Ric says,
"The claim that government documents about Earhart remain classified is not true."
Do you have source material to back up this statement?"
Interesting question. Think about it for a moment. What source material could I possibly have that would back up the statement that no government documents about Earhart remain classified? I can list many government documents about Earhart that are not classified. Marty has pointed out that the FBI files are public information and there are numerous government reports and correspondence published on the TIGHAR website. Beyond that, the exhaustive database of ship's logs, radio logs, radio messages, and weather reports compiled by TIGHAR researcher Dr. Randy Jacobson (see
Jacobson Database) includes something over 2,000 government documents relative to the Earhart disappearance. When Randy was doing his research in the early days of the Earhart Project he was working for the Office of Naval Research in Washington, DC and his security clearance went all the way to "Really Neat." Of course, Randy could not tell us the contents of any classified files but he did tell that he could find no classified files related to Earhart. I've seen copies of replies to generalized Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests asking for the release of any classified document related to Amelia Earhart. The reply is always, "We don't have any classified files to release."
But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. What if the government is lying? What if those thousands of released files are all cover for Earhart's spy mission? What if Randy was actually part of the conspiracy of silence? Author Mike Campbell (
The Truth At Last) is quite sure that I too am in on the plot.
So where does that leave us? To make a credible claim that the government has files related to Earhart that remain classified you have to know that the file exists and is classified. To my knowledge, nobody has been able to name any such document. And yet, the author of this new book claims there are something like 113 classified files (nice specific number). Maybe when his book comes out on January 5 it will have a list of documents in the NARA Finding Aids that cannot be accessed because they are still classified. If so we'll look into it, but I suspect that any still-classified files, if they exist at all, are naval intelligence files that some conspiracy buffs assume contain information about Earhart.
Looking at the
author's page on Amazon it seems clear that this is not a serious book about the Earhart mystery. The author cranks out books about treasure hunting. This latest book is just a rehash of the bizarre, too-dumb-to-discuss Irene Bolam theory first offered by Joe Gervais and Joe Klass in
Amelia Earhart Lives! forty-five years ago. He'll sell a few books. The media and the public have a short memory and an insatiable appetite for stories about Amelia Earhart. I've even heard it claimed that she died as a castaway on desert island.