The following is by
Randy Jacobson, Ph.D.He sent it to EPAC, and plans to put it up on Amazon.
Book Review: No Place To Put A Stone, Sherman A. Meeds, Jr.I feel a need to briefly outline my
bona fides and biases for the reader. As a member of TIGHAR, I have been the lead researcher for the past 20 years into the details of Earhart’s Last Flight, including assembling the chronological database of radio messages, letters, and other correspondence from 1935 to 1941. I also have compiled all available ship logs and weather information immediately before, during, and after the search for Earhart. I consider myself a valuable skeptical contributor to TIGHAR’s research efforts on Nikumaroro Island, neither accepting nor rejecting TIGHAR’s hypotheses of what happened there.
The book in question is the first comprehensive examination of Earhart’s flight and subsequent disappearance, covering all relevant data and theories to date, by a new, independent researcher with no affiliation to existing investigative teams or researchers. The author lays out the available data to define the trade-space of possibilities of what happened to the last flight of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan as they attempted to fly from Lae New Guinea to Howland Island in the central Pacific. The approach taken is that of an investigative engineer or scientist: examine the facts, determine the possibilities and examine all reasonable scenarios. The data themselves can be interdependent (e.g. speed of advance, fuel consumption, radio signal strengths, etc.), such that information in one area, albeit sparse, is augmented by other information. The author’s approach to this problem is to be commended, and he does an excellent job: better than any other book written on the subject to date. All of the Japanese capture theories are debunked very quickly, along with Elgin Long’s theory, and the “crashed and sank” theories. Much of the author’s work revolves around the flight path, speed of the aircraft, and the headwinds, assuming that the last half of the flight had overcast conditions preventing celestial navigation. The author gives an excellent overview of the post-loss radio messages, providing a cohesive and compelling argument that the Earhart plane had to have landed on Nikumaroro (nee Gardner) Island: there is no other obvious solution to the disappearance. He disagrees with TIGHAR’s hypothesis that Earhart and Noonan survived on Nikumaroro for several days; instead, he believes that they were inside the plane when it was carried off of the reef edge and floated westward shortly after the last credible radio signal was heard on July 5.
The author takes most of his information from already published books and Internet sites, and accepts nearly all primary documentation at face value. For example, he believes the story of what happened to Earhart upon arriving at Dakar, rejecting a description of what actually happened that was based upon the actual chart used and annotated by Noonan for that flight. He consistently states that Noonan updated the position of the aircraft at least one an hour, if not every half-hour. Actual examination of charts used by Noonan on the world flight show a much different story: very few navigational fixes during the bulk of the flight with more emphasis towards the latter third, consistent with the ability to correct for offset in flight paths at large intervals at time. Trying to keep the aircraft on a strict flight path is too difficult to manage: it is easier to let it go where the plane wants (based on crosswind conditions) such that it becomes obvious what has happened and then make substantial course corrections. These maps give great insight into Noonan’s methods and have been ignored or simply not been available to the author. Another example of accepting data at face value is the various weather forecasts made by the Navy in Pearl Harbor. In hindsight, we know that the data available to the meteorologists for the area were extremely limited to non-existent and are not terribly credible. Further, the author insists that a significant typhoon near the Philippine Islands affected the weather along Earhart’s flight path. This is not credible, as the Intertropical Convergence Zone, located just north of the equator, acts as a barrier to weather effects. The author believes that an individual weather measurement at one position can be valid for 100’s of miles; in fact, the weather can be quite variable and is often uncorrelated at a 100 miles distance.
There are some errors in the book, but none make a substantial difference in the conclusions. Many of these errors could have been corrected with a knowledgeable or competent copy editor. For example, Meeds refers to Rear Admiral Richard Black as the lead administrator for the colonization of Howland, Baker, and Jarvis Islands; in fact, he received that title during WWII, long after the Earhart flight. The reader is given the impression that a Rear Admiral was on site at Howland with only a commander of the US Coast Guard as the next highest military officer and is very misleading. Howard Hanzlik, the U.P. correspondent on the Itasca has two spellings in the book: Hanzlik and Hanz Lick. Times of day are usually represented in local time with an occasional time zone letter reference (used by the British at the time), with subsequent difficulties for the reader. First, the US only adopted the letter practice for time zones once it entered WWII; secondly, the author correctly points out the time zone difficulties for the participants. Earhart requested everyone use GCT (or Zulu time), but the Itasca personnel did not. The author should have been consistent and kept everything in GCT time as well. He states that the Itasca stayed on Howland Island time (zone +11.5), but in fact, Howland was using zone +10.5 to be consistent with Honolulu. The author relies heavily upon the plane’s position at 0722 GCT at the Nukumanu Islands, based upon a radio report by Earhart. I have investigated all available maps in the US, British, and Japanese archives from that time period, and the Nukumanu Islands were not well charted or known. Earhart’s position does not mention the islands themselves in her message and every researcher assumes the position was based upon the island location based upon modern day maps. In fact, the position was probably a dead reckon projection of where the plane would be at some hour or half-hour position based upon Noonan’s last navigational fix. This was a very common practice by Noonan. Another glaring error was that the author believes it was daylight when the Earhart sighted a ship about midway through the flight. In fact, it was well past dusk and the only way to see a ship was if the ship had lights on the deck.
The author did find some glaring errors in other’s books, including Gillespie’s
Finding Amelia. Gillespie states that Earhart reached the position of the Nukumanu Islands after 6 hours of flying when in fact the position was reported more than 7 hours after leaving Lae.
The book itself is poorly laid out with small graphics and hard-to-read maps. I found it hard to read with the relatively small text and a large distance across the page. References are not as robust as a good researcher would like, referencing mostly previous books. Several interesting tidbits of information not seen before have no citation as to their source. Footnotes are somewhat copious and repetitive. Several times there were poorly constructed sentences and/or bad English. Again, a good copy editor could have corrected these flaws. As the book was self-published, it is not a surprise that the quality is not as good as one would expect.Nevertheless, this is an excellent book for both the amateur and keen investigator of Earhart’s last flight. The only book that comes close is
Finding Amelia by Gillespie, but that book lacks the overview and depth of this book. I rate this book a B+, and would have given it an A or A- had it been adequately proof-read and published in a more readable format. Despite my criticisms, I am more than willing to place this book in my bookshelf.