COULD RIDDLE
ITTING on the dock is a figure with a startling resemblance to Amelia Earhart, whose disappearance over the Pacific 80 years ago remains shrouded in mystery.
She has the same frame, the same short hair, and is wearing trousers – just as the trailblazing pilot did.
Now experts believe this recently discovered photo proves she did not die in a plane crash in 1937 as previously believed.
Instead they say it shows she was captured by the Japanese as she attempted to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe, and died a prisoner of war.
They claim a man on the left of the photo is her co-pilot Fred Noonan, and that their plane can be seen on a barge to the right.
Former FBI assistant executive director Shawn Henry, who is privately investigating Earhart’s disappearance, said: “I’m looking at her sitting on the dock and thinking, ‘This is her’.
“When you pull out and when you see the analysis that’s been done, I think it leaves no doubt to the viewers that that’s Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.”
Earhart, 37, and Noonan, 44, set off from the city of Lae in Papua New Guinea in a Lockheed Electra twinengine plane on July 2, 1937. But something went wrong on their way to Howland Island, where they had been due to refuel.
Earhart was declared dead two years later after officials in her native US concluded she had crashed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.
But her remains were not found, and millions of pounds have since been spent on numerous expeditions trying to discover what happened to the pilot, writer and fashion designer who so inspired the women’s movement.
Some claim she was captured as a spy, others that she somehow made it home to America where she lived quietly to an old age in New Jersey.
Now this image, found recently in a former “top secret” file in the US