Advanced search  
Pages: 1 2 3 [4] 5 6 7   Go Down

Author Topic: Japanese capture theories  (Read 102968 times)

Chris Johnson

  • T5
  • *****
  • Posts: 1069
  • Trying to give a fig but would settle for $100,000
Re: Japanese capture theories
« Reply #45 on: May 24, 2011, 02:13:09 AM »

I'm probably racking up muck here but was nosing around the web and came accross this site.

LEGERDEMAIN With the latest startling revelation regarding the fate of Amelia Earhart!

« Last Edit: May 24, 2011, 02:16:53 AM by Chris Johnson »
Logged

Martin X. Moleski, SJ

  • Administrator
  • *
  • Posts: 3006
Re: Japanese capture theories
« Reply #46 on: May 24, 2011, 08:30:10 AM »

I'm probably racking up muck here but was nosing around the web and came accross this site.

LEGERDEMAIN With the latest startling revelation regarding the fate of Amelia Earhart!


OK, I've added the title to "Alternative Theories." 

Have you read the book?  Got a review of it somewhere?  How should it be classified?
LTM,

           Marty
           TIGHAR #2359A
 
Logged

Chris Johnson

  • T5
  • *****
  • Posts: 1069
  • Trying to give a fig but would settle for $100,000
Re: Japanese capture theories
« Reply #47 on: May 24, 2011, 09:15:26 AM »

Didn't know it existed till I found the site whilst googling something else. So no i've not read it.
Logged

Chris Johnson

  • T5
  • *****
  • Posts: 1069
  • Trying to give a fig but would settle for $100,000
Re: Japanese capture theories
« Reply #48 on: May 24, 2011, 09:26:23 AM »

Another link that you may or may not be aware of Amelia Earhart's Survival and Repatriation: Myth or Reality?  (2005)by Alex Mandel, quite a lot to read on the subject.  Done a search on his name on the forum and nothing comes up.
Logged

Don Dollinger

  • T3
  • ***
  • Posts: 239
Re: Japanese capture theories
« Reply #49 on: May 24, 2011, 09:33:34 AM »

Intresting stuff but nothing new.  It is truly amazing how these writers can take all that is alreay known, rehash it in their own words, and then "republish" it and then advertised it as being the definitive book on the subject.  I'm definately in the wrong business.   >:(

LTM,

Don
Logged

Martin X. Moleski, SJ

  • Administrator
  • *
  • Posts: 3006
Re: Japanese capture theories
« Reply #50 on: May 24, 2011, 09:35:56 AM »

Another link that you may or may not be aware of Amelia Earhart's Survival and Repatriation: Myth or Reality?  (2005)by Alex Mandel, quite a lot to read on the subject.  Done a search on his name on the forum and nothing comes up.

Thanks for the link, Chris.  It seems to be an excellent rebuttal of Reineck's theory.
LTM,

           Marty
           TIGHAR #2359A
 
Logged

Bruce Thomas

  • Administrator
  • *
  • Posts: 651
  • Now where did I put my glasses?
Re: Japanese capture theories
« Reply #51 on: May 24, 2011, 10:20:57 AM »

I'm probably racking up muck here but was nosing around the web and came accross this site.

LEGERDEMAIN With the latest startling revelation regarding the fate of Amelia Earhart!


OK, I've added the title to "Alternative Theories."  

Have you read the book?  Got a review of it somewhere?  How should it be classified?

This book was mentioned on the old Forum in late 2007 by Karen Hoy:

Quote
Date:         Wed, 12 Dec 2007 21:24:53
From:         Karen Hoy
Subject:      Re: Bolam theory

For William Webster-Garman,

Your theory makes perfect sense. It's all the fault of cute aliens
(isn't everything?)

Jokes aside, there is a published book entitled "Legerdemain" which
is described as "a startling new book on the disappearance of Amelia
Earhart."

This is an extremely badly written, edited and indexed rehash of the
Bolam theory, by David Bowman, who needs to be sent back to 4th grade
to learn how to write coherently.

It seems that everything, from the 1938 Hawaii Clipper crash to a
French message in a bottle, were really connected to Earhart's
disappearance. And AE was really Irene!

This book makes "Amelia Earhart Lives" look like brilliantly written
research. The only startling thing is that anyone actually bought it.

