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Speaker 1: stories of things we simply don't know the answer too.
Speaker 1: Hi there, Welcome again to another episode of Thinking Sideways.
Speaker 1: I'm your host Joe, joined as always by Devin and Steve. Alright,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna talk about a really fun mystery this week. Um,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan
Speaker 1: and what happened to them possibly maybe there. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: I'm sure you've heard about Amelia, but if just in
Speaker 1: case you haven't, I'll just give you a brief rundown.
Speaker 1: She was an early female pioneer of aviation, and and
Speaker 1: she flew across the Atlantic for example, I think the
Speaker 1: first woman to fly across the Atlantic. And she was
Speaker 1: on I once you disappeared, she was on a round
Speaker 1: the world flight. She would have been the first woman. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I like, you just sound very unimpressed, Like I guess
Speaker 1: she was. I don't know if she was important female
Speaker 1: figure history. Probably what she was trying to do is
Speaker 1: that we're trying to give just a real brief because
Speaker 1: there's so much to the story. I think it's probably
Speaker 1: on your kid. Yeah, yeah, I mean if you go
Speaker 1: to a wiki page, you can read all about her life,
Speaker 1: so by all means to do that if you want to.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh. And also Fred and
Speaker 1: Inden was her navigator. He was considered one of the
Speaker 1: best navigators around. And uh. He was also a licensed
Speaker 1: ship captain, had a ton of experience with marine and
Speaker 1: then flight navigation. Excuse me, what's that is? Maybe? Oh
Speaker 1: that's true. You might still be alive. Yeah, okay, sorry
Speaker 1: about that. Uh. And yeah, and the alien Fred, if
Speaker 1: you're out there listening, drop us a postcard. Souse, I know. Anyway.
Speaker 1: On July nineteen thirty seven, Heat and Amelia were heading
Speaker 1: out over the Pacific Ocean on their third to the
Speaker 1: last leg of their round the World trip. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: they're going to try to find a tiny little piece
Speaker 1: of land called Howland Island. Um, you can find it
Speaker 1: on Google if you want. Well, I mean, probably go
Speaker 1: any further. I want to acknowledge that this was suggested
Speaker 1: by a couple of people, Ash and also Jeremy Right,
Speaker 1: so thanks guys. A long time ago, ye, quite a while. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: one of our first suggestions, I think. Yeah, well, okay,
Speaker 1: the round world. The Round the World trip began in Oakland, California,
Speaker 1: went eastward in ninety seven. People had already flown around
Speaker 1: the world, so Amelia decided to set herself apart by
Speaker 1: following an extra long twenty thousand mile equatorial route and
Speaker 1: also being female and also that too. Yeah. Yeah. She
Speaker 1: got financing for Purdy University and Lockeed Aircraft built her
Speaker 1: a custom lock heat Electric ten airplane, which yatom mean.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, like, don't you want the
Speaker 1: model that's been tested? Yeah, you never, you never use
Speaker 1: first use. I'm not sure how long the lock the
Speaker 1: elector had been around at that time. Well, but even
Speaker 1: if you just add an extra fuel tank, you want
Speaker 1: one that's been around a couple of times. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: my rule at least. Yeah, so, yeah, the extra big
Speaker 1: fuel tank was one thing. But but what strikes me
Speaker 1: as strange about this is that they didn't incorporate a
Speaker 1: navigation dome. What's a navigation dome? Because in the old days,
Speaker 1: before they had all this fancy stuff, that we had
Speaker 1: these days. You had to use a sextant and like
Speaker 1: like when you're flying at night, actually get a fix
Speaker 1: on a star skylight on the top of the plane.
Speaker 1: Basically bubbles like I have a sperit glass bubble that
Speaker 1: they built into the tops of a lot of planes
Speaker 1: back in those days. And why they didn't build one
Speaker 1: into this plane, I don't know, but it would have
Speaker 1: been a good idea for fun. I think because they
Speaker 1: were they were relying on the technology they had of
Speaker 1: the new radios and stuff like that they thought. I
Speaker 1: don't think they felt like they needed first Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems like they were going to use radio direction
Speaker 1: finding technology in this particular little thing of Amelia's, but
Speaker 1: it didn't really work out too well. Was there is
Speaker 1: there some consideration for aerodynamics as well? Like were they
Speaker 1: trying to make the plane more aerodynamic? It's conceivable, I
Speaker 1: don't know, to extend the fuel life. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: think that's a good question. Yeah, the first try this
Speaker 1: this actually was her second try at around the world thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she tried one time before and she flew from Oakland
Speaker 1: to Honolulu successfully and yeah, so that means that she
Speaker 1: was flying east to West instead of what she ended
Speaker 1: up doing in the end, which was flying yeah, exhausting east. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in halleluluh. She was taking off her second leg and
Speaker 1: she had an unfortunate incident. There's still a little controversial.
Speaker 1: She ground loops essentially, which meant that on takeoff, one
Speaker 1: wingtip caught the ground and she just sort of spun
Speaker 1: around and did a huge amount of damage to her plane.
Speaker 1: Did it? Did it spin around? Always got the impression
Speaker 1: that the ground loop is where one hits and then
Speaker 1: you know, it's the equal and opposite reaction. It pushes
Speaker 1: it the other way, and so they waggle back and forth,
Speaker 1: because you've seen plane. I've seen planes doing that when
Speaker 1: they're taking off and they'll they kind of one tip
Speaker 1: then the other wing tip back and forth on their
Speaker 1: central accesses. No, it's actually it's defined as a rapid
Speaker 1: rotation of a plane and in the horizontal plane. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: So my impression is it's like one wing gets caught
Speaker 1: basically pivots. Yeah, okay, okay, that's then that's where I
Speaker 1: misunderstood it. Yeah. Anyway, the plane was severely damaged. It
Speaker 1: had to be shoot back to California to be fixed
Speaker 1: and Uh, and it's controversial. I mean, I mean a
Speaker 1: lot of damage. Yeah, Amelia claimed that her right tire
Speaker 1: blue out, which may or may not be true, and
Speaker 1: other people who blame pilot error. So there, she's controversial,
Speaker 1: and it might there might be a certain amount of
Speaker 1: bias with some of these people who said that she
Speaker 1: was not so hot of a pilot after all. But
Speaker 1: it's a lot of problems with the stories that people
Speaker 1: are holding back because either they think she because she
Speaker 1: was a woman, she wasn't a good pilot, or because
Speaker 1: she was a one woman pilot, they don't want to
Speaker 1: point out any of her flaws and her ability. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a weird it's a weird catch twenty two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it kind of is. Oh. And also there was some
Speaker 1: mention in the story at the end of nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: seven that supposedly Fred Noonan told his wife he had
Speaker 1: just recently remarried, told her about the blowout, if it
Speaker 1: was a blowout, that he didn't think it was an accident,
Speaker 1: he thought it was sabotage. Yeah, but I'll talk about
Speaker 1: I'll talk a little bit more about this article. It
Speaker 1: was in True magazine. I think that's probably what should
Speaker 1: not be called it's a pretty liberal article. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: anyway back to the second one, back to our trip.
Speaker 1: The second of her second attempt, second try, they leave
Speaker 1: Local for Miami, and then at Miami they made the
Speaker 1: faithful decision to remove their trailing antenna, which really might
Speaker 1: have saved their bacon later, Joe, what's the trailing in?
Speaker 1: I'll just do that for this entire episode. Yeah, I was.
Speaker 1: I was going to explain that a trailing antenna is
Speaker 1: something that you in those days at least, antenna's were
Speaker 1: less sophisticated, so generally speaking, and I'm not an expert
Speaker 1: on radios at all, but my understanding of this is
Speaker 1: that in order to broadcast on the five Killer Hurts band,
Speaker 1: which is a marine distress band, I think you have
Speaker 1: to have it. You have to have an antenna of
Speaker 1: a certain length, and would be too much a longer
Speaker 1: antenna than you can actually accommodate inside or mounted on
Speaker 1: the fuselage of it. So it's gotta be longer. So
Speaker 1: what you do is it's a it's a long and
Speaker 1: wire antenna with a lead weight on the end, and
Speaker 1: then you toss it out now you know, you deploy
Speaker 1: it out the window exactly fuselage on the back and
Speaker 1: then it's got to the bridge. Yeah. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: you after you take off, you deploy it, and then
Speaker 1: before you land you better remember to reel it back in.
Speaker 1: Why what would be the reason that one would disconnect that.
Speaker 1: It seems like it's a innocuous thing. Yeah, apparently U
Speaker 1: I guess they felt it was just too much of
Speaker 1: a nuisance to have to reel it in every time
Speaker 1: you land the plane. So why not just not not
Speaker 1: deploy it? Yeah that question. Yeah, it doesn't seem like
Speaker 1: it's a tremendously heavy thing. Yeah, it's not like weighing
Speaker 1: them down a hole. Probably got it's probably a couple
Speaker 1: of pounds total in weight, So yeah, just don't eat
Speaker 1: a couple of meals maybe and you're well, it's probably
Speaker 1: more than a couple of pounds for the electric winch
Speaker 1: and everything else. But you know, still it wasn't that much.
Speaker 1: And uh, it's a little explicable. You know for me,
Speaker 1: I would want to have everything. Yeah, I just want
Speaker 1: to have that extra radio, you know, just in case
Speaker 1: when you where the radios goes out. And you know,
Speaker 1: part of the big part of the problem with this
Speaker 1: whole thing, for Amelia and Fred is that the radio
Speaker 1: wasn't quite working right and that kind of hosed them
Speaker 1: in the end. Yeah, and uh, just a brief mention here.
Speaker 1: They were talking before they hired brought Fred onto the project.
Speaker 1: They were talking to another navigator whose name was Bradford Washburn,
Speaker 1: and they asked him. That was Amelia and her husband
Speaker 1: were asking him, well, we we want to go from
Speaker 1: New Guinea to Howland Island. It's going to be really
Speaker 1: tough to find. What what do you think we need
Speaker 1: to do? And he said, you have to have a
Speaker 1: trailing antenna and and then for communications, and you have
Speaker 1: to have a radio operator on the island. Amelia didn't
Speaker 1: want to go with the trailing antenna and so he
Speaker 1: backed out. Smart dude. Yeah for him, I'm sure he
Speaker 1: was patting himself on the back. I mean, he probably
Speaker 1: wasn't happy about it, but you know, still the so
Speaker 1: the jump from le from La Papua, New Guinea, it's
Speaker 1: a town on the east east coast of Papua New Guinea.
