July 10th, 2011

 This has now become a 13 year odyssey, taking me from the halls of the National Archive s at College Park, Maryland  to the far reaches of the Central Pacific Ocean. I  made several trips to the Marshall Islands in 2001, staying at the Outrigger Marshall Islands Resort (now the Marshall Islands Resort). From there I traveled  on 3 different occasions to the island of Taroa, part of Maloelap Atoll to do an initial site survey of the IJNAF base on Taroa. I learned very quickly that the island is strewn with over a million pounds of unexploded ordinance from World War 2 that has never been removed. In order to do any work there, you must have a defined area to search and do a thorough GPR survey to locate any buried aircraft remains , bombs, etc. It's not a job for the faint of heart. As recently as last October 2010, while clearing brush with fire, the natives set off a 500 pound bomb. Luckily no one was injured, but it underscores the danger of working in an area that was heavily bombed during WW2.  My own experience with bombs came about on my second trip to Taroa. I was climbing up a sand bank from the beach and stepped on something round, covered with sand. I pitched forward on my chest, looked down and realized I had stepped on a Mark 5- 500 pound bomb! Luckily, the triggers are cast iron and rusted together. A few days later, the natives found another bomb in an area where children play regularly. They simply dug a pit around it, filled the pit with coconut husks and lit them on fire, moved everyone to the other side of the island and waited until it “cooked off”! A very loud and exciting explosion and a simple and efficient way to dispose of them.

   This article is about creating a time line by going through all of the eyewitness reports and radio messages and only compiling the reports that mention injuries attributed  to Fred Noonan. I'm sure that all of those reports are NOT included in here, my principal aim is to show the continuity in the statements from different locations and individuals.  One of the great things about the Earhart mystery is that there is a wealth of information contained in all of the interviews and books done by many writers and Earhart researchers over the last 70 years. Fred Goerner, Oliver Knaggs, TC “Buddy” Brennan, D Michael Harris, Randall Brink , Bill Prymak, Joe Gervais and Don Wilson to name a few.

   Since all that any of us know for sure is that Amelia and Fred took of from Lae, New Guinea on July 2nd 1937 and were never seen officially again, no information that is available should be excluded. Radio messages, eyewitness accounts and historical documents are just a few of the tools available in finding a solution to the most enduring mystery in aviation history.

   Let's consider those statements that note Noonan's injuries to create our timeline. Nina Paxton wrote letters to both Walter Winchell in 1943 and corresponded with Fred Goerner from 1964 to 1968.  Her letter revealed to me why our Leading Aviation Archaeological Foundation, also known to several of us by it's other acronym LAAF,  only characterized her as a “lonely old lady” that pounded on the doors of congressmen for several years to try and get information on Earhart released. Her letters that are at the Nimitiz Museum in Fredericksburg, Texas are glaringly absent from from the CD included in their latest book, although the gentleman that helped me go through Goerner's files remarked that their members had recently gone through the files and copied those same letters.  In all of these documents, three items stood out to me.

  “On July 3rd, 1937 at 2:20 PM EST, I picked up Amelia Earhart's distress signal by short wave. This message contained some 300 to 400 words- in which she described Mille or Mulgrave atoll, Klee Passage, Knox island and seemed to be located on a small island of 133 acres adjoining Knox, directly NE of a part of Marshall Island”. That would be Chirubon island, just to the north of Knox .

   On the 5th of July. Nina picked up an SOS giving 177 longitude.... and 58 minutes  above the equator. The radio was fading in and out so the coordinates were partial. Just for fun, I took those numbers, bought aerial navigation charts from NOAA, and inserted all of the possible number combinations for coordinates in the Marshall Islands to make a complete set of coordinates. The only place in the Marshalls that I came close to land were the coordinates- 172.07 degrees east, 5 hours and 58 minutes north of the equator, the reef plain on the western shore of Chirubon Island. That area is dry at low tide and has about 5 feet of water at high tide. Several years later I received a copy of Charles N. Hill's book “Fix on the Rising Sun” and noted that his redo of the LOP (line of position), page 140, puts the LOP a few miles east of this location.

   In the article Nina wrote for the Louisville Courier Journal, she noted that Earhart described Noonan's injuries. In a later to Fred Goerner, she wrote that Earhart talked about Noonan having bruised his knees during the landing yesterday, saying that was why he wasn't at the radio with her yesterday. A very important statement!