Goodnight, Irene,
Karen Hoy
LTM,

Bruce
TIGHAR #3123R
 
« Last Edit: May 24, 2011, 11:20:31 AM by Martin X. Moleski, SJ »
Logged

Martin X. Moleski, SJ

  • Administrator
  • *
  • Posts: 3006
Re: Japanese capture theories
« Reply #52 on: May 24, 2011, 11:23:53 AM »

This book was mentioned on the old Forum in late 2007 by Karen Hoy: ...

Thanks, Bruce!

I've met Karen several times since she joined EPAC.

She is one of the most amazing researchers on the TIGHAR team.

She is also quite objective and not the least bit prone to sarcasm, irony, and ridicule (unlike myself).

That is a blistering review of the book.  I think I'll take her word for its contents and leave it off my reading list.   8)
LTM,

           Marty
           TIGHAR #2359A
 
Logged

Bruce Thomas

  • Administrator
  • *
  • Posts: 651
  • Now where did I put my glasses?
Re: Japanese capture theories
« Reply #53 on: June 11, 2012, 10:35:53 AM »

An addition to the Earhart-and-the-Marshall-Islands theory in an anecdotal recollection of a conversation described by a retired Naval officer (“Captain Greenwood”), apparently in a letter to the alumni magazine of the U.S. Naval Academy (Shipmate) in its Jan-Feb 1987 issue.  I found reference to this in a paper on the website of the Redlands Fortnightly Club in California, described as “believed to be the second oldest literary club in the United States.”  The paper’s title is “The Flying Clippers: Their Glory, Romance, Tragedy and Mystery,” by W. Leonard Taylor and Robert W. Taylor.

It seems that Captain Greenwood had a conversation with a young Pan American pilot, Mark Walker, who was lost later in the 1938 disappearance of the Hawaii Clipper. (The scientist Fred Meier, for whom AE had been collecting air samples on the World Flight, was a passenger on that flight.)  Walker, a Stanford University graduate, is said to have learned to fly while in the Navy before joining Pan American.

Walker was “assigned to work with Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan” (by PAA? the Navy?) in early 1937.  He is supposed to have learned from AE that she had been tasked by “someone high in government” to undertake a spy mission.  Her airplane actually had the capability of flying at 250 miles per hour, and that would have enabled her to secretly divert over the Marshall Islands to gather military intelligence, and then still make it to Howland Island in the proper amount of time for the publicized straight route at 150 mph from Lae.

I came across this article because it mentions that Captain Greenwood’s letter in Shipmate was in response to a November 1986 article that had appeared in the magazine about Earhart’s flight.  The author of that article:  Captain William B. Short, Jr., one of the other two pilots who flew with John Lambrecht in the search of the Phoenix Islands.

Does anyone have access to old issues of Shipmate?  In his article, Captain Short was apparently critical of AE's flight, saying it was a "publicity stunt."
LTM,

Bruce
TIGHAR #3123R
 
Logged

Ric Gillespie

  • Executive Director
  • Administrator
  • *
  • Posts: 6098
  • "Do not try. Do or do not. There is no try" Yoda
Re: Japanese capture theories
« Reply #54 on: June 11, 2012, 11:10:27 AM »

Short's letter to his father is on the TIGHAR website.

The only way to make an Electra do 250 mph would be in a power dive. There was no engine that could be put on the airplane that could make it go that fast.
Logged

Bruce Thomas

  • Administrator
  • *
  • Posts: 651
  • Now where did I put my glasses?
Re: Japanese capture theories
« Reply #55 on: June 11, 2012, 11:42:30 AM »

Short's letter to his father is on the TIGHAR website.

The only way to make an Electra do 250 mph would be in a power dive. There was no engine that could be put on the airplane that could make it go that fast.

Well, yeah, the anecdote with Mark Walker at its center is twaddle, of course. 

But I'm wondering if there are any 50 year-old recollections of the Phoenix Island search that Captain Short threw into the anecdotal soup in his November 1986 Shipmate article -- to be taken with the proverbial grain of salt, of course.  And/or whether any of what he wrote in it conflicts with the contemporaneous account he wrote in that letter to his father.

The article seems to have been published post-mortem -- Captain William Byfield Short, Jr., USNA '32, died the previous January according to the VA's national grave locator.
LTM,

Bruce
TIGHAR #3123R
 
Logged

Gary LaPook

  • T5
  • *****
  • Posts: 1624
Re: Japanese capture theories
« Reply #56 on: June 12, 2012, 03:48:13 AM »

Short's letter to his father is on the TIGHAR website.

