Press Touts Dubious Earhart Photo

For three quarters of a century America’s press and its court historians have studiously ignored the voluminous evidence that aviation adventurer Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were captured by the Japanese and did not just mysteriously crash into the Pacific Ocean on her round-the-world venture. * Now, across the board, from NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, CNN, to The Washington Post and the Associated Press, they all seem to have made a 180-degree turn based upon the supposed discovery of one very ambiguous photograph in the National Archives. What, we have to wonder, is going on?

The New York Times, jumping the gun with its more skeptical approach, gives us a very big clue. The headline says it all, “Did Amelia Earhart Survive? A Found Photo Offers a Theory, but No Proof.” Already, The Times is beginning to cast doubt upon the significance, if not the authenticity, of this photograph.

What is more than likely happening is that our propaganda press is changing its strategy in defense of the official crashed-and-sank line. What they are apparently using now is a combination of a #4 and a #9 in the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression. They are “Knock down straw men” and “Come half clean.” The upcoming History Channel program that features the photograph will probably leave the knocking down to be done by other photo-examining “experts.”

It reminds me quite a bit of the work that the fake critic, journalist Christopher Ruddy, did in the Vince Foster death case concerning Foster’s presumed “suicide note.” Ruddy found three handwriting experts who pronounced it a forgery. Kenneth Starr came back in his final report with his own expert who said that Foster wrote it. The dueling experts will only lead us down a blind alley, and the next time someone mentions that the Japanese might have captured Amelia Earhart, the average person will think that such “wild speculation” was based entirely on this specious bit of evidence.

When it comes to experts on the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, there is one that we should listen to above all others. That is Mike Campbell, the author of Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last. Here is his take on the photograph:

July 9 Earhart special to feature bogus photo claims

On Wednesday morning, July 5, I awoke to the long-anticipated news that an unclassified photo found at the National Archives in College Park, Md., by researcher Les Kinney that reflected Jaluit Harbor in the Marshall Islands, date possibly late 1930s but not known, would indeed be the centerpiece of the History Channel’s July 9 special, “Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence.” NBC News apparently had the TV network news exclusive on this story, but others were soon also breathlessly touting the photo, as if it were truly the Holy Grail in the Earhart case. To see the initial NBC video and story, please click here.

This would be great news if the claim that Amelia Earhart, Fred Noonan and the Earhart Electra are in the photo were true, because we know that the doomed fliers were in the Marshalls, were taken to Jaluit and later to Kwajalein and Saipan, where they died in Japanese hands.  Several researchers and authors, whose work can be easily found on this site, have presented mountains of evidence to this effect. But this photo isn’t “evidence” of anything except that Koshu was at Jaluit Harbor (large ship in right background) when it was taken, and might have had an unidentifiable airplane on its stern.  Interesting, but hardly what our “experts” are telling us. In fact, this photo does little except discredit the truth, which, in my view, is the goal of this current exercise, along with ratings and making money, of course. (To read the rest of the article, go to Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last.)

* For a summary of that evidence and the press (and Wikipedia) treatment of it, see “Hillary Clinton and the Amelia Earhart Cover-up,” “Amelia Earhart Truth Versus the Establishment,” and “Wikipedia’s Greatest Misses.”

David Martin

July 7, 2017

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