Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence
Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence is a 2017 documentary broadcast by the US television network History that purported to have new evidence supporting the Japanese capture hypothesis of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan. Its main piece of evidence, a photograph purportedly showing the two still alive after their 1937 disappearance, was soon proven to have been published in 1935, and subsequent showings of the documentary were cancelled.
In 1937, famous aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan embarked upon a planned circumnavigation of the Earth via largely equatorial routes. Departing from Miami on June 1, Earhart and Noonan completed multiple legs of their journey without incident. They arrived at Lae, New Guinea on June 29. On July 2, the pair took off on the longest and most dangerous leg of the trip, from Lae to Howland Island, a tiny island in the Central Pacific. They never arrived, and a search effort was unable to locate the pair or their airplane, the Electra.
The "lost evidence" in question was a photograph found in the National Archives at College Park of Jaluit Atoll in the South Seas Mandate, the Japanese mandate for the Marshall Islands. The photograph includes two European-looking people. The documentary, through a forensic analyst who specialized in facial recognition, posited that it was "very likely" to be a picture of a captured Earhart and Noonan.[1] The Lost Evidence also says that a barge in the background might possibly contain a plane, and that plane might possibly have been the Electra.[2] The photograph was from the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and prepared for the 1944 invasion of the Marshall Islands during World War II. The documentary suggested that a ship seen in the background flying a Japanese flag might be the Kōshū Maru, a Japanese military naval vessel, that would have been involved in transporting the captives. It suggests that perhaps the Kōshū Maru transported them to Saipan, where they died in custody. The documentary also cited existing evidence for the Japanese capture hypothesis, such as locals who claimed to have witnessed a plane crash at Mili Atoll.[3] It also suggested that the US government might have known about the capture and covered this knowledge up.[2]
Two days after publication of The Lost Evidence, Japanese historian and blogger Kota Yamano investigated the issue, and published a blog entry that showed the original source of the photograph that the ONI had used: a travel book The Lifeline of the Sea: My South Sea Memoir (海の生命線 我が南洋の姿, Umi no seimeisen : Waga nannyou no sugata), which was first published in 1935.[4][5] Earhart and Noonan's final flight was in 1937, so a 1935 photo would be unrelated to Earhart and Noonan's disappearance. In an interview with The Guardian, Yamano criticized the work behind the documentary, saying "I find it strange that the documentary makers didn't confirm the date of the photograph or the publication in which it originally appeared. That's the first thing they should have done."[6] Yamano also said that it only took thirty minutes of searching to find the source.[6] On Twitter, Yamano (as @baron_yamaneko) identified the ship in the right of the photo as a different ship called Kōshū seized by Allied Japanese forces in World War I from the German Empire and not the Kōshū Maru of the Japanese navy.[7][8]