The only way to make an Electra do 250 mph would be in a power dive. There was no engine that could be put on the airplane that could make it go that fast.
There were about 130 different models of the Wasp engine (although some models were never built) and none produced more than the 550 horsepower continuous rating of Earhart's S3H1 engines so there were no more powerful engines that could have been installed. The next more powerful P&W engines had two rows of cylinders, weighed a whole lot more, and anybody would notice the extra row of cylinders and these engines would not fit in the cowlings.

But if they could have fitted more powerful engines, where does that get you? According to report 487 it takes full power, 1200 hp, to make the plane go 200 mph and it takes 1080 hp to go 190 mph so it takes 120 more hp, 10% more, just to make the plane go 10 mph faster. You would have to add a bunch of extra engines to make it go 50 mph faster since drag increases with the square of the airspeed.

Operating aircraft engines at high power uses a lot of fuel. Earhart's engines burn 120 gallons per hour at the full 1200 hp output and this would make the plane go 200 mph. The plane had only 1100 gallons on board so would use up all the fuel in only nine hours and ten minutes and would have splashed down at 0910 Z after covering only 1833 statute miles. At the 550 continuous rating per engine the plane still burns 110 gallons per hour so would run out of fuel after only ten hours and would fly at about 190 mph so would cover about 1900 SM before splashing down at 1000 Z. If bigger engines were installed it just makes the range even less.

See my website for a more detailed explanations of why there was no spy mission.

Flight planning for spy mission.

And second spy mission theory.

gl
Logged

Gary LaPook

  • T5
  • *****
  • Posts: 1624
Re: Japanese capture theories
« Reply #57 on: June 12, 2012, 03:58:28 AM »

And there is no way that they ended up in the Marshalls due to a navigational error because it was impossible to be that far off course. Let me say that again, it was
IMPOSSIBLE to be that far off course. I’m not saying that it was “unlikely” to be that far off
course and I am not saying that it was “highly unlikely” to be that far off course. I AM saying that
it was IMPOSSIBLE to be that far off course.

The generally accepted level of uncertainty for a position found by dead reckoning is 10% of the
distance flown since the last fix. This means that if Earhart and Noonan flew all the way from
Lae to Howland, 2556 SM, inside solid clouds without the opportunity to see any visual
landmarks or to take any celestial sights then it is highly unlikely that they were more than 255.6
SM away from Howland at 1912 Z. (Of course this is not a real scenario since Earhart wrote that
“Noonan must have star sights” so they would have turned around if they could not see the stars.)
Mili is 856 SM from Howland, more than three times the accepted level of uncertainty if they had DRed all the way.

But wait, we know that they had a fix at 0718 Z near Nikumanu Island and it is only 1700 SM
from there to Howland so the expected uncertainty would only be 170 SM so Mili was five times
further away than the accepted uncertainty. And then they saw the Ontario at 1030 Z which was
only 1270 SM from Howland making the uncertainty at 1912 Z only 127 SM so Mili was about
seven times further away than the accepted level of uncertainty. Then they passed Nauru at about
1130 Z and it is only 1143 SM from there to Howland, the uncertainty became 114 SM making
Mili 7.5 times further away. Then they flew over Tabituea which is only 613 SM from Howland
further reducing the dead reckoning uncertainty to only 61 SM. Since Mili is 856 SM from
Howand it is 14 times further away than any possible error in the dead reckoning.

You might say “but what if a strong wind came up and blew them far off course?” Well since it
would only take about five hours to fly from Tabituea to Howland, to be blown off course 856
SM in this time period would have required a wind out of the southeast blowing at 174 mph, you
would think that Itasca would have noticed such a strong wind.

I have attached two images showing the course line from Lae to Howland with turn offs toward
Mili at Ontario and at Tabituea. The course to Howland is 078̊. From Ontario to Mili is 800 SM
and the course is 036̊ meaning that Earhart would have had to make a left turn there of 42̊ in
order to head to Mili. From Tabituea to Mili is 550 SM and the course is 339̊ so Earhart would
have had to make a left turn there of 99̊ in order to head to Mili from there. Obviously they
never made any such turns.

