Has it ever occurred to others than myself just how many fine roots have seemingly been cultivated in the soil of Earhart's fame and misfortune by virtue of a very invigorating fertilizer - which is that the lady may very possibly never be found so as to prove one wrong?
It can be very like religion itself: faith, not proof, gathers the masses; belief in the word, not that which is tangible, sustains. And one may question another's faith only at the peril of needing to prove that which is unprovable: it cannot be proven that the intangible reality that is believed in by the believer does not exist in some humanly unknowable form.
Don't get me wrong - I am a 'believer' in the Spiritual sense... but that's as far as it goes, at least incrementally as I gain a bit more wisdom year by year.
What in the world would having the anomaly emerge miraculously as the L10's fuselage have to do with discouraging those who might well point to the absence of the whole airplane as rich ground for parts to also still turn up elsewhere - as the
true place of loss? At the very least, finding only a portion of the airframe anywhere would certainly feed those still bent on some sort of Japanese-American guvmint conspiracy thing.
For two thousand years there have existed two empty tombs that we know of (well promoted) in Jerusalem (or for at least a significant part of that two millenia). One is at a 'traditional' site of crucifixion and interment near a 'skull' like place of rock (Golgotha), another in a garden setting and with a rolling stone type of closure - and situated below a rather 'skull' looking limestone hill/cliff (another suggested possible Golgotha). Both are attended daily by hordes of pilgrims who bow there as kneeling to mark the 'true' place. Not to confuse the Earhart absence from this veil with that of something on the order of the empty tomb, the point is humans are capable of just so much discernment and understanding; they also attach to that which is comfortable to their own unique psyches - and God Himself help you if you go there to change what they see as rational truth.
If TIGHAR drags up a chunk of Electra from Niku, or conversely, should Stratus do the same from the seabed somewhere, someone, somewhere, will still wonder at the shreds of things pulled from the surf a thousand or more miles away and what it was those people at TIGHAR or Stratus (or you name it) did to 'fake' the true splinter in the wrong place...
...or, just how was it that TIGHAR or Stratus or whomever couldn't see through what the Japanese did to scatter and hide the evidence of their misdeed.
Seriously, what is it that gets all this focus on this or that faraway island? I suspect it has to do with an unwillingness to accept the discomfort of an abrupt, violent ending at sea, or at the maw of hungry crabs instead of at the hands of the Japanese, or something.
If Earhart could only speak... oh damn, now I've opened the psychic door...
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Topic: Dust cover and cover plate (Richard Spink, Mili Atoll) (Read 249608 times)