Speaker 1: As I said, the third to last leg, it was
Speaker 1: expected to take at least eighteen twenty hours and the
Speaker 1: Elector was capable of flying twenty four hours under a
Speaker 1: deal conditions if the tanks were full, and I've heard
Speaker 1: varying accounts of this. Most say that the tanks were
Speaker 1: full when they left Lay, but I've also seen a
Speaker 1: few other accounts that stay that, No, she only had
Speaker 1: about nine fifty gallons of gas. Well, how much was
Speaker 1: the tank? Sorry, thank I've heard varying spent that. Yeah, eleven,
Speaker 1: we're there, Yeah, yeah, But apparently they there was a
Speaker 1: grass airstrip at Lai and it was it was only
Speaker 1: three thousand feet long, and apparently, according to some authorities
Speaker 1: that have heard, she couldn't take off with much more
Speaker 1: weight than she had, and they actually offloaded a bunch
Speaker 1: of weight just so they could make up make it
Speaker 1: up with fuel, so they took some stuff off at Law.
Speaker 1: The Navy was cooperating with the mission. The Coast Guard
Speaker 1: cutter Itasca was stationed at Hellan Island, and also the
Speaker 1: tug the USS Ontario was stationed midway between Lay and Howland,
Speaker 1: and then the USS Swan was stationed beyond Hollan Island
Speaker 1: to the east. So the Navy was plane of ships
Speaker 1: form to be able to communicate with as they got close.
Speaker 1: When they got there and if they were shot, somebody
Speaker 1: still talk to them, yeah, or go rescue them if
Speaker 1: they had a ditch or something like that. Of the navy.
Speaker 1: That was awfully nice. Yeah. Yeah, it was an overnight flight.
Speaker 1: It was scheduled to arrive at helln Island early in
Speaker 1: the morning of July two. So they left July second,
Speaker 1: they arrived July second. That's international dateline. Oh yeah, right, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: And so they left at ten am, which is zero
Speaker 1: Granwich mean time, and so all the times I'm going
Speaker 1: to be giving from here on in our Granwich mean
Speaker 1: time because when I don't know if you guys noticed,
Speaker 1: as when you researched, it was, oh, it's screw. It's
Speaker 1: really hard because there's half hour time zones over there
Speaker 1: and they're they're talking local time at La local time
Speaker 1: at Howland and and then they're mixing it in with
Speaker 1: Granwich mean time and oh my god, it's confused. So
Speaker 1: actually this is interesting. My brother is I'm currently in
Speaker 1: New Zealand working and so they are three hours behind us,
Speaker 1: but they in tomorrow. Yeah, so it's very interesting trying
Speaker 1: to have, you know, skype conversation with him because it's
Speaker 1: like I don't I literally cannot conceptualize of what time
Speaker 1: it is there for you because it's just it seems
Speaker 1: like it's in the future. So I you know it
Speaker 1: is in the future. Well, I kind of had this
Speaker 1: same thing happening with this, you know, because it was
Speaker 1: kind of like, I don't know, I can't get a
Speaker 1: good beat on it. So good on the Greenwich meantime
Speaker 1: that we're just going to do it all in one
Speaker 1: keep simple, let's do it. Yeah, Okay, back to Holland Island.
Speaker 1: So the morning that Amelia and Fred were do in
Speaker 1: at Holland Island, the Ataska reported weather conditions as clear
Speaker 1: blue sky to the south and the east, but heavy
Speaker 1: cloud banks to the north and the west. And the
Speaker 1: Ataska is the one that was at the island. That
Speaker 1: was at the island, yeah, and so yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: so not the ideal weather conditions for finding a tiny
Speaker 1: island in the middle of nowhere. And so the plane
Speaker 1: was flying towards the cloud banks, that's flying through them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were to the west of Hallan Island. There were
Speaker 1: a very decent number of radio messages, but I'm not
Speaker 1: going to list them all between there were a lot,
Speaker 1: but that when they were getting close to Holland at
Speaker 1: seventy seven g m t Amelia radio were two hundred
Speaker 1: miles out. Please take a bearing on her signal, And
Speaker 1: she started whistling into the microphone and that so that
Speaker 1: it would be a tone for him to to track, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: just just a steady noise for the track. And the
Speaker 1: thing about it is is they replied to her, but
Speaker 1: they never got an acknowledgement of the message. And then
Speaker 1: in fact, they never got acknowledgments of any of their
Speaker 1: messages to her over the radio. Shouldn't indicates to me
Speaker 1: her receiver was not working. That's it's widely believed that
Speaker 1: there was receiver antend had gotten damaged on takeoff. So
Speaker 1: about this time the Ataska fired up its oil burners
Speaker 1: and generated a big column of black smoke. Oh that's
Speaker 1: a good idea. Yeah, yeah, the commander of the ship
Speaker 1: said later that should have been visible for forty plus
Speaker 1: miles to the south and east. Uh. And if if
Speaker 1: Amelia was flying at one thousand feet, which she said
Speaker 1: she was, well, but I've also heard that if she
Speaker 1: was coming from slightly you know, I think it was
Speaker 1: a slightly different direction, it could have very easily blended
Speaker 1: in with the clouds depending on where she was. You know,
Speaker 1: it's funny. I looked up this this ship and I
Speaker 1: was like, it's got guns. Why the hell weren't they
Speaker 1: just fired off shots to make a bunch of noises.
Speaker 1: She can home in on that that's not a bad idea.
Speaker 1: Didn't have guns at that time, Oh it didn't. Didn't
Speaker 1: got fitted for guns for or two is when I
Speaker 1: figured out they will, like what happens when it's the
Speaker 1: errant shot and you shoot the plane rain? You shoot blank?
Speaker 1: You don't? Yeah, I'm not sure miles away and with
Speaker 1: two really loud aircraft engines, you know, right next to
Speaker 1: your true Yeah. So I actually have one quick question
Speaker 1: before we move on from this. It was documented that
Speaker 1: Amelia did have like the kind of training right that
Speaker 1: she would know you have to respond when people radio you, right,
Speaker 1: And there was documented that she had done that in
Speaker 1: the past. Rights. I just wanted to make sure. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, there's so much talk about her maybe not
Speaker 1: being a great pilot and blah blah blah. I mean,
Speaker 1: I would think that everybody would know if somebody radio's you,
Speaker 1: you at least acknowledge that you got it. But it
Speaker 1: occurs to me that maybe she just didn't know that,
Speaker 1: but I was, so I just wanted to make sure. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: she was accused of not following correct procedures radio procedures
Speaker 1: later on, but I just wanted to make sure, so
Speaker 1: if we're going forward with this that it's that it
Speaker 1: does seem reasonable that she wasn't actually receiving the calls,
Speaker 1: not that she was just choosing to not respond. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The other thing that I know of is in reading,
Speaker 1: is because this radio system was different than what she
Speaker 1: was used to and she want to count it. I
Speaker 1: read it was like she got like a half hour
Speaker 1: of training on it. At it's lucky. Is that who
Speaker 1: made us? Yeah? They when she was picking up, they
Speaker 1: gave her a half hour walk through how the radio worked.
Speaker 1: Wasn't right. She may not have been known how to
Speaker 1: identify that or correct for it. Yeah, it was like
Speaker 1: her radio direction finder, I think, is the one that
Speaker 1: she got just a really quick overview on and that
Speaker 1: was it. Yeah. Well, so when I guess it's also
Speaker 1: possible she wasn't totally clear on how it worked and
Speaker 1: she made a thought she was hitting the button the
Speaker 1: right way, or was holding her head the right way,
Speaker 1: and she wasn't, and nobody's saying to her like, hey,
Speaker 1: did you hear what we were saying? Her headphones were
Speaker 1: unplugged the whole time, and she had no idea the
Speaker 1: mixer was off. Yeah, yeah, Okay, so all right, sorry,
Speaker 1: let's back to back to what the commander said. He
Speaker 1: said that he was it was doubtful that the smoke
Speaker 1: would have been visible for more than twenty miles to
Speaker 1: the north and west, which is where she was coming from. Okay,
Speaker 1: back to the messages. GMT. She radio said they were
Speaker 1: a hundred miles out and low on gas. Uh and
Speaker 1: along about this time, her voice was starting to get
Speaker 1: a little, a little bit of an edge in it,
Speaker 1: I hear, I can imagine. Yeah, yeah, but this is
Speaker 1: this is the part that I find a little inexplicable,
Speaker 1: is why it was. You know, she must not have
Speaker 1: been getting any messages from the Ataska or anybody else.
Speaker 1: So at that point, don't you conclude that your receiver
Speaker 1: was busted and turn around and go back to light.
Speaker 1: Isn't that what not? If you're running low on she's
Speaker 1: been how far out of well no, no, no, I'm
Speaker 1: not saying this way. She must have known earlier in
Speaker 1: the flight, well, you know, well before the halfway point
Speaker 1: and her receiver wasn't working. How could you not deduce
Speaker 1: the receiver? Do we know? Was there a storm, any
Speaker 1: kind of interference that could have knocked him out on midflight,
Speaker 1: So they wouldn't have known that they weren't receiving. So
Speaker 1: sadly they didn't find out that they weren't receiving until
Speaker 1: not possible, until they suddenly weren't receiving from the ship
Speaker 1: and they were like, well, we are too far now
Speaker 1: to turn around, so we're just going to have to
Speaker 1: go pointing in return. Yeah. Yeah, it could have been.
Speaker 1: It could have been maybe they got struck by lightning
Speaker 1: or something like that, or even I mean, I don't know,
Speaker 1: like maybe a duck hit it or something, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: something like that, you know, But I mean that is
Speaker 1: that is that a reasonable thing to sit with. The
Speaker 1: prevailing theory is that it was damaged on takeoff and
Speaker 1: it wouldn't have been working the entire flight, so they
Speaker 1: should have figured something out, like when they were communicating
Speaker 1: with the tower and not hearing the tower in Papua
Speaker 1: New Guinea responding to them again. Yeah, I mean so yeah,
Speaker 1: but anyway, for whatever reason, they just they turned on.
Speaker 1: I think that maybe they figured that they could they
Speaker 1: be able to find this place, you know, and certainly
Speaker 1: if the weather had been better, you know, weather didn't
Speaker 1: help at all. They had a head wind for one thing.
Speaker 1: Uh So back to the messages here, they got their
Speaker 1: last message message on the Ataska am T. She said
Speaker 1: that they were on on a line I think it
Speaker 1: was line of position slash three thirty seven. Can you
Speaker 1: explain what that means? I'm still not positive that I understand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I definitely don't understand. What is what are those numbers?
Speaker 1: So lattitude and longitude? No, no, no, that's uh you
Speaker 1: know you know that you know that's in a in
Speaker 1: a circulars three D and sixty degrees right, so yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, exactly, And so zero on that circle is
Speaker 1: is north? How do an eighty greeze is south? So
Speaker 1: one degrees is like south southeast? Okay, okay, So I've
Speaker 1: never done bearings like That's why I was. I was
Speaker 1: a little confused. So there, so they're south southeast what yeah?