But what if they arrived in the vicinity of Howland at 1912 Z, couldn’t find Howland so they
flew off to the northwest looking for an alternate landing site such as Mili? They didn’t have
enough gas on board to make it to make it to Mili, 856 SM away.

I have been a lawyer for a long time and almost all of my cases involved airplane crashes. Based
on my experience I have come to be distrustful of “eyewitness testimony.” Even if a witness is
trying to be truthful it doesn’t mean that they actually saw what they think they saw. I’ll give you
an example. A number of my cases involved airplane crashes involving fires with the wreckage
badly burned up. We would take the testimony of 3 or 4 and in one case 6 eyewitness who
testified under oath “I looked up and I saw the airplane on fire, fire was coming out of the front
of the plane!” According to those who like the capture theory such testimony from so many eye witnesses would
establish the fact that the plane was on fire while it was still up in the sky, case closed.

Well, not so fast. When a plane catches fire after it impacts the ground, the fire and smoke goes
upward, just like the fire in your fireplace. When a plane is on fire while in flight the smoke trails
back and deposits soot on the tail of the plane, no soot on the tail, no in-flight fire. All these
witnesses that testified under oath that they saw a plane on fire up in the air were wrong. They
weren’t lying, they were just wrong. This is just a sample but when you take sworn testimony
many times you start to realize that eyewitness testimony is not all that reliable. And these
witnesses were testifying shortly after the accidents, not 60 years later.

If you produced a thousand eyewitnesses who testified under oath that a flying saucer landed,
little green men came out and forced Earhart and Noonan into the saucer and then they took off,
no jury would believe that story even with that many witnesses. Jurors weigh the testimony and
compare it to their common sense to decide if the testimony is correct and reject testimony that
doesn’t make sense. This is especially so when the testimony makes impossible claims, such as
Earhart landing in the Marshalls.

It is easy to reject the many conflicting statements about Earhart and Noonan’s capture and death
made many years after the events. There are so many conflicts in the statements that you must
reject a good portion of the statements, keeping only the statements that support your own
favorite theory. Well if so many statements can be rejected, then why can’t they all be rejected?
They were captured here, they were captured there. They were executed, they died of dysentery.
They were buried here, they were buried there, etc.

So no, I am not swayed by the witness statements that some are so fond of.


Most of us have heard of standard deviation and this is the concept governing the uncertainty of
dead reckoning. We can consider that the band of uncertainty contains about 95% of the possible
actual positions of the aircraft so there is only a about a 5% chance that you would be outside the
band. In standard deviation terms, 95% equals 2 standard deviations meaning that one standard
deviation was only half of the band of uncertainty. As you exceed this distance the probability
that you are further away decreases very quickly. In 1 case out of a 21 you will be beyond 2
S.D.s; in 1 case out of 370 will you be more than 3 S.D.s ; in 1 case out of 15,787 will you be
further out than 4 S.D.s; in 1 case out of 1,744,278 will you be out 5 S.D.s; and in only 1 case
out of 506,800,000 will you be out more than 6 S.D.s.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation

Going the other way, 68% of the time you will be within half of the uncertainty band, at 1 S.D.,
of the DR position which means that only about 32% of the time will you be in the outer one-half
of the error band. The uncertainty at 1912 Z was 255 SM which is 2 S.D.s so one S.D was 128 SM.
To accidently arrive at the closest Japanese island, Mili, would mean the plane was 785 SM from its
D.R. position over Howland which is 6.1 Standard Deviations and this will happen in less than one
case out of 506,800,000! This means that the odds against this happening is more than 506,800,000
to one! And this is based on dead reckoning all the way from Lae without any fixes. Fixes determined
enroute would have made the resulting uncertainty at Howland smaller so the S.D. would have been smaller
making it even more unlikely than this 506 million to one that they ended up at Mili.

The most complete treatment of the statistics of navigational errors is in the American Practical Navigator, commonly known as "Bowditch," U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office Publication number 9 (H.O. 9) which is the standard navigational authority  in the United States and has been since the first edition in 1802. The 1977 edition has "appendix Q" which  is a 33 page discussion of this topic.

https://sites.google.com/site/fredienoonan/resources/american-practical-navigator-h-o-9/h09-1962-1.JPG?attredirects=0

I was stating my "best case scenario" for those who believe in the MIli theory.