   Lijon's story is in Amelia Earhart: Lost Legend, by Don Wilson, pages 65 and 66. It reads in part as follows: He saw a big silver plane coming. It was low down and he could tell it was in trouble because it made no noise. Then it landed on the reef about 200 feet from the small island. A white woman and man got out and walked down the beach. He could tell that one of them was hurt because  the man was limping and there was blood on his face. You may read the complete statement in Wilson's book.

  There is still another story told by Air Force Major Joseph C. Wright. He had spoken to an old man on Enajet Island, Mili Atoll, in 1967.  The old man told him that a plane had crashed there thirty years ago and that when a man and a woman emerged from the wreckage, the man had a towel wrapped around his head from some type of injury. (E-mail from Dan Cheatham 7/6/2006.)

   Bilimon Amaran stated that he had treated a man and a woman on a ship in the lagoon at Jaluit Atoll.  The man had a slight cut on his forehead and an old, inflamed wound on his knee.  The head wound required only a bandage.  Amaron had been interviewed many times over the years  and as he aged there were slight variations to his story, but the core statement above never changed (Amelia Earhart:  Lost Legend Pages 68-73)  Joe Gervais and Bill Prymak had a meeting with Paul Amaran, Bilimon's brother, on Jabor Island during a trip to the Marshalls in 1997.  Paul gave a handwritten statement concerning a conversation with Bilimon a few months before he died.  Bilimon had revealed that the man he treated had false teeth and that one of the people, which one he couldn't remember, tried to give hm a ring.  (E-mail from Joe Klass 7/10/06). The ring statement will be addressed in another paper! The false teeth statement is another telling clue. Dr. Clifford Phillips, D.D.S. of Exeter, California, wrote a letter to Goerner describing Fred Noonan as having fractured four of his upper anterior teeth in a fall in a hotel bathroom in Hawaii in  March 1937, after their takeoff attempt resulted in a landing gear failure and subsequent crash . Dr. Phillps made an upper removable metal cast bridge for Noonan and was to have made a permanent lower on upon his return  from the around the world flight. The lower teeth were removed over the years prior to his fall. ( The Search for Amelia Earhart, pages 168-169.)

  Jim Golden had this item to add in 2008. After the air base at Roi Namur , part of Kwajelin Atoll, had been captured by US Armed Forces in Febuary 1944, “ the Marines wrote up a detailed report capturing the info that two white persons, a male and a female were brought by plane to Roi, the man with a white bandage on his head and the woman with short cut hair wearing mans pants , who were taken across a causeway to the Namur Administration Building. “ I read the report myself”.

  Statements by Josephine Blanco Akiyama appear in both Goerner's and Wilson's books.  She related that she had seen a white man and woman on the beach at Tanapang Harbor after they had been brought ashore from a plane in the water in 1937.  The man had a bandage on his head.

  Thus we have six individuals with a story about a man and a woman all brought together in a time line because of the man's injuries.

Paxton – injured knees, Radio message ,July 3rd 1937

 Lijon- head injury and limping, Mili Atoll, no time frame given.

Old man – head injury, told to Major Joseph C. Wright in1967, Enajet Island, Mili Atoll

Amaran – bandaged head injury and knee injury, Jaluit Atoll, July 1937
          
Akiyama- bandaged head injury, Tanapang Harbor, Saipan, July or August1937

 Jim Golden- head injury, read in a written military report in Febuary 1944 on Roi Namur , Kwajelin Atoll

   Now we have a time line  as follows:

Crash at Chirubon Island, Mili Atoll

Mili Atoll, transport to Jaluit Atoll by ship

Medical treatment at Jaluit

Moved to Roi Namur, Kwajelin Atoll

 Moved to Saipan by seaplane

   My opinion is that one story is just that, a story. Two stories, a coincidence. But six, all tied together by the injury descriptions? Sounds like history to me. I'm surprised that as long as all of this nformation has been floating around, no one has attempted to organize and connect it all in this manner.

  The other item that I want to point out is that there were over 90 people in the Marshall Islands and on Saipan that remembered seeing Earhart and/or Noonan or had stories from friends and relatives that related secondary accounts about their sightings. The most common statement heard from the eyewitnesses was that the woman had short hair and wore pants, Earhart's