Speaker 1: So south is south southeast? Is between south and southeast
Speaker 1: right now, I know, But it's and then they can't
Speaker 1: give their position. Three seven is just the opposite like
Speaker 1: north northwest. Oh, so she was either going south southe
Speaker 1: so that's the thing. She didn't say what direction on
Speaker 1: that line that they were going. Oh they were all,
Speaker 1: oh I see, okay, yeah, okay, yeah, And so it's
Speaker 1: it's so it's believed that what what fred Knud had
Speaker 1: done was what he was going to do is get
Speaker 1: them out there, take a bearing off off the sun,
Speaker 1: or however we could get a bearing presumable with the
Speaker 1: sun and determine their longitude. So if if they're at
Speaker 1: the correct longitude for the island, for Allen Island, then
Speaker 1: they make they make a right turn and head down
Speaker 1: that line to hit the island. But you know, so
Speaker 1: that's that's theoretically what he was doing. I see, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: so I assumed that they were running south on that line,
Speaker 1: but we actually don't know. She didn't say. And actually,
Speaker 1: and they may frankly, they may not have really known either, right, No,
Speaker 1: they would have known, but they wouldn't know which direction
Speaker 1: they were going. But but you know, we just had
Speaker 1: no way of knowing if they were going north on
Speaker 1: that line. Of course, they would have known. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know what I'm thinking. I'm
Speaker 1: I'm being a dummy. Okay. So, and that was the
Speaker 1: correct longitude for the island latitude longitude. It appears not
Speaker 1: because they never showed up. So she also said at
Speaker 1: the end of that message said she was switched switching
Speaker 1: to sixty different frequency. The Taska radio back telling her
Speaker 1: not to change her frequency, but apparently she did anyway,
Speaker 1: because that's the last they ever heard of her. Did
Speaker 1: she did they switch frequencies. I don't know why they
Speaker 1: couldn't just switch over to sixty two ten. Really, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure have had the radio. They may not have
Speaker 1: that might have and part of the problem, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess it was radio is back in those days
Speaker 1: were a lot more crude, although very narrow bandwidths. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess. For me, my initial reaction is always like
Speaker 1: she was in a small plane, like they had a
Speaker 1: giant naval ship. Really the radio on her plane was
Speaker 1: more sophisticated than there's. But again, you're right, you're making
Speaker 1: good was not new at that time, but it's you know,
Speaker 1: and so it may have gotten the latest radio technology
Speaker 1: ten years prior. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Yeah, So it's
Speaker 1: a good point that you guys are bring up, because
Speaker 1: it is totally my impulse to be like, what do
Speaker 1: you mean her plane was more advanced than a giant battleship.
Speaker 1: You're right, I'm not really sure what the issue was there.
Speaker 1: You know, you would think that they would have the
Speaker 1: capability of operating on a bunch of different frequencies, including
Speaker 1: that one, that it might be that their radio was
Speaker 1: busted or I was old certain frequencies are only used
Speaker 1: in certain areas, you know, on land versus sea, stuff
Speaker 1: like that. So I I mean, I'm I'm completely ignorant here,
Speaker 1: and yeah, we're gonna get a lot of hate mail
Speaker 1: from ham Ham radio operators. Yeah, I know, I know.
Speaker 1: But actually there were three more messages. I mean twenty
Speaker 1: GMT is the one that's always listed as the last one,
Speaker 1: but I read that. Actually the radio operator at NARU
Speaker 1: was was back the halfway point on that that island
Speaker 1: on did hear three more messages at and g MT
Speaker 1: within the span of about a half hour. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: what must happened, Well, I don't know what the contents were.
Speaker 1: I've never been able to find that, but he did
Speaker 1: send a telegram that was eventually made it to the
Speaker 1: Coast Guard about the messages, and he he mentioned the
Speaker 1: last message. He said that the last message sounded just
Speaker 1: like the person in the previous messages, but that the
Speaker 1: person was shouting and the sound of the airplane's engines,
Speaker 1: which had been present previous messages, was gone. So i'd
Speaker 1: probably yeah, a lot of things. So that is that
Speaker 1: is what we know about about Amelia. That's the last
Speaker 1: we heard of her. Um. Then there's a lot of
Speaker 1: theories out there, and they started almost immediately. Of course,
Speaker 1: she was she was a very public figure and she
Speaker 1: was doing a very public thing. Yeah you know you
Speaker 1: were calling. I mentioned that article in True Magazine. Yeah, okay, tu, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's one of the first theories that came at us,
Speaker 1: that they were assassinated. Yeah. So that was in the
Speaker 1: December nineteen thirties seven issue of True Magazine. Uh claimed
Speaker 1: that Amelia and Fred were spying for the US government.
Speaker 1: We're in theory section, by the way, Oh yeah, we
Speaker 1: are in the theory section. Yeah, yeah, sorry about that. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: This article notes that it was very risky to make
Speaker 1: the hop to Howland Island and it would have made
Speaker 1: more sense to travel around the Pacific room like say
Speaker 1: Japan the Illusian Seattle, if you ignore completely what they
Speaker 1: were doing. Yeah, you're right, Yeah, well she wanted to
Speaker 1: do the whole equatorial thing first of all. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: but still, you know they did. There's a good point.
Speaker 1: I mean, how trying to find Hollan Island in the
Speaker 1: middle of a vast ocean was kind of risky and
Speaker 1: uh so obviously they were they were suspicious of True
Speaker 1: magazine and why they took this very risky route. Uh
Speaker 1: And the answer they believed was that they had something
Speaker 1: in their possession that they didn't want the Japanese to see. Yeah,
Speaker 1: apparently they've been doing a lot of spy on their
Speaker 1: round the World trip, and they had a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of top secret info that needed to be
Speaker 1: delivered to the U. S. Government, like in the form
Speaker 1: of like developed pictures. Is that what they're saying? Who knows?
Speaker 1: You know? Uh, yeah, yeah, I guess it has to
Speaker 1: be undeveloped. But that's but that's my argument against this theory,
Speaker 1: because it's like, well, but if it's undeveloped film, then
Speaker 1: they can say, yeah, we've been taking pictures of our
Speaker 1: world record journey. Yeah, why do you have eight rolls
Speaker 1: of films trip? Okay, a lot of water to go
Speaker 1: to the bathroom and take like twelve selfies. I don't
Speaker 1: know what you want from me. Okay, yea. Why the
Speaker 1: pictures all of like military installations? I don't know. It
Speaker 1: all looks like military installations from a thousand feet Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. Anyway, somebody, presumably the Japanese government, didn't want
Speaker 1: all that all that good data delivered to the US government,
Speaker 1: so they used radio interference to make the direction finding
Speaker 1: gear on the airplane and the task are useless, and
Speaker 1: to mess with the air mess with their audio also,
Speaker 1: and the evidence for this as well, the U S
Speaker 1: Government did participate in an Amelia Earhart's trip well station
Speaker 1: in those three ships and everything. Um that's about it
Speaker 1: for evidence. Um yeah, okay, yeah, we let's just ignore
Speaker 1: the fact that she was friends with the current first
Speaker 1: Lady at that time, you know who she is in
Speaker 1: her connections had nothing to do with her being able
Speaker 1: to arrange all of that. No, no, yeah, well, but
Speaker 1: I mean also it's not it's not my impression, correct
Speaker 1: me if I'm wrong that these naval ships were usually
Speaker 1: stationed in New York and made a huge transatlantic journey
Speaker 1: all the way over to this like a little area
Speaker 1: to be stationed in these areas. They were kind of
Speaker 1: like stationed in that general vicinity. Anyway, it was a
Speaker 1: short jog for them to just go plant themselves a
Speaker 1: hundred miles from where they usually were. I don't know
Speaker 1: if they were stationed in the Philippines or you know,
Speaker 1: I Harbor, right, But it's not that it's not like
Speaker 1: they sailed halfway around the world yet. And you know, again,
Speaker 1: it's like kind of an exciting thing for the people
Speaker 1: who are on the ship, right, all of the Marines,
Speaker 1: navy men, navy men. Sorry maybe I didn't actually say this,
Speaker 1: but actually two of them were Navy ships, but the
Speaker 1: Ataska was a coast guard cutter. So anyways, for the
Speaker 1: men that were stationed on the ships, you know, it's
Speaker 1: something interesting for them. It's helping an American citizen achieve
Speaker 1: a world record. You know, it's the famous American America. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we do stuff like that all the time already,
Speaker 1: still right, totally, so yeah, I mean it's not suspicious.
Speaker 1: So of course, this argument or this article is they
Speaker 1: did make a mention of Fred Noonan saying to his
Speaker 1: wife supposedly that they've been sabotaged in Honolulu when they
Speaker 1: when they ground looped. When did that article come out again?
Speaker 1: December nineteen seven? And is that article the first mention
Speaker 1: of Fred Noonan's concern over Amelia's or over sabotage? Is
Speaker 1: that where it came from? Probably that's the first that
Speaker 1: I as first that I know, Yeah, I've never seen it.
Speaker 1: I've never seen it dated prior to that. Now that
Speaker 1: I think about it's like, I wonder if we've discovered
Speaker 1: where the source of it is, you wouldn't surprise me. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: now this is uh, this might be the first the
Speaker 1: source for all the spying allegations and everything to you know,
Speaker 1: it could be another another source was there was a
Speaker 1: movie that came out in I think nineteen forty three
Speaker 1: that was kind of loosely based on Yeah, this one
Speaker 1: was and this one she was spying for the U. S.
Speaker 1: Government And that sort of helped to put that whole
Speaker 1: we were they were spying thing into the population. So
Speaker 1: where where are we saying they were spying? I mean
Speaker 1: like where along the equator? That's like very tactical at
Speaker 1: that point. Yeah, exactly. I mean the area that they
Speaker 1: disappeared in, it's there in the in the Pacific. There
Speaker 1: were islands that were under Japanese control at that time.
Speaker 1: But that's really the only thing. I mean, it's not
Speaker 1: like they would have gone to let's say, Germany is
Speaker 1: the first one that pops into mind. That's way out
Speaker 1: of the way. I mean, nobody major pops up as
Speaker 1: somebody that I would say you would need to be
Speaker 1: spying on, I would just say, like again, as a
Speaker 1: counter to that, not that any of us in this room,
Speaker 1: like actually believe this, but I just really want to
Speaker 1: We're at home, right. Uh. That's a really popular in
Speaker 1: the public eye long way to go about spying on
Speaker 1: tiny little islands that aren't really tactically relevant. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they were. But but if you're gonna have
Speaker 1: somebody's spy, why would you be like Amelia Earhart is
Speaker 1: going for the world record of this thing. Everybody know
Speaker 1: this is exactly a story. You ever, this is exactly
Speaker 1: the way that she's going. So if you want to
Speaker 1: shoot her down, you know her course, why would you
Speaker 1: do that? Why would you do that? Why wouldn't you
Speaker 1: just throw somebody in the air and have them go
Speaker 1: for it, throw somebody in the air. Yeah, said that,
Speaker 1: you're right. Yeah, So look, I guess we can say
Speaker 1: that the assassination theory was a fail. Yeah. And then
Speaker 1: another one that's out to this popular. And there's a lot.