I only cited the odds up to 6 standard deviations, 506,800,000 to 1 since that covered the case of dead reckoning all the way from Lae ( which we know was not the case.) 10 % of the distance to Howland is 255 SM which is two standard deviations so one standard deviation is half of that, 128 SM. It is 856 SM from Howland to Mili which is six point seven (6.7) times the standard deviation for a complete dead reckoned flight from Lae to Howland.

 We know they had a fix near Nukumano only 1700 SM from Howland making the standard deviation for the DR position over Howland 85 SM so it would be 10 S.D. to end up at Mili.

They had  a fix over the Ontario leaving only a 1270 SM dead reckoning leg to Howland making the S.D. only 63 SM making Mili 13.5 standard deviations away.

Next they had a fix over or abeam Nauru leaving only a 1143 SM dead reckoning leg to Howland making the S.D. 57 SM making Mili 15 standard deviations away.

It was reported that they were heard flying over Tabituea which is only 613 SM from Howland making the S.D. 31 SM  making Mili 28 standard deviations away.


Noonan would also have gotten a celestial fix at or after the radio report of "partially cloudy" at 4:53 Itasca time (1623 Z) leaving only 2 hours and 49 minutes (or less) until the 1912 Z report of "must be on you" over Howland. At 150 m.p.h. the plane would have flown 422 SM (or less) making the standard deviation only 21 SM and placing Mili 40 standard deviations (or more) away.

The highest odds I could find was for 7 standard deviations, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation

(if you can find a table that shows the odds for more that 7 S.D. please point it out to me, I am quite interested.)

 The probability of being seven standard deviations away is one chance in three hundred and ninety billion, seven hundred million (390,700,000,000) So based on any of these fixes, the probability of ending up at Mili would have been even much lower than this number. The likelihood of being forty standard deviations off course after the 1623 Z fix is astronomical. In fact, there is not any significant difference in the probability of Earhart ending up at Mili as her ending up on the Moon!

The probability of less than one chance in more than 390,700,000,000 meets the definition, in most peoples' minds, of "impossible."

gl
« Last Edit: June 12, 2012, 04:03:21 AM by Gary LaPook »
Logged

Bruce Thomas

  • Administrator
  • *
  • Posts: 651
  • Now where did I put my glasses?
Re: Japanese capture theories
« Reply #58 on: June 12, 2012, 12:50:14 PM »

Short's letter to his father is on the TIGHAR website.

Thanks, Ric.  I didn't pick up from your comment about the typed letter being on the website that you were in effect telling me that the article in Shipmate was just the text of the letter neatly typeset with a couple of pictures of the Colorado and one of the floatplanes. 

But now I know, since the nice people at the USNA Alumni Association responded quickly today to my request for a photocopy of the November 1986 article.  I guess I'll need to make a donation to them in honor of my late father-in-law (also a naval aviator, USNA Class of '43).  :)  Well, at least it wasn't a completely useless exercise:  Finally, I now know what words got cut off at the end of the copy of Captain Short's letter stored on the TIGHAR website when it was turned into a PDF:  "ing possibility."   :D 
LTM,

Bruce
TIGHAR #3123R
 
Logged

Stephen Hinkle

  • T1
  • *
  • Posts: 7
Re: Japanese capture theories
« Reply #59 on: July 31, 2012, 03:36:40 AM »

While I beleive that the Nikumaroro Hypthoesis as the most probable, I wonder how much of these Japanese spy rumors could have come from the planning that lead up to the Battle of Pearl Harbor.   It wonder how many of these islands were used along the path.   See this link:   http://marshall.csu.edu.au/Marshalls/html/WWII/SeaPlaneOps.html
Logged
Pages: 1 2 3 [4] 5 6 7   Go Up
 

Copyright 2024 by TIGHAR, a non-profit foundation. No portion of the TIGHAR Website may be reproduced by xerographic, photographic, digital or any other means for any purpose. No portion of the TIGHAR Website may be stored in a retrieval system, copied, transmitted or transferred in any form or by any means, whether electronic, mechanical, digital, photographic, magnetic or otherwise, for any purpose without the express, written permission of TIGHAR. All rights reserved.

Contact us at: info@tighar.org • Phone: 610-467-1937 • Membership formwebmaster@tighar.org

Powered by MySQL SMF 2.0.18 | SMF © 2021, Simple Machines Powered by PHP