AMELIA EARHART MYSTERY

A top-secret archival photo may prove the famed aviator survived her final flight 80 years ago circumnavigating the globe along the equator in a marathon 46,671km flight. And then suddenly, she vanished. “Fuel is running low,” Earhart said in what is beli

A top-secret archival photo may prove the famed aviator survived her final flight 80 years ago.

Shortly after midnight on July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart, the celebrated aviator, climbed into her Lockheed Electra at an airfield in Papua New Guinea and took off into the dark, overcast night. Together with her navigator, Fred Noonan, the 39-year-old pilot flew east towards a tiny Pacific island 4,113km away on the final stretch of her boldest aeronautical adventure to date—

reef, Henry offers a startling theory of a possible US government cover-up that challenges the idea that she died after her plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean. “This absolutely changes history,” says Henry, who led a team of investigators examining evidence, including plane parts found on the remote Mili Atoll consistent with the aircraft Earhart was flying. “I think we proved beyond a reasonable doubt that she survived her flight and was held prisoner by the Japanese on the island of Saipan, where she eventually died.”

The theory that the Japanese (who “may have believed [Earhart and Noonan] were American spies,” says Henry) were linked to the disappearance of the aviators is decades old. But it is the 2012 discovery of a blackand-white photograph by retired US Treasury Agent Les Kinney of two blurry images on a dock, believed to be Earhart and Noonan, that makes the story more plausible. Kinney’s undated photograph—which was apparently misfiled in the National Archives—was examined by digital forensic analyst Doug Carner. “I can say with more than 99.7 per cent confidence that the photo is authentic and untouched.”

After her disappearance, the government launched what was then the largest-ever sea and air search, but no trace of the fliers was found. (US vessels weren’t allowed into the Japanese-controlled Marshall Islands.) Henry believes that days after Earhart and Noonan crashed, they, along with the plane, were picked up by the Japanese military and taken roughly 320km to Jaluit Island, where their picture was snapped on the pier.

Forensic analyst Carner identified the ship in the photo as the Koshu Maru, a Japanese cargo vessel that supposedly transported the fliers nearly 2,897km to Saipan, where Henry’s team believe Earhart died in prison. Behind the ship on a barge was an object resembling an aeroplane that Carner calculated to be 11.5m long. Records show that Earhart’s Lockheed Electra measured 11.8m long.

Smithsonian aeronautics-department curator Dorothy Cochrane insists she has never seen “definitive evidence” that the pair survived. She calls the idea that they were taken prisoner by the Japanese “ridiculous” and says she is “not aware of any missing government records that could be a game changer.” (The Office of Naval Security did not respond to WHO’S request for comment.)

Henry acknowledges his team’s theory opens up countless questions. “It’s not clear why the US might want to cover up what happened to Amelia,” he says. “If, in fact, she was spying on the Japanese, the government may not have wanted the American public to know they put ‘America’s sweetheart’ in that situation and she was captured.”