Speaker 1: I didn't even even incorporate every single theory. There's just
Speaker 1: where there's so many. It's just it's just they're kind
Speaker 1: of grouped in generalities here. A lot of them are
Speaker 1: very similar to one another two And Joe's not Devin,
Speaker 1: so he didn't do the bullet point way. Yeah, which
Speaker 1: is why it's really easy for me to understand. Continue
Speaker 1: on our next theory. They crashed on Saipan and were
Speaker 1: eventually killed by the Japanese. So that was another island
Speaker 1: that was under Japanese control at that time. And somebody
Speaker 1: has dug up quotes from locals in Saipan who supposedly
Speaker 1: saw two white people, a man and a woman, one
Speaker 1: woman who was a girl, all the times that you
Speaker 1: saw a silver twin engine plane flying low over the island,
Speaker 1: hit some trees and then crash land on the beach,
Speaker 1: and then she got to look at the two people
Speaker 1: from the wreck and they were white, and the woman
Speaker 1: she described as tall and thin with short hair, just
Speaker 1: like Amelia Earhart did either of your Actually this is
Speaker 1: a little off topic, but I found it interesting. It's
Speaker 1: just when you were talking about having short hair. I
Speaker 1: never realized why she had her hair cut in the
Speaker 1: style that she did. Did you did you guys find
Speaker 1: that in the reading. You can't have long hair when
Speaker 1: you're flying an airplane because you can't get it all
Speaker 1: underneath a cap easily, and so then of course it
Speaker 1: would be tangled and would break off anyway over hours
Speaker 1: and hours and hours of flight time. So it was
Speaker 1: a giant pain in the butt, which is why she
Speaker 1: adopted the short hairstyle. It's also kind of a hazard
Speaker 1: if you're like checking engines that are going yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah. This is like, you know, don't have long
Speaker 1: loose clothes on when I'm working. Yeah. Maybe if you
Speaker 1: have to bail out of your plane, it gets tangling
Speaker 1: in your shoot and your shot doesn't deploy her. There's
Speaker 1: a jillion reasons why, but I yeah, because you've never
Speaker 1: had to think about it. I did once. I had
Speaker 1: long hair once. I just mean as a man, as
Speaker 1: a bald man, just as a man once as a
Speaker 1: man had long hair, it was a man. Can we
Speaker 1: continue on, Yeah, okay, leaving my hair. So what's the
Speaker 1: problem with this theory, Well, Sipan is due north of
Speaker 1: lie Yeah, that's a pretty that's a real, real gigantic
Speaker 1: navigational error. Even I wouldn't make that error problem. Yeah. Yeah. Also,
Speaker 1: Lieutenant Governor of Saipan said in an interview on this topic,
Speaker 1: said that reporters were coming to the island and offering
Speaker 1: people money to say that they had seen two white people,
Speaker 1: and in ninety seven there were white people living on Saipan.
Speaker 1: Somebody could in good conscience take the money and say, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: I saw two white people. I saw some whole bunch
Speaker 1: of Yeah, yeah, I gotta get this one of ale
Speaker 1: I would I would totally agree with that. Okay, this uh,
Speaker 1: this one is kind of a variant that actually has
Speaker 1: them wind up in Saipan after all. In fact, several
Speaker 1: of these have been wanting ups in Sapan for miscellanous reasons.
Speaker 1: But this theory is that they took a detail over
Speaker 1: the Marshall Islands to do some spying for the government
Speaker 1: and were shot down by the Japanese. The Japanese were
Speaker 1: occupying the Marshall Islands, and that's to the north of
Speaker 1: where all of our Amelia air heart action is going on.
Speaker 1: Well to the north. The U. S Government had an
Speaker 1: interest in finding out what they were doing in those
Speaker 1: islands because it was suspected that they were fortifying the islands,
Speaker 1: which they weren't supposed to be doing so anyway. So
Speaker 1: Amelia it wasn't listed to fly over the islands and
Speaker 1: spy on them. The Japanese shot them down and supposing
Speaker 1: they survived the crash and eventually executed them on Saipan. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and a magazine called Air Classics a guy named this
Speaker 1: is in April named Roland Rheineck. Yeah, and now revealed
Speaker 1: the fall going this is this is a whole big
Speaker 1: stonewall cover up theory. Here the whole thing. In April
Speaker 1: ninety eight, Paul Monts, who had been a technical adviser
Speaker 1: for Amelia Earhart, wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt asking if she
Speaker 1: would use her influence to get him a copy of
Speaker 1: the official report of the cutter Itasca because they were
Speaker 1: good friends an Eleanor. Yeah, they were, or at least
Speaker 1: it's not good friends. They were friends. Yeah, he had
Speaker 1: asked the Coast Guard for a copy of the report,
Speaker 1: but they said that they wouldn't release it to him
Speaker 1: for the right channels or something. Apparently. Yeah, So Eleanor
Speaker 1: sent the letter to Henry Morgan thou with a note
Speaker 1: Henry market that was Secretary of the Treasury and one
Speaker 1: of the FDR's closest advisors. And on May thirteenth nine
Speaker 1: and this this eventually turned up actually in the files
Speaker 1: of the National Archives. Morganto called Eleanor Roosevelt and spoke
Speaker 1: with their secretary and he said to her, and I
Speaker 1: quote this letter that Mrs Roosevelt wrote me about trying
Speaker 1: to get the report on Amelia Earhart. Now I've been
Speaker 1: given a verbal report. If we're going to really is this,
Speaker 1: it's just going to smear the whole reputation of Amelia Earhart.
Speaker 1: If we ever released the report of the Ataska on
Speaker 1: Amelia Earhart, any reputation she's got is gone. Now I
Speaker 1: know what the Navy did, I know what the Ataska did,
Speaker 1: and I know how Amelia Earhart absolutely disregarded orders. And
Speaker 1: if we ever release this thing, goodbye Amelia Earhart's reputation unquote.
Speaker 1: Now some people took this to me that Morgat that
Speaker 1: was thinking that a reputation would be ruined if people
Speaker 1: found out that she'd been spying for Uncle Sam. I
Speaker 1: don't take it that way. The one who feels like
Speaker 1: he's saying she screwed. Yeah, I mean, there's like in
Speaker 1: the even in the official story, right, it says like
Speaker 1: she changed frequencies and obviously that was like a huge
Speaker 1: miss staff, right, Yeah, And I'm sure if she could
Speaker 1: hear the instructions she disregarded them, right, but like who,
Speaker 1: like why would you? I guess if she couldn't hear them,
Speaker 1: then it's understandable she might have been following a process
Speaker 1: she had done before. I guess it's also possible. It's
Speaker 1: just occurring to me that she changed frequencies because she
Speaker 1: couldn't or anything and thought, good point, they're not getting
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. Cycle through the frequency is not necessarily
Speaker 1: not a bad idea. You know. It might be like
Speaker 1: what you're saying too, with the whole thing about getting
Speaker 1: hit by lightning and having to go out half way
Speaker 1: through maybe something I mean even like a piece of hail,
Speaker 1: you know, like she just didn't know it could happen.
Speaker 1: I do, I'll g I guess I do want to
Speaker 1: go ahead and state that, like, if your plane got
Speaker 1: hit by lightning, probably be one of the first things
Speaker 1: you said as soon as you were within radio contact,
Speaker 1: if you thought anybody could hear you, you would say, hey,
Speaker 1: we got hit by lightning. So I don't know what's
Speaker 1: going on, but here's some information. And then you wouldn't
Speaker 1: need to say, hey, I got hit by lightning. Here's
Speaker 1: another update. We don't know what's going on, right, It
Speaker 1: does seem like you would mention that, but yeah, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: that's off topic. I think that report would have been
Speaker 1: oh my god, lightning got hit by lightning. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: oh my god, oh my god, lightning, oh my god,
Speaker 1: something like that. Yeah, but that you would want, I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe this is just my rational Yeah, I understand entirely,
Speaker 1: but it's perfectly okay. You know, if you go down,
Speaker 1: you just deploy your life raft and you're fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: Well back to this article. Reineck goes on too. And
Speaker 1: by the way, this guy this is really annoying. When
Speaker 1: I was typing this up. This guy's name is spelled
Speaker 1: R E I N E. C. K. And every time
Speaker 1: I would type that his name and able to autocorrect
Speaker 1: would turn it into red necks. Yeah. Yeah, I finally
Speaker 1: just gave up his red neck. Yeah. His article also
Speaker 1: notes some gaps in the radiologus, which I don't find
Speaker 1: entirely all that suspicious, you know. And uh, he makes
Speaker 1: note of a of a letter that had been received
Speaker 1: by the U. S. Armies saying that Amelia had been
Speaker 1: shot down by the Japanese. And then last of all,
Speaker 1: he talks about a request from Senuel Daniel Acacca of
Speaker 1: Hawaii to Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady. Senator Roca wanted to
Speaker 1: see Henry Morganteus files on Amelia and shout Treasury Secretary
Speaker 1: Brady replied that the morgan the files had been sent
Speaker 1: to the National Archives. Well that's suspicious, don't you think.
