The Amelia Earhart
mystery gets another examination in a new History Channel documentary.
NEW YORK — The retired federal agent who found what he believes is the first photographic evidence of Amelia Earhart alive and well after crash-landing in the Pacific Ocean during her attempted round-the-world flight says he didn’t initially capture the significance of the image until years later.
The black-and-white picture is of a group of people — including what seems to be a woman seated with her back to the camera — on a dock on Jaluit Atoll in the Marshall Islands. “Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence,” a new documentary airing Sunday on the History channel, claims the figure is the famed aviator who vanished 80 years ago this month.
Retired U.S. Treasury Agent Les Kinney said Wednesday that he was looking for clues surrounding Earhart’s disappearance in the National Archives, when he found the photograph in 2012 in a box filled mostly with text documents from the Office of Naval Intelligence. Kinney “didn’t really look at it carefully” because he was searching through thousands of items.
In 2015 he took another pass at the undated photo, which also shows a ship apparently pulling Earhart’s plane wreckage on a barge. The image is at the heart of the two-hour program that claims the aviator, along with navigator Fred Noonan, crash-landed in the Marshall Islands, where they were picked up by the Japanese military and held prisoner.
The theory concludes Earhart died in Japanese custody on Saipan. In the documentary, that photo is subjected to facial-recognition and other forensic testing, such as torso measurements. Experts on the show claim the subjects are likely Earhart and Noonan.
Others aren’t convinced, including Dorothy Cochrane, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum and an expert on women in aviation. She said Thursday the blurry image isn’t conclusive. “I cannot say definitively that this is Amelia Earhart. That doesn’t mean that it might not be, somehow. But you can’t say that just through the image the way it is.”
The disappearance of Earhart and Noonan on July 2, 1937, in the Western Pacific Ocean has been the subject of continuing searches, research and debate.
The longstanding official theory is that Earhart ran out of gas and crashed into deep ocean waters northwest of Howland Island, a tiny speck in the South Pacific that she and Noonan missed. Other theories have claimed she made an emergency landing on a flat stretch of coral reef southwest of Howland.
Kinney, who started his career as a naval intelligence agent, said the photograph was in a batch of documents collected by U.S. sources in anticipation of the 1944 invasion of the Marshall Islands. The National Archives, in College Park, Md., verified Thursday that the image is from its holdings and was in a file “unrelated to Earhart.”
Kinney believes the photo was taken in July 1937 and shows Earhart and Noonan, based on other evidence including physical landmarks and islanders’ recollections.
He suspects they may have been picked up by a fishing boat and handed over to Japanese authorities, who initially may have had no intention of keeping them.
That may explain why there are no handcuffs or restraints in the photo.
Though Cochrane isn’t convinced, she respects Earhart as a heroine who took chances and was a role model for women. “It would be great to solve it and I’m happy that people are still interested in her, so we’ll just see where it goes,” she said.