Corps believed that Earthardt had been captured, writing in the 1970’s he said that from what he saw and heard she made it.

There also were the radio transmissions, that seemed to preclude the official theory that they went into the sea. One woman who was listening to shortwave that night said she heard a transmission that clearly mentioned the Island where they touched down (Miwi?), she wrote letters in the 1940’s to NIS that said she had heard that…how many people in the US, let alone a nurse (I think it was louisville) knew of that Island, a flea speck in the Marshall group.

Obviously, there is nothing conclusive about this, but I also am skeptical of the guys looking on the other island, who have major corporate backing as well as Nat Geo, I doubt they would be very objective. Not saying this is true, but given what the program presented I think there is a case to look into it further and see for example if they can find the bone fragments from Saipan (they found the site on this show, found a coke bottle from 1968 when they did the dig that found the fragments, but only found that the soil had been disturbed, didn’t find any fragments) and try and check the DNA. I don’t understand why the secrecy all these years, but then again who ever said the government is rational? Last I checked, the gizmo they used to break the japanese codes in WWII was under heavy guard at an NSA warehouse and was considered ‘top secret’. Maybe the government is afraid if people found out that they left earthardt and noonan to die, that they would be outraged, or maybe it was to try and protect the Japanese when we were trying to rebuild them post war and didn’t want memories of the past…I think it is worth watching, even if in the end it really didn’t prove anything.

33

I was glued to my seat watching the History channel Earhart piece. The evidence was presented well and made sense to me. @musicprnt did a great job of recapping above.

They also addressed why the US gvmt would have kept quiet about knowing her whereabouts and that she was taken prisoner. If the US had taken action, apparently it would have alerted the Japanese that the US had a code breaking machine.

In the photo below, Earhart isn’t looking at the camera. She’s looking at her plane on the barge on the right. The History channel also took known points from the ship pulling the barge and the distance betweeen those points and transposed onto the airplane. It was the same size as Earharts plane.

The use of facial recognition software and forensic science looking at bone structure etc from known photos vs the archives photos was also interesting.

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34

Sorry, anyone who works with government documents- even ones you have to get a lot of clearance for- can tell you that’s baloney.

Document go missing and get misplaced all the time. It just happens. And often officials think that the documents are there until they go to look for them and realize they’re missing. Basically, they way overestimate their ability to keep track of millions upon millions of documents.

35

@romanigypsyeyes :
I would agree with you, but not when it is to the level you are talking about, we are talking hundreds of documents that aren’t there, and though they didn’t say it outright, it implies they were told that they were still being kept secret. Individual documents, maybe, a couple of hundred? Government security is always a wacked out thing, my guess about why this stuff is hidden is either because they feel it would make the government look bad, or they are doing it not to embarass the Japanese, especially where Japan these days has an ultra nationalist ruling the country (Abe shares the view of many in Japan that the empire did nothing wrong and everything with the war was the US’s fault.)…it could also be simple government inertia, like with the NSA with the blue box that broke the japanese codes or the Colossus machine that was under the official secrets act until almost into the 21st century, both of which were obsolete by the end of the war, yet they made it seem like they were life or death secrets for all those years…

My take is if in fact they knew Earhardt was alive and in the custody of the Japanese, they don’t want it coming out because it would be embarassing both to the US and the Japanese government. One of the thing about a lot of stuff that stays classified is that it stays that way, not because it is dangerous or sensitive, but rather is often politically embarassing, that is pretty much why the Nixon administration tried to suppress the Pentagon papers, and this is often the case.

36

Regarding the possibility a spy working for the US could have snapped that photo, that assumes two things:

  1. The US had a well-funded intelligence apparatus able to infiltrate spies into a highly militaristic empire with a well-developed intelligence/counter-espionage agencies with highly experienced operatives.
  2. That the US was able to recruit enough willing agents who could feasibly infiltrate the IJN administered South Pacific Islands and get them close enough to snap a photo.

The first has a lot of problems considering the US severely cut back on military/intelligence related spending after WWI, state of counterespionage/security within the US military in the 30s*, and the somewhat ad hoc nature of spywork in East Asia during this period as admitted by some former military officers serving in such a role in that period…especially considering funding/resources were a serious issue back then.

In short, it ascribes far more capabilities than what the US actually had in the 1930’s…especially in East Asia. Most of those assumed capabilities wouldn’t manifest itself until after Pearl Harbor and especially after the founding of the OSS/CIA.

And the second was even harder not only because the IJN administered South Pacific was tightly controlled to discourage spying attempts, there were also serious issues with conflicts with other intelligence agencies who were also trying to gather more intel on the Japanese Empire’s military who may not necessarily want to share info with the US…such as those of the then dominant colonial European nations with longer-standing wider intelligence networks especially the British Empire.

  • It was so poor that a former US Naval officer cashiered in disgrace in the 1920's for financial/social improprieties was able to easily talk himself into critical areas of Naval bases/ships so he could access top secret naval plans/ship designs, have them photostatted using Navy photostat machines/personnel, and return them without arousing too much immediate suspicion.

It was only after he started to make mistakes and became disgruntled with a new Japanese handler who severely reduced his payments to the point of blabbing about his being a Japanese spy to a reporter that he was caught.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Semer_Farnsworth

37

The trail is way too cold. We’ll never know what happened to her.

38

Well the history photo appears to be from a Japanese tour book…. Published 2 years before Amelia crashed…

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Perhaps this link to the Guardian newspaper will be better.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/11/blogger-discredits-claim-amelia-earhart-was-taken-prisoner-by-japan

Essentially this blogger in Japan found the same image in the national library of Japan, contained within a travel guide published in 1935.