Sure, Thompson was trying to quash those rumors but by doing so admits that they existed at the time and that Bellarts did not just dream it up 30 years later.
Bellart's wasn't dreaming anything up. He was telling a story he had told probably a thousand times and, like all oft-told stories it had evolved to fit the teller's agenda. To Leo Bellarts, Amelia Earhart was an emotional, arrogant, incompetent woman who got herself lost despite the heroic best efforts of the Itasca's men.
And the description in the memo and in Kenner's letter, "then she went to pieces," show that Earhart sounded like a person about to run out of fuel, not someone with a large fuel reserve.
If Earhart had the 24-hour range she was expected to have and which she should have had based on the 1,100 fuel load and Kelly Johnson's recommended procedures, at 08:55 local time (2025Z) - the apparent actual time of the last transmission heard by Itasca (see
Last Words) - she had ballpark three and a half hours of fuel left. Hardly what you'd call a "large reserve" in her situation.
Thompson says, "...towards the end I could distinctly notice an inflection of tension coming into [her voice] and a decided increase in pitch as though she was talking under a great deal of stress or emotion." She was worried - real worried - and with good reason, but to say that the reported tone of her voice somehow shows that she was about to run out of fuel is more than a bit of a stretch.
That is my point, that the Kenner, Thompson and Bellerts statements support the logged transmission "BUT GAS IS RUNNING LOW" and "SEZ RUNNING OUT OF GAS ONLY 1/2 HR LEFT."
I agree that Kenner and Thompson's accounts support Galten's log "BUT GAS IS RUNNING LOW". When you're lost in the middle of the Pacific with three and half hours of fuel remaining, gas is definitely running low. O'Hare's "SEZ RUNNING OUT OF GAS ONLY 1/2 HR LEFT" is clearly a mistake, either by O'Hare or by Earhart, because she was still in the air an hour later. I wrote about O'Hare's log entry at length in Finding Amelia (pages 95-6).
Here's what Ballarts had to say about it in his 1973 interview with Elgen Long:
"Well, don’t go on O’Hare’s log, because I say—I wasn’t even aware that O’Hare was putting that stuff down. . . . No, I mean that. . . .
O’Hare shouldn’t have been putting that down because it was not his responsibility. It was actually mine and Galten, you know. [Laughs] . . . That stinkin’ O’Hare. . . . It’s in error . . . it should never have been in O’Hare’s log. He’s just adding confusion to it and that’s not correct. Possibly O’Hare might have had something in his little punkin’ head that he might have, you know, thought he was going to make a bundle of jack on that or something."
Also, nobody disputes that Earhart actually said "1/2 hour left," Thompson included that information in the message he sent out that morning at 1015, only one and a half hours after her last transmission.
As I wrote in Finding Amelia (page 96):
"At the time, however, Itasca’s commanding officer knew only that he had two different, but not necessarily contradictory, reports of Earhart’s fuel situation. He had little choice but to accept the more pessimistic version. Commander Thompson was not present in the radio room and did not personally hear the call. In his official report, he quoted both versions accurately, but after O’Hare’s “running out of gas, only 1⁄2 hour left,” he added the parenthetical comment “(unverified as heard by other witnesses).” Sometime later, the “un” in “unverified” was crossed out by hand."
I personally think that O'Hare heard the "gas is running low" transmission and conflated it with Earhart's earlier request that Itasca take a bearing and report "in half hour."