Speaker 1: I know, that's That's what I'm wondering why, But yeah,
Speaker 1: he's yeah, that this right, yeah Rightdeck as a basically
Speaker 1: a cover of so Morgant morgantou Stone walls about Amelia
Speaker 1: and then Brady Stone walls on Morgant thou um so
Speaker 1: cover up, cover up, And that to me doesn't prove
Speaker 1: a damn thing. But that's the way this guy spun
Speaker 1: the whole thing. Yeah. But the problem with this whole
Speaker 1: theory about spying in the Marshall Islands is if she
Speaker 1: had if she had gone through the Marshalls and overflown
Speaker 1: representative number of islands and set to see what the
Speaker 1: Japanese are doing, and then headed on down to Holland Island,
Speaker 1: she would have run out of fuel. That's a significant yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And as it happens, it would have been even bigger
Speaker 1: because the plan actually did flew over the island of
Speaker 1: Nauru on the way halfway out there, so I would
Speaker 1: have had to go halfway. Um, I think so, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're at least radio, but I think it was still
Speaker 1: light what she went over that that island. That after
Speaker 1: passing that island, she would have had to basically turn
Speaker 1: left and head up to the head up to the
Speaker 1: Marshals do or spying and then come back down. So
Speaker 1: it was even a more significant detour than just going
Speaker 1: straight there from light. Also, um wouldn't have been like night.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I did a good film, yeah, really really
Speaker 1: good camera. You don't have film that good? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I don't. Yeah, I'm probably the military does, but
Speaker 1: I don't. Yeah. Yeah, but they didn't have that kind
Speaker 1: of not in a place when they couldn't even change
Speaker 1: over to the right radio frequency. They didn't. You would
Speaker 1: have had to put a really big flash bowl on
Speaker 1: the bottom, and then it would have been probably reported. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: Have there been any UFO reports from that time in
Speaker 1: that area, Yeah, it's her. Yeah. Anyway, back to the report,
Speaker 1: the report was kind of scathing. It was written by
Speaker 1: the about and that and that is I've seen I've
Speaker 1: seen some extra from the report, and it was rather scathing,
Speaker 1: and so that's obviously the reason why Margot didn't want
Speaker 1: to release it. I think. I think part of it, though,
Speaker 1: is is the there was a certain level of sexism
Speaker 1: at that time towards that profession, and I'm sure that
Speaker 1: that really colored the reports, Yeah, influenced so that it
Speaker 1: was in the tone that it was in. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: probably there was some bias on the part of at
Speaker 1: least some of these people. There's no doubt about that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I shouldn't say no doubt. I mean there could have been.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it was. There probably was. Lastly,
Speaker 1: on the spying theory, Amelia's families denies that she as
Speaker 1: he was doing any of that. Her sister said that
Speaker 1: they were very close and that there's no way that
Speaker 1: she would have not mentioned that to her. I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna it was I'm just gonna say again, it seems
Speaker 1: like a really but if you're trying to do something covert,
Speaker 1: why would you tack it onto something where you're literally
Speaker 1: publicizing that exactly. And the fact of the matter is,
Speaker 1: you know, there were plenty of plenty of ways to
Speaker 1: get spies in there to look around, and so yeah,
Speaker 1: this just seems like a weird cover story. Now that's
Speaker 1: a lane. I get this one to fail. What do
Speaker 1: you guys think? Yeah, basically no zone, okay ye. Our
Speaker 1: next theory is that they couldn't find Hown Island, so
Speaker 1: they crashed land on me Atoll in the Marshall Islands,
Speaker 1: which is you know, the south south side of the chain,
Speaker 1: but it is controlled by the Japanese, and the Japanese
Speaker 1: you know, of course, grabbed them and you know, send
Speaker 1: them to Saipan and and then eventually killed them. Uh.
Speaker 1: There are this there are a fair number of people
Speaker 1: who actually buy into this theory. They would have had
Speaker 1: to have been way far off course to um, I
Speaker 1: mean really far off course. I guess my thing with
Speaker 1: that is that wouldn't it seems like the Japanese would
Speaker 1: try to ransom them, ransom them, not if they were
Speaker 1: hiding something, but they were hiding so were doing they
Speaker 1: would not ransom those people. But I don't think that
Speaker 1: this theory says that they were hiding something, right, It
Speaker 1: was just that they accident, They were off course when
Speaker 1: they crash landed. Yeah, I thought you were talking about
Speaker 1: the Japanese hiding something. Oh I was You're saying that
Speaker 1: they weren't hiding anything. They did Japanese find them and
Speaker 1: would have then tried to ransom them, ransom them all.
Speaker 1: I don't think they would have even tried that. You.
Speaker 1: I mean, we were not at war with Japan at
Speaker 1: this time, but we weren't. We weren't under good relations,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't it wasn't the best. But now it's
Speaker 1: not like we had the best relations with the Russians.
Speaker 1: But the Russians, if somebody crash landed on their territory
Speaker 1: would probably just hand them back, you know. The it
Speaker 1: was because they were civilians And I didn't mention this before,
Speaker 1: as you guys know, there was a huge search effort
Speaker 1: undertaken to find her, and they called a huge amount
Speaker 1: of ocean looking for the plane and they never found
Speaker 1: it and attend to Japanese warships took part in that
Speaker 1: search effort, you know. Yeah, it does seem unlikely. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they would have probably said we have them, well if
Speaker 1: they if they had something super secret on the atoll,
Speaker 1: but I've seen aerials of that and it's just a
Speaker 1: basically kind of a square, a sliver of land around
Speaker 1: a big lagoon. There's not not much you can put
Speaker 1: their militarily speaking, well, and I know I'm looking at
Speaker 1: your notes, but there's there's people who say that that
Speaker 1: they give accounts that these two were alive at some
Speaker 1: point with the Japanese, and that's a weird thing to me. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then yeah, and so they captured on the atoll
Speaker 1: and then they took him to Saipan and eventually, so
Speaker 1: the story goes, they were both executed or Fred got
Speaker 1: executed and Amelia died of disease or something, and maybe
Speaker 1: Amelia and Fred were actually spied for the Japanese. That
Speaker 1: could have been. Maybe they're over there living there right now. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you guys have any more thoughts
Speaker 1: on this. I give it a fail. I mean, they're
Speaker 1: playing could easily have reached the atoll from where they left.
Speaker 1: I mean, but again, it would be a massive, massive
Speaker 1: error of navigation, but it could have. It could have
Speaker 1: reached it for sure. Now I don't think but by
Speaker 1: going all the way over to Holland and then up, No,
Speaker 1: no way, okay fail. Another story that got out there
Speaker 1: is I think this started about seventies, that she survived
Speaker 1: and assumed a new identity and in New Jersey she's
Speaker 1: living with a tupac and yeah, doth Arnold, Yeah exactly, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this idea was floated in a book called Amelia
Speaker 1: Earhart Lives, published in nineteen seventy. The claim is that
Speaker 1: Amelia survived Japanese captivity, returned to the US after the
Speaker 1: war and where she moved into New Jersey and changed
Speaker 1: her name to Irene Polam and uh Irene for her
Speaker 1: parts through the publisher and got an out of court
Speaker 1: settlement for an undisclosed amount, and then the book was
Speaker 1: taken off the market. I've seen a picture of Irene
Speaker 1: and she looks sort of like Amelia Earhart. Did you
Speaker 1: guys ever see that picture over it's out there? I
Speaker 1: want to say yes, but I don't remember it. Not
Speaker 1: a perfect match, I would say, not even like Devin
Speaker 1: showing it to me. Yeah, that's she looks like Princess
Speaker 1: Die more than a million. Yeah. Yeah, so you know,
Speaker 1: so I think this is an incredibly weak theory. How
Speaker 1: anybody could buy intoism is beyond me, much less publish
Speaker 1: a book about it. And why would why wouldn't reli
Speaker 1: are do that? Well exactly, she liked publicity. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: hard to imagine her living in obscurity voluntarily because if
Speaker 1: she had come home after the war, she would have
Speaker 1: come home to a hero's welcome. That would have been huge,
Speaker 1: and then she could have she could have written books
Speaker 1: that would have made movies. I mean seriously, it would
Speaker 1: have been. It was part of what she made part
Speaker 1: of her living from before she went on this, is
Speaker 1: that she was on a speaking tour and writing books.
Speaker 1: She was going to write a book about this, this
Speaker 1: around the world. Of the reason to do this was
Speaker 1: to generate of, you know, money for the next five
Speaker 1: to ten years. Yeah, yeah, and so so this is
Speaker 1: one of the most assnine theories I've ever seen. Do
Speaker 1: you guys agree? Yeah, I believe you're going to say
Speaker 1: this is a fail. That's a fail. Okay, next theory
Speaker 1: not quite okay, not quite. Yeah. So this theory is there.
Speaker 1: There's there's an island fifty miles south southeast of of
Speaker 1: our island of Holland. A lot of people think that
Speaker 1: they crash landed on an island called Gardner Island, which
Speaker 1: is about three fifty miles south southeast of Holland Island. Uh.
Speaker 1: And there's a there's a reef on the northwest corner
Speaker 1: of the island, and it's kind of flat, flat enough
Speaker 1: to land a playing on. So let's believe that she
Speaker 1: could have landed that plane on the reef and actually
Speaker 1: been there for you know, days, or however long it
Speaker 1: took it. But they eventually died of thirst. So here's
Speaker 1: why so many people liked this theory. Remember I talked
Speaker 1: about that line they were traveling on seven three seven, Uh,
Speaker 1: Now it's seven okay anyway, So they if you draw
Speaker 1: that lawn through that line through Holland Island, it almost
Speaker 1: did that that bearing and almost directly goes to Gardener Island.
Speaker 1: On reason people like it, So it's yeah, it would
Speaker 1: be south of there. For four or five days after
Speaker 1: she went missing, there were various weak radio signals that
Speaker 1: people were hearing that were perhaps from Amelia Earhart. So
Speaker 1: it was theorized at the time that maybe she had
Speaker 1: found a place to land and he was broadcasting S
Speaker 1: O S messages. So that's another reason that people like
Speaker 1: this theory. Yeah. So what if I remember I said
Speaker 1: that there were there were big cloud banks to the
Speaker 1: west of Holland Island. What if they emerged through a
Speaker 1: navigation area or far south, far from far enough south
Speaker 1: of Holland Island, they were not able to see that
Speaker 1: column of smoke that the Atasca was admitting and so
Speaker 1: as far enough, so they turned before they were lower. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: one way or another. Uh, they don't see it, and
Speaker 1: so they and so then they're under the impression that
Speaker 1: they're actually north of Holland Island. So they turned right,
Speaker 1: had done that line. Maybe you know, they they wind
Speaker 1: up coming across this island, which is not the right island.
Speaker 1: But well, we're out of gas, so it's time to
Speaker 1: land this thing. So yeah, if you're running out somewhere
Speaker 1: to land and the yeah, and and so other supports
Speaker 1: for the theory is in there was a British colonial
Speaker 1: officer named Gerald Gallagher who found a skeleton and what
Speaker 1: appeared to be a sexton box on the southeast corner
Speaker 1: of Gardener Island. You know, I'm not I'm not calling
Speaker 1: it the actual name of it as Nicu mar Ro.
Speaker 1: I'm calling it Gardener Island. They've renamed it, but I'm
Speaker 1: gonna call it Gardener Island now. Yeah, this one, Uh no,
Speaker 1: it's sacri figout what country it's It's part of another
Speaker 1: like Archipela Archipelago. Country that's not Japanese. Gerald Gallagher set
Speaker 1: the skeleton to Fiji, where British authorities had looked at it,
Speaker 1: and they concluded that it had belonged to a man
Speaker 1: about five ft five inches tall, But then analysis of
Speaker 1: the measurement data concluded that the scaleton naturally belonged to
Speaker 1: a tall white woman of European ancestry. Uh that. I
Speaker 1: never understood how that worked, How they managed to do that?
Speaker 1: You mean, yeah, that's a good question. Was gone, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the original skeletons long Sin. Yeah, so I don't
Speaker 1: know they did got a look at the records and something.
Speaker 1: I conclude that it's actually not a five ft five guy.
