I have not posted on this forum for 15 years, but Ric’s comments are worthy of a response.
Thank you. Let me echo Andrew McKenna's appreciation for the opportunity to get beyond the press and discuss these issues directly.
David Alan is mistaken. You are not a troll. You are someone who wants to be taken seriously. You think you are right and you want others to agree with you. I totally get that because I am in the exact same position - so I sincerely welcome your participation in this forum.
I have a few questions, comments, and requests.
I am a long time Earhart researcher, a retired senior federal agent manager who has devoted the past ten years exclusively to tracking down the Earhart mystery.
I presume you mention your previous career as way to establish your credentials. Could you please tell us more? You describe yourself as "a retired senior federal agent manager." That's pretty vague. Were you a federal agent or a manager of federal agents? What sort of agent(s)? CIA? IRS? FBI? What's your educational background? Do you have training and/or previous experience in investigation? I'm not just being nosy. These questions are important. If I told you that I've been studying brain surgery as a hobby for the past ten years I don't think you'd assume that I was competent to operate on you.
I have submitted 100’s of FOIA’s and copied the entire contents of the Goerner collection at the Nimitz Museum.
Then you are surely aware that Fred Goerner eventually discounted the possibility that Earhart was ever in the Marshalls. I have attached an excerpt from a letter that Goerner wrote to TIGHAR member Rob Gerth on April 13, 1989. We have a stack of correspondence from Goerner dating from the early years of the Earhart Project. Fascinating stuff. We really need to get it all scanned and posted to the TIGHAR website. (Time, time, time ...)
During the course of my research I have uncovered “one” document written by a U.S. military department branch that would stand up to court scrutiny. This document indicates our military had evidence Earhart had been in the custody of the Japanese in the Marshalls. Only one document, that’s it!
By all means, produce the document!
There were three eyewitnesses to the Earhart landing at Mili Atoll which Ric categorizes as “folklore.” That is Ric’s kind way of saying brown skinned people can’t be believed. There is another eyewitness: a Japanese/Marshallese medic who treated a man and a woman on the deck of a Japanese ship at Jaluit in 1937. There are fascinating accounts of the Japanese conscripting 40 young Marshallese men from other islands to assist in pulling a twin motored plane onto a barge at Mili Atoll. There are of course, many members of our military who saw official documents detailing the government’s knowledge and interest in tracking the captive Earhart in her journey through the Marshalls on her way to Saipan.
I'll forgive your accusation of racism and attribute it to ignorance rather than malice. My comments about "folklore" (aka "oral history", "eyewitness testimony", "anecdotal recollection") have nothing to do with the skin color of the informant. The problem with accepting stories as evidence is that you have to decide whose stories to believe. Why is Emily Sikuli, who remembered seeing the wreckage of an airplane on the reef at Nikumaroro, less credible than Bilimon Amaron who remembered treating a man and a woman on the deck of a Japanese ship at Jaluit in 1937? We learned that stories are not reliable evidence while searching for the White Bird in Maine in the 1980s and '90s. The white folks of Washington County regaled us with a well-established body of folklore about how the missing French transatlantic flight had come down in the Round Lake Hills - but after 20 expeditions we ultimately realized that there was nothing there but stories. Stories may help lead you to hard evidence (documents, photographs, artifacts) as they have at Nikumaroro, but by themselves they are just stories. This is a fundamental aspect of historical investigation - one that the Japanese Capture Crowd has never grasped. Read Tom King's excellent peer-reviewed paper
Amelia Earhart in the Marianas: A Consideration of the EvidenceThis past January, I was one of the seven men including Dick Spink, who scoured a small three acre island at Mili Atoll for five days under the sponsorship of Parker Aerospace. Nearby, were other small islands. Accompanying us was a technician from a global company which conducts ground penetrating radar searches worldwide. We were also equipped with five solid metal detectors. At low tide, we walked out on the island’s coral laced north shore reef. We got a few solid hits but it was useless to dig.
You got hits out on the reef flat??? With what, the GPR or the metal detectors? You think there is metal buried in the coral? I don't see how that is possible. There is no active coral growth on reef flats.
Back on the island, we found numerous pieces of aircraft aluminum mostly buried 12 to 18 inches deep. The original 1937 Marshallese eyewitnesses were fishing at a nearby fish trap inside the lagoon when the plane landed on the island’s northern coral reef about 400 yards away. The fish trap still exists. About ten days later, the plane was dragged over rails from the north beach area to a spot where it could be loaded onto a small barge on the island’s protected south beach. The island’s original 1937 west beach had receded well within the confines of the island. All the artifacts were found along this north south corridor.
That paragraph liberally mixes fact with speculation. You can't DO that. You say the plane was dragged over rails. Are the rails still there or is that just part of the story? You need to produce an accurate map showing where each piece of metal was found and you need to show how you know that the beach has receded.
The artifacts are currently being tested by Parker Labs and Alcoa against appropriate known samples of Japanese, Lockheed Model 10 aluminum specific to the Earhart era, and samples of American aircraft aluminum of the World War Two era.
How is Parker qualified to analyze aluminum alloys? Who at Alcoa is doing the testing? What documentation do they have that establishes the elemental breakdown of Alcoa 24ST ALCLAD throughout the 1935 to, say, 1943 period? We would desperately like to have that information. A word of caution: Do NOT take the word of the Alcoa engineers who are doing the testing. Insist on historical company documents. We got burned on that when Alcoa in Pittsburgh did testing for us in 1996. There is "folklore" at Alcoa.
Spectrographic analysis of the artifacts having residual paint is being completed. However, the Earhart aircraft was partially repainted during Lockheed's reconstruction of Earhart's Electra. I doubt the paint analysis will stand up to scientific scrutiny since it very well could have come from a different batch than the sample owned by Mr. Donavon. What we do hope to eliminate is Japanese paint. Time will tell.
The best you can hope for there is "consistent with" unless you can prove that the paint used on NR16020 was unlike any other paint used on aircraft up through WWII.
In summary my advice is, if you want to be taken seriously produce all of your evidence and invite responsible scrutiny and debate. Secrecy is the hallmark of the amateur. Passionate assertions of your own certainty may get you some media coverage (they love that) but the only thing that really counts is substance.
I'll continue to engage in this discussion to the extent that I can find time but with departure of the Niku VIII expedition one week away that's going to be limited.
Thanks again for sharing your information with us.