Earhart vanished from sight, not ears
Researchers: Dozens heard pilot’s final radio pleas for help
But those radio messages form a historical record — evidence that Gillespie says runs counter to the U.S. Navy’s official conclusion that Earhart and Noonan died shortly after crashing into the Pacific Ocean.
“These active versus silent periods, and the fact that the message changes on July 5 and starts being worried about water and then is consistently worried about water after that — there’s a story there,” Gillespie said.
“We’re feeding it to the public in bite-sized chunks. I’m hoping that people will smack their foreheads like I did.”
Some of Earhart’s final messages were heard by members of the military and others looking for Earhart, Gillespie said. Others caught the attention of people who just happened to be listening to their radios when they stumbled across random pleas for help.
Almost all of those messages were discounted by the U.S. Navy, which concluded that Earhart’s plane went down somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, then sank to the seabed.
Gillespie has been trying to debunk that finding for three decades. He believes Earhart spent her final days on then-uninhabited Gardner Island. She may have been injured, Noonan was probably worse, but the crash wasn’t the end of them.
On July 2, 1937, just after Earhart’s plane disappeared, the U.S. Navy put out an “all ships, all stations” bulletin, TIGHAR wrote. Authorities asked anyone with a radio and a trained ear to listen in to the frequencies she had been using on her trip, 3105 and 6210 kilohertz.
It was not an easy task. The Electra’s radio was designed to communicate only within a few hundred miles. The Pacific Ocean is much bigger.
The searchers listening to Earhart’s frequencies heard a carrier wave, which indicated that someone was speaking, but most heard nothing more than that. Others heard what they interpreted to be a crude attempt at Morse code.
But thanks to the scientific principle of harmonics, TIGHAR says, others heard much more. In addition to the primary frequencies, “the transmitter also put out ‘harmonics (multiples)’ of those wavelengths,” the paper says. “High harmonic frequencies ‘skip’ off the ionosphere and can carry great distances, but clear reception is unpredictable.”
That means Earhart’s cries for help were heard by people who just happened to be listening to their radios at the right time.
According to TIGHAR’s paper:
“Scattered across North America and unknown to each other, each listener was astonished to suddenly hear Amelia Earhart pleading for help. They alerted family members, local authorities or local newspapers. Some were investigated by government authorities and found to be believable. Others were dismissed at the time and only recognized many years later. Although few in number, the harmonic receptions provide an important glimpse into the desperate scene that played out on the reef at Gardner Island.”
On July 3, Nina Paxton, a woman in Ashland, Ky., said she heard Earhart say “KHAQQ calling,” and that she was “on or near little island at a point near” ... then she said something about a storm and that the wind was blowing.
“Will have to get out of here,” Earhart says at one point. “We can’t stay here long.”
What happened to Earhart after that has vexed the world for nearly 81 years, and TIGHAR is not the only group to try to explain the mystery.
Gillespie is just one member of competing researchers who have dedicated their time and resources to one of aviation’s greatest mysteries.
Mike Campbell, a retired journalist who wrote “Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last,” insists along with others that Earhart and Noonan were captured in the Marshall Islands by the Japanese, who thought they were American spies, and died in Japanese custody after being tortured.
Elgen Long, a Navy combat veteran and an expert on Earhart’s disappearance, wrote a book saying her plane crashed into the Pacific and sank.
Gillespie said he believes that evidence supporting his Gardner Island theory is adding up. He believes that the messages sent out over those six days were by Earhart and, occasionally, Noonan. He believes that bones found on Gardner island in 1940 belonged to Earhart but were misidentified and discarded. He believes Earhart died marooned on an island after her plane was sucked into the Pacific Ocean.
But he realizes that the public needs more than his tide tables and extrapolations from data that predates World War II.
“We’re up against a public that wants a smoking gun,” he said. “We know the public wants, demands, something simple. And we’re also very much aware that we live in a time of rampant science denial. Nobody does nuance anymore.”