Speaker 1: But you know, I don't know if they were photographs
Speaker 1: or what. But well, I guess maybe if there were
Speaker 1: like specimens, samples, spamples. Yeah, I don't think so, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't. Well, this is done under the auspices of
Speaker 1: a group called let me it's the International Group for
Speaker 1: Historic Aircraft Recovery a k A. Tiger. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: know they these guys started investigating Gardner Island as a
Speaker 1: possible resting place for Amelian Fred's in eight and I
Speaker 1: think they're still at it. I know they had they
Speaker 1: had an expedition i'd look as late as two thousand
Speaker 1: twelve out to the island, So they've been island. Now,
Speaker 1: it's not that huge now that as far as I
Speaker 1: can tell, they have an unblevished record. In twenty years
Speaker 1: of historic aircraft recovery, they haven't found anything. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a perfect record. Yeah, and maybe they haven't been rung
Speaker 1: yet perfect zero, but it's perfect. Yeah. So any way
Speaker 1: that that's what they believe, is that they landed on
Speaker 1: the reef and then they just died. Yeah. And again
Speaker 1: it is the radio. Because of the radio messages which
Speaker 1: were heard by a lot of people. Nobody is really
Speaker 1: sure if it was Amelia or just pranksters. I could
Speaker 1: have been a lot of pranksters. So the thing that
Speaker 1: I read was that because everybody knew that she was
Speaker 1: missing and they were on that frequency, a lot of
Speaker 1: people were calling and people and I've read this and
Speaker 1: somebody said, you know, there was so much traffic on
Speaker 1: there that it was kind of jammed up, and you've
Speaker 1: got little whisps of prior of transmissions that were just
Speaker 1: too low to make out, but you could kind of
Speaker 1: hear something, and so that's people were like, Oh, no,
Speaker 1: that's what's this kind of saying, that's what's happening is
Speaker 1: that it's just too many people on the band and
Speaker 1: they're all talking and it's just degrading the signal. So
Speaker 1: you're just picking up little bits here and there. But
Speaker 1: normally there's let's say five people in the Pacific using it,
Speaker 1: there's now five hundred. Problem. Yeah, it is a problem,
Speaker 1: and they usually regulate things like that. I know there
Speaker 1: are a lot of military frequencies where you cannot as
Speaker 1: beyond they regulate stuff like that, but I guess this
Speaker 1: one they weren't regulating. Ah yeah, and this this might
Speaker 1: have been all over the frequency range too. I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: It also could have been under the auspice of like,
Speaker 1: let's all listen to see if we can hear her.
Speaker 1: Then they might have been a little more lenient at
Speaker 1: that point. That is the thing to do is just
Speaker 1: for everybody to just shut up and stay off the
Speaker 1: radio and just listen. Yeah, that would have been. There
Speaker 1: was people calling Amelia, can you hear us? You hear
Speaker 1: the ghost of you know, the bits of a voice
Speaker 1: through the static. Yeah, and you think you hear you know,
Speaker 1: somebody says, Amelia Earhard, are you there? It's and it
Speaker 1: translates to Amelia Earhart is there? This happens exactly, And
Speaker 1: it's the dumbest thing because I mean, obviously, if Amelia
Speaker 1: and Fred have a working radio, they're going to be
Speaker 1: on at trying to get calling you don't you think? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: But anyway, there was one one notable instance, which was
Speaker 1: a girl named Betty Clink who was living in Florida
Speaker 1: at the time. This is a hell of a skip
Speaker 1: if she got radio skip. Yeah, like you know us
Speaker 1: not unheard of, but it is a hell of a skip.
Speaker 1: You're right halfway around the world. Yeah, But she was
Speaker 1: fiddling with her dad's shortwave radio and she heard a
Speaker 1: woman's voice saying, this is Amelia Earhart. Helped me. So
Speaker 1: she listened to this transmission for three hours or so.
Speaker 1: It took notes, and years later she gave those notes
Speaker 1: to Rick Gillespie, who is ahead of Tiger Tiger Tiger
Speaker 1: or whatever you call him. Uh. And I've seen copies
Speaker 1: of the notes. They're not there, they're not too readable.
Speaker 1: What you can you can make sense. Somebody's transcribed them,
Speaker 1: so they're making it much easier to read. Mostly a
Speaker 1: woman's voice, but there was a man's voice in the background,
Speaker 1: and he sounded kind of agitated and and at one
Speaker 1: point he says he's got to leave because quote the
Speaker 1: waters knee deep let me out unquote. And this woman
Speaker 1: kept making reference to New York City and if actually
Speaker 1: said that a total of seven times, which is key
Speaker 1: because just a stone strowaway on that reef was the
Speaker 1: wreck of the s S Norwich City, which, yeah, which
Speaker 1: founded on that reef in team. So was Amelia saying
Speaker 1: Norwich City, But Betty Clank was hearing New York City
Speaker 1: or just not understanding what Norwich was. And yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the closest thing that she knows about. So and
Speaker 1: with that, because that would be a way to clue
Speaker 1: the navy into your position. Now there are yeah, there
Speaker 1: are some numbers in Betty's notes, but none of them
Speaker 1: bear any resemblance to Gardner Island's actual coordinates. And since
Speaker 1: Fred was apparently still alive, it's been assumed by everybody
Speaker 1: that he was incapacitated due to injury or something, or
Speaker 1: maybe a sextant got broken in the landing, so they
Speaker 1: didn't know their location, but they luckily had a shipwreck
Speaker 1: right there called the Norwich City. Very convenient, it's very handy,
Speaker 1: a great way to clue people in as to where
Speaker 1: you are. But unluckily, it doesn't appear that anybody heard
Speaker 1: that transmission other than Betty, so well that makes you want. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Rick Gillespie, a Tiger, theorizes that the amelion, Fred and
Speaker 1: the plane were on the reef for four or five
Speaker 1: days before the plane got finally swept off the reef
Speaker 1: and out to sea, and they suspected it's still they're
Speaker 1: not far offshore, and of course they haven't found it
Speaker 1: yet though, and they did find, I think this was
Speaker 1: in two thousand twelve, they did find using sonar a
Speaker 1: large airplane sized object on the seafloor not too far
Speaker 1: away from the island. But there's yeah, there really are
Speaker 1: a lot of those. Yeah, I mean not not not
Speaker 1: I'm I'm I'm being I'm joking specif theory, but there's
Speaker 1: a lot of airplane sized things on the bottom of
Speaker 1: the ocean. Frankly, whales are airplane sized things. That's a
Speaker 1: good point. And yeah, you know, in the course of
Speaker 1: the World War two we left, we left a lot
Speaker 1: of airplane wreckage on the on the Pacific slore. So yeah,
Speaker 1: there's lots of it down there. Uh yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: know why they weren't able to confirm this, that this
Speaker 1: was actually the plane or not. Maybe they just wanted
Speaker 1: an excuse to come back with a later day. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Google Ocean hadn't been finished at that point, so well, anyway,
Speaker 1: they did score o the island. They found some interesting stuff.
Speaker 1: The big find is a rectangular piece of aluminum with
Speaker 1: a lot of ribbit holes in it. Yeah you've seen
Speaker 1: I have, and I really questioned it. That couldn't have
Speaker 1: come from anything else, you know. Beaches anywhere. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: they did have they did cover. They didn't have one
Speaker 1: of the windows on the on the electro plated over
Speaker 1: with aluminium. And this is about the size and dimensions
Speaker 1: of that piece of aluminum. So here's my question though,
Speaker 1: is I understand why the body of the aircraft has
Speaker 1: a bajillion rivets in it because it's riveting that skin
Speaker 1: to a frame. But why would the window cover have
Speaker 1: a bajillion rivets that were in the same line as
Speaker 1: the body when there's no frame to be riveting it too? Well, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: I don't you know, I don't know what actually you
Speaker 1: would be building that would need that many rivets. It
Speaker 1: was the riveted the hell out. Oh yeah, it's riddled
Speaker 1: with them. Yeah. Well we'll talk about that that piece
Speaker 1: a little bit later here, but yeah, that that is
Speaker 1: definitely a reasonable question. But Rick Ullespie of Tiger is
Speaker 1: uh says he's that it's it's a real deal. Let's
Speaker 1: see what else they find is there. Can you do
Speaker 1: testing on the metal? I under sure you could probably
Speaker 1: you know, like if they took it to I'm sorry
Speaker 1: who made the electra blocked. If like he took it
Speaker 1: to Lockheed and said, hey, can you test this medal
Speaker 1: if it's even remotely similar to what you used at
Speaker 1: that time? It seems like they could do that, right,
Speaker 1: probably okay, but I don't know if he's done that
Speaker 1: or not. He claims he likes his point. Yeah, he plans.
Speaker 1: He claims he's got it and gotten it more or
Speaker 1: less authenticated, But I don't know what that process hasn't
Speaker 1: released any of the authentication information. Well, we are more
Speaker 1: or less detectives. Yeah, yeah, the well, you know the
Speaker 1: detective's license. Yeah, well you know that. That's that's like
Speaker 1: the whole skeleton thing. You know, suddenly this guy, this
Speaker 1: guy gets involved with and suddenly they decided it had
Speaker 1: to be a tall white woman. Yeah, and uh, let's
Speaker 1: see what else they found. They found an impressive hall
Speaker 1: of stuff. They found a cap from a jar, zipper
Speaker 1: pole that he left, a woman shoe, a piece of
Speaker 1: plexiglass that was curved and they could possibly have been
Speaker 1: from an airplane window if we improvised tools. And a
Speaker 1: piece of bone one that appears to be part of
Speaker 1: a human finger, although DNA analysis has been inconclusive on
Speaker 1: that one. Do you think Amelia a heart war heels
Speaker 1: when she was flying. Well, I'm not sure if these
Speaker 1: were high heels or low heels. I don't knows of
Speaker 1: any kind. Yeah, I don't know. Well, boots, I mean
Speaker 1: you wear boots in general, I mean just regular day
Speaker 1: to day boots have a heel on them. Yeah, these
Speaker 1: aren't high heels. No, I think they're like, look at
Speaker 1: Joe's shoe. There's a heel on the rear of it.
Speaker 1: But it's part of the overall soul. It's so I
Speaker 1: I have the impression that it's a I'm sorry, I'm
Speaker 1: kind of a nerd about thing. I know you are,
Speaker 1: that it's a disconnected soul. That it's not. You know
Speaker 1: that the heel is different from the soul of the shoe,
Speaker 1: which usually means that it's a bigger heel a little bit. No,
Speaker 1: if it's going to be a flat soul, If you're
Speaker 1: wearing a flat shoe of any kind, the soul is
Speaker 1: one one continuous piece. Even an inch, you usually have
Speaker 1: the same continuous piece. Yes, don't look at me like that.
Speaker 1: I know my stuff. And then two inches usually is
Speaker 1: when you start to get the too disconnected pieces. No,
Speaker 1: even I think, Okay, I don't know, I mean because yeah,
Speaker 1: I have. I've owned pairs of dress shoes, for example,
Speaker 1: where it was like a long sort of almost wouldn't
Speaker 1: he any thing with a with a rubber soul attached
Speaker 1: to it? And then we're talking like, you know, half
Speaker 1: to three quarters of an inch of of heal, yeah,
Speaker 1: and so you know, I'm very sure could have become
Speaker 1: disconnected somehow. So if we're talking, yeah, I wouldn't call
Speaker 1: that a heel off of a person's shoe that they
Speaker 1: don't know even for sure if it's a man's or
Speaker 1: a woman's. I don't know that there's much to be
Speaker 1: gained by this because we Joe just hit on the
Speaker 1: perfect point. We don't know if it's a man or
Speaker 1: a woman's heel, and it could have washed up there
Speaker 1: along with a thousand rubber ducky well exactly, So we're
Speaker 1: talking it's the rubber we have we seen pictures of it,
Speaker 1: the hell yeah, I have not. If you could probably
Speaker 1: go out to Tiger's website and see if he's But
Speaker 1: here's the deal is that that island is people have
Speaker 1: been people have actually lived on that island off and
Speaker 1: on for for years, and people have been visiting the
Speaker 1: island at the time for you know, for well over
Speaker 1: a hundred years, people have been coming and going from that,
Speaker 1: as have critters, which is why the fingerbone could easily
Speaker 1: be from a turtle. Yeah, that's what they're saying, is
Speaker 1: that the as far as the DNA analysis goes, because
Speaker 1: they can't tell, I can't tell if it's a human
Speaker 1: or sea turtle. They really can't, but it would be.
Speaker 1: It would be really surprising if you scoured the island
Speaker 1: to not find some junk land around. People are messy.
Speaker 1: We threw stuff in the ocean off that time. I
Speaker 1: am impressed that they found so little, I really am.
Speaker 1: It means they are either spectacularly incompetent or people have
Speaker 1: been a lot tied here than we give them credit
Speaker 1: for him. I don't know. But here's my other problems
Speaker 1: with what their theory overall, which is the the the
Speaker 1: aluminum panel. Their theory stipulates that the plane landed on
Speaker 1: the reef intact and they were using the radio. So
Speaker 1: that how did that luin in peace get detached from
Speaker 1: the airplane. It's a good question. Yeah, yeah, all right.
Speaker 1: Next up Betty Clank's notes. Remember Norwich Norwich City to
Speaker 1: New York City. Um, and I looked in there and
Speaker 1: there are lots of references to New York City, but
Speaker 1: nowhere near that is the word wreck or shipwreck, because
Speaker 1: you know, I think about it. Imagine, but I could,
Speaker 1: I could see you saying, you know, we are near
Speaker 1: the Norwich City expecting everybody to understand that the Norwich
Speaker 1: is a wreck. Yeah. Here's a question. When was it
Speaker 1: that Betty was listening? Betty? Right, Betty? Supposedly it was
Speaker 1: like the afternoon of July, So it was right when
Speaker 1: they would okay, never mind, I was going to make
Speaker 1: the argument that, Okay, so they're like dehydrated and malnourished
Speaker 1: and have just gone through this incredible trauma. You know,
Speaker 1: you're just kind of saying things that you can see,
Speaker 1: not necessarily thinking, oh I should tell them it's a shipwreck.
Speaker 1: But if it was that night, no, no, yeah, no
Speaker 1: it was. And and and the thing about it is is, um,
Speaker 1: let's imagine you're you're shipwrecked and there's a ship right there.
Speaker 1: It's called the Bob Jones, the s S Bob Jones,
Speaker 1: and you want to be found. So if you have
Speaker 1: half a half an ascid brains, you're not going to
Speaker 1: be saying Bob Jones, Bob Jones, Bob Jones. You're not
Speaker 1: gonna say that. You're gonna say the wreck of the
Speaker 1: Bob Jones, the shipwreck of the Bob Jones, if anything else,
Speaker 1: the uss Bob Jones. Yeah, and this does assume that
Speaker 1: she was, you know, that she was hearing Amelia heard,
Speaker 1: or the she was transcribing whatever from that first night,
Speaker 1: because if you take a couple of days of dehydration
Speaker 1: and malnourishment and stuff like that, it's it's much easier
Speaker 1: to see that you're just literally like rock ship ocean tree. True,
Speaker 1: you know, but but the island had that was surveyed
Speaker 1: later that year. By the next I'll talk to talk
Speaker 1: about that it had well over a hundred big, healthy
Speaker 1: coconut trees. Yeah, what you could say, Yeah, lots of
Speaker 1: lots of that stuff. So here's my next problem with
Speaker 1: their theory, which is, Okay, the plane was washed off
Speaker 1: the reef by wave action, but wouldn't it be more
Speaker 1: likely that breakers would have been coming in from outside
Speaker 1: the island and pushed the plane off into the lagoon.
Speaker 1: I would say, not even more likely. Yes, I actually
Speaker 1: want to play Devil's advocate because you're presuming that it
Speaker 1: is landed in the middle of and sitting on top
Speaker 1: of the reef instead of just just barely resting on
Speaker 1: the exterior edge of the reef, which when it breaks
Speaker 1: free and it's sinking, it would slide back down just
Speaker 1: the wave action would break whatever was holding it. Doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like then it would just be sitting like right
Speaker 1: next to I am in I'm in agreement when you
Speaker 1: on that point, but I'm saying it. I think that yes,
Speaker 1: it should have gone in works, but it could easily
Speaker 1: have gone outwards and then it's blown through the ocean
Speaker 1: for several miles. That thing, with that, with that big
Speaker 1: gass empty tank, it would have it would have I
Speaker 1: don't know that it would have been positively boy, but
Speaker 1: it definitely wouldn't have been too terribly negatively when so,
Speaker 1: it could have easily floated a long ways away. Yeah,
Speaker 1: especially with those big old wings. You know, we could
Speaker 1: just you could just drift on for miles perfectly. Uh.
Speaker 1: Here's my next problem with it, though, is that it
Speaker 1: really does appear from the radio transmissions they were getting
Speaker 1: they were even stronger and stronger. I mean, it appears
Speaker 1: that Amelia and Fred were very close to Holland Island
Speaker 1: before they made that turn and headed south. And it
Speaker 1: just seems they just they just did not have enough
Speaker 1: gas to get all the way to Gardener Island. But
Speaker 1: what do you guys think, I think, Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: there's that it's even a perfect mileage. I think it's
Speaker 1: a stretch to say they got there. And they definitely
Speaker 1: weren't getting perfect mileage. No, they weren't. They weren't. They
Speaker 1: wouldn't know what the head winds and everything else. Uh.
Speaker 1: And here's my last problem with it is that's the
Speaker 1: navy plane searched the other and I mean they've searched
Speaker 1: all the islands in the vicinity. Yeah, they flew around
Speaker 1: it on July night and they circled it, flew over
Speaker 1: it and everything, and they looked at it pretty carefully,
Speaker 1: and they saw nothing. Uh. And of course, as you said,
Speaker 1: they could have died of thirst. Except that's just only
Speaker 1: they're really, really stupid, or they found no way to
Speaker 1: crack open coconuts, which you know would mean there's no rocks. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I got used their heel of their shoe, which
Speaker 1: we did find. It is a wide soul of the
Speaker 1: bottom of one of them. Yeah, you know, I'm sure
Speaker 1: they must have had something on the plane. Yeah, or
Speaker 1: a rock or a rock yea or a rock. I
Speaker 1: literally have rock will do it. Yeah, I know that's
Speaker 1: the historic documentary, right yeah. Yeah. So anyway, besides those guys,
Speaker 1: in October n seven, a British Colonial Service survey team
Speaker 1: went to the island and spent three days surveying it.
Speaker 1: That those are the guys that they think they kind
Speaker 1: of a huddering in eleven big coconut trees with lots
Speaker 1: of coconuts on them. They said that there was just
Speaker 1: you know, scads and scads of fish in the lagoon
Speaker 1: and big coconut crabs which would be real good eats,
Speaker 1: probably not that hard to catch, and said there was
Speaker 1: plenty of plenty of stuff to keep them alive there.
Speaker 1: And last of all, there would have been a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff if if their plane was actually on the reef,
Speaker 1: wouldn't they wouldn't you have offloaded everything that you could
Speaker 1: off of that plane onto the island. That's presuming that
Speaker 1: you're able to get back to the plane easily. Well,
Speaker 1: apparently they were, because they kept going on the plane
Speaker 1: to make radio calls. Maybe they stayed in the plane.
Speaker 1: It could It could be if they stayed in the
Speaker 1: plane too. May have said that is a long way
Speaker 1: and I can't make that swim and oh god, sharks
Speaker 1: because we're a friend of sharks or sorry, oh no,
Speaker 1: and so they just say, screw it, We're gonna stay
Speaker 1: here where we can use our radio, which is weird
Speaker 1: because the radio probably would have been dead in the water.
Speaker 1: But okay, okay, whatever. Yeah, well, now this is this
Speaker 1: The reef was actually somebody did an analysis of that
Speaker 1: whole thing, of the tides and everything, and the reef
Speaker 1: was actually high and dry it most of the time.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was not always completely high dry, but
Speaker 1: I think I think the water rose up over the
Speaker 1: top of it. Not huge, not a huge amount, although
Speaker 1: tides varied from day to day. I was in the
Speaker 1: presumption that it would have been partially submerged at all times.
Speaker 1: That was my presumption. I would, I guess, piggyback on
Speaker 1: the argument that Steve was making earlier that the plane
Speaker 1: could have been on the outer edge of the reef
Speaker 1: kind of like you know, almost like a car over
Speaker 1: a cliff, right, And so you kind of have to say, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's usable stuff in there. But if I go back
Speaker 1: in there and get sucked down with it, I'm done.
Speaker 1: So let's just stay where we're at with the things
Speaker 1: we have. But you would assume that they had something,
Speaker 1: but they again, yeah, they would have taken something with you.
Speaker 1: It's a plane plops down, is it moving? You grab
Speaker 1: whatever you can, You get your go bag of stuff
Speaker 1: and you go. Well, and they had, as far as
Speaker 1: I know, unless they were really really stupid and they
Speaker 1: threw it away, they had a life raft in there.
Speaker 1: Although let's be fair, they threw away there antenna, so
Speaker 1: they might they were offloading stuff to reduce weight right
Speaker 1: where they left on this. Yeah, I mean, so nobody
Speaker 1: really knows. I mean, I suppose you could. You could
Speaker 1: stay with you know, perfect common sense to say, hey,
Speaker 1: if we go down, we're just gonna we're just gonna
Speaker 1: break up and die anyway, So who needs a life raft?
Speaker 1: So maybe that's what they were thinking of. Yeah, those
Speaker 1: life rafts are really heavy, that's true. Okay, So anyway,
Speaker 1: it still amazes me that so many people take this
Speaker 1: theory seriously. Yeah, I have a lot of problems with it.
Speaker 1: I think it's the hope, I guess, you know, because
Speaker 1: I mean, not the thing. We encounter this, well, we
Speaker 1: encounter this in a lot of stories. Right. The logical
Speaker 1: answer is this person disappeared. These people are dead. This happened,
Speaker 1: And I know that sounds really jaded, but that is
Speaker 1: the logical answer. But as humans, we want to assume
Speaker 1: that these other human beings survived. But I don't forget
Speaker 1: also that there's some people who make money off this stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, I mean so Rick Ollespie and Tiger they
Speaker 1: made a good living off this stuff. So yeah, so
Speaker 1: I maybe I should maybe I should start doing something
Speaker 1: like this, I don't know, like a podcast about stuff
Speaker 1: like this or whatever. You go. Yeah, yeah, well let's
Speaker 1: get on to our last area. Speaking of we're going
Speaker 1: to break up in the air anyway. Yeah yeah, I know.
Speaker 1: So this is a lot of there are people who
Speaker 1: really believe this, and kind it seems kind of obvious. Actually,
Speaker 1: So they faced head winds throughout the trip. I had
Speaker 1: heard twenty six point five miles an hour, but let's
Speaker 1: assume it was intermittent. Uh So I concluded an average
Speaker 1: headwind of twenty miles an hour just for fun. Optimiary
Speaker 1: are speed for the electra Is was a hundred forty
Speaker 1: five miles an hour for the best field economy, which is,
Speaker 1: of course you're gonna want the best bank for your buck.
Speaker 1: Fuel wise, Amelia and fred I was told that Amelia
Speaker 1: intended to fly at mph that would give the electrical
Speaker 1: ground speed we're assuming again twenty miles an hour average
Speaker 1: and headwinds, that would be a ground speed of a
Speaker 1: hundred twenty five miles an hour. So they reported at
Speaker 1: twenty hours and fourteen minutes into their trip that they
Speaker 1: turned to the one seven three thirty seven bearing. So
Speaker 1: if their ground speed was on dur they would have
Speaker 1: been two thousand, five hundred nine miles into the trip
Speaker 1: and twenty seven miles short of Gardener Island. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: I remember what the commander of the Ataska said about
Speaker 1: the smoke. Didn't think it'd be more than twenty miles
Speaker 1: right from the north and west. He didn't think it
Speaker 1: would be visible more than twenty miles NT. It's it's
Speaker 1: a huge shame, But you know, if they had just
Speaker 1: gone a few more miles before they made that turn, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, things they might have turned out a lot
Speaker 1: differently if they were being able to see the sun
Speaker 1: and then it had just come up. It's so it
Speaker 1: might have been shining in their eyes if they could
Speaker 1: see it. It It doesn't sound like they could, because if
Speaker 1: they had been able to see the sun, you would
Speaker 1: think they'd be able to see that column of smoke. Yeah, maybe,
Speaker 1: or maybe not. You know, maybe they popped out into
Speaker 1: the sun and then and that's the column of smoke
Speaker 1: was directly between them and the sun, and they were
Speaker 1: just they were kind of blinded and they just couldn't
Speaker 1: see it. So I can't remember was it was it
Speaker 1: a coal fired unit or was it steam fired this ship?
Speaker 1: Because I'm trying to is it is it actually black
Speaker 1: smoke that it was belching, or was it was oil
Speaker 1: steam or oil or what was it? Was it was
Speaker 1: some kind of sooty thing. I'm not sure they would
Speaker 1: have been a black it wouldn't have been a steam cloud.
Speaker 1: I just suddenly couldn't grab that bit of information. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I believe it was coal fired. I probably should have
Speaker 1: checked on that, But I guess also coming out of
Speaker 1: a bunch of clouds, you might think, well there's another
Speaker 1: freaking cloud. Yeah, okay, Well, according to what the commander said,
Speaker 1: do you seem to think it was pretty distinctively darker
Speaker 1: than the surrounding clouds. Yeah, he said, he said it was.
Speaker 1: It would have There's no way they could have not
Speaker 1: seen it unless they were more than twenty miles unless
Speaker 1: they were more than twenty miles away to the west. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But I think that they might have chosen a poor
Speaker 1: time to arrive at Holland, and they probably should have
Speaker 1: left a little later, like one or two in the afternoon,
Speaker 1: and then in that way they would get there, it'd
Speaker 1: be mid morning and the lights and the light would
Speaker 1: be better, yeah, bad more Yeah. Yeah. But as as
Speaker 1: far as tenants soon how Fred noon and could have
Speaker 1: made that navigational error is up to there's been conjecture
Speaker 1: about that. The one is that just because of the
Speaker 1: weather conditions, it was impossible for him to get accurate
Speaker 1: fixes on stars and the sun, and so he was
Speaker 1: just going by dead reckoning, and he figured out that
Speaker 1: twenty hours of flight they had to have reached the
Speaker 1: longitude of Howland, and maybe they understated estivated the total
Speaker 1: strength of the head winds against them. Uh. And there's
Speaker 1: another theory that I read about, which is that he
Speaker 1: might have been able to take a fix on the
Speaker 1: sun as it came up and you can do that
Speaker 1: to fix if you know the time, you can do
Speaker 1: you can use that to fix your latitude. But you
Speaker 1: have to make there's a certain way of calculating it
Speaker 1: if you're on land, but if you're a thousand feet
Speaker 1: in the air, you have to make an adjustment to that.
Speaker 1: And do you have to know what the time is locally? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that could have been based on all I mean,
Speaker 1: we've we've been doing everything in granch mean, but if
Speaker 1: if the time zones are so weird, he could have
Speaker 1: easily been an hour ahead or behind where it was
Speaker 1: half an hour and that would have changed his his
Speaker 1: bury for what twenty hours storm? Yeah it was You know,
Speaker 1: when you do this stuff, you know, I don't know
Speaker 1: much about navigation, but I'm sure you've got to use
Speaker 1: Greenwich meantime. You can't be futching around with the times.
Speaker 1: I don't really but but I mean, but okay, but
Speaker 1: even if it's not that, yeah, I mean, they've been
Speaker 1: flying for how many days, for how many average hours
Speaker 1: a day, They're coming off a twenty hour leg. At
Speaker 1: the end of their trip through a storm. You see
Speaker 1: the sun and you go, yeah, just turn that way. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it might have been a really easy navigation errors
Speaker 1: something that he didn't make that adjustment, and if he had,
Speaker 1: just they ran out of fuel and they dumped it
Speaker 1: into open ocean. Yeah. See, this is the whole thing,
Speaker 1: is why it's they if their radio receiver had been working,
Speaker 1: this would have turned out a lot differently because they
Speaker 1: could have gotten a weather report from the Itasca and
Speaker 1: they would have known basically, it's sunny to the south
Speaker 1: and east, cloud banks north and west, so they know
Speaker 1: that they're either in a cloud bank to the west
Speaker 1: of Howland or in a cloud bank to the north
Speaker 1: of Holland. And all you have to do is turn
Speaker 1: southeast and keep going until you reach the sun. Turn right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's it. Turn right, yeah. And uh yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: it's a damn shame. I mean, just that one little thing,
Speaker 1: you know, lacking that radio receivers. I think it's it's
Speaker 1: we started joking about this beginning, but I think it's
Speaker 1: she was using new tech and there was some problems
Speaker 1: with that and I wasn't tested and something went went
Speaker 1: wrong with it. We will never know what the problem was. Well,
Speaker 1: whenever we might find out, we might find a plan.
Speaker 1: One of these days. But I have a feeling that
Speaker 1: by the time we find the plane that everything is
Speaker 1: going to be so corroded into we're not gonna be oh,
Speaker 1: look that one glass fuse with blue. Yeah. But if
Speaker 1: we find the plane on land, then we'll know that
Speaker 1: they lived. Well that's true. Yeah, and you know, if
Speaker 1: we find that, we'll probably find some mysterious evidence that
Speaker 1: he's choked her to death on their way down. Pretty much. Well,
Speaker 1: all right, so much worth you guys have any more thoughts,
Speaker 1: any more theories? No, I think Yeah, I think it's
Speaker 1: an unfortunate accident, very very unfortunate. Um. Yeah, so don't
Speaker 1: try to fly around the world with first gen tech. Well,
Speaker 1: and also don't throw away your trailing antenna. Yes, if
Speaker 1: they had that functioning radio, things would have turned out different. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was a big mistake. Have been a hassle, but
Speaker 1: it was worth it. Yeah. Alright, well, so much of
Speaker 1: that mystery. Another one down. You probably know if we
Speaker 1: have a website or not, Well, yes we do. It's
Speaker 1: called Thinking Sideways podcast dot com, where you can download episodes,
Speaker 1: you can leave comments, you can check our links. We
Speaker 1: always put a few links up for all of our mysteries. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you find us on iTunes, where of course we are,
Speaker 1: you can subscribe and leave us a review hopefully it'll
Speaker 1: be a nice review. And of course you can stream
Speaker 1: us in any one of a billion websites. We're on Facebook,
Speaker 1: so find us out there. You can like us uh
Speaker 1: and follow us. You can also join the group because
Speaker 1: we have a Facebook group. Twitter rights that is thinking
Speaker 1: Sideways without the g uh. And of course we have
Speaker 1: an email account, we really do. Yeah, thank you Sideways
Speaker 1: podcast at gmail. If you've got theories about Amelia or
Speaker 1: if you are Amelia in Fred about how to use email,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. What else, We've gotta sub Reddit. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure how active that is right now, but it's fine.
Speaker 1: It's there, Okay, keep joining and talking and joint talk. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And last of all, if you want to support the show,
Speaker 1: we are on patreon dot com. That's the kind of
Speaker 1: thing where it's kind of like you pledge a certain
Speaker 1: amount per episode. It's like run for the arts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: whatever you're comfortable with per We've also got the papal
Speaker 1: and we've been putting up new merch a bunch of
Speaker 1: on our website. Yeah, so anyway, not not not necessary,
Speaker 1: but if you feel like sure. Yeah. And stickers, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we've been selling a lot of those. Well I don't
Speaker 1: know half a dozen anyway, So I guess it's patreon
Speaker 1: dot com slash thinking sideways if you want to find us,
Speaker 1: and the other links are on our website website. Ye.
Speaker 1: All right, Well that's it for this week. You guys
Speaker 1: have any final thoughts. I'm not gonna fly on my
Speaker 1: plane anywhere soon. Yeah, not over the ocean, that's for sure.
Speaker 1: Let's take off, all right, hie guys,