Amelia Earhart Book.com | Amelia was captured by the Japanese

If Earhart did not go down at Howland Island

what did happen?

This woman, Josephine Blanco Akiyama, started an uproar in the aviation world when she claimed she saw two American flyers, a man and a woman on the island of Saipan in the year 1937. The descriptions fit Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan who, in the same year, had been lost under mysterious circumstances. Fred Goerner, a radio reporter for CBS news in San Francisco , picked up the story and tracked it down.

"One day in 1937 Josephine Akiyama had been riding her bicycle down the beach road on Saipan taking lunch to her brother-in-law, Jose Matsumoto, who worked for the Japanese at their secret seaplane base at Tanapag Harbor on the Western shore of the Island . As she neared the gate of the facility, she saw a large, two motored plane fly overhead and disappear in the vicinity of the harbor. A little while later when she reached the beach area, she found a large group of people gathered around the two white persons.

"At first she thought they were both men, but someone told her one was a woman. They were both thin and looked very tired," said Mrs. Akiyama. "The woman had short cut hair like a man, and she was dressed like a man. I think I remember the man had his head hurt in some way. I remembered the year because 1937 was the year I graduated from Japanese school. I was eleven years old."

"I asked her why she was sure they were American flyers. She answered, "That's what the people said and later the Japanese guards said it." The guards, according to Mrs. Akiyama, had taken the pair away, and later there was a rumor they had been executed by the Japanese. Her memory of the plane was hazy. She could remember seeing it in the water by the shoreline, but she could not recall if it was damaged or what happened to it after that day."

Fred Goerner's book, "The Search for Amelia Earhart"
pioneered a multitude of Amelia Earhart books. Elgen Long's book, "Amelia Earhat The Mystery Solved", caused a lot of attention, but the facts that were presented have not gained acceptance by several parties in the professional aviation community. Television specials have been done on the subject of Amelia Earhart crashing into the sea, and we are very respectful of the Nauticos - Elgen Long contribution to aviation history with their search. However, a crash into the sea dodges the real fact that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, did not crash into the sea and may indeed have been captured by the Japanese and executed as spies. There has never been any recovery of airplane parts or human remains of the Earhart flight. Over 70 years from the date of the disappearance, the probability of finding any meaningful evidence is nearly non-existent ... certainly not in 18,000 feet of ocean where the point of impact is a great unknown ... assuming the ocean was the point of impact. With the recognition of the post loss transmissions as being authentic (particularly the Nauru Island intercept) the "crashed and sank" theories of the Earhart disappearance have, more recently, begun to fall by the wayside. In the case of the Earhart flight, the known testimony and sightings point to Saipan and the Marshall Islands. If Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan went down at sea, no one ever saw it or witnessed what happened. Tom Devine is an ex-Army Sergeant Postal Worker from World War II who claims that he saw the Earhart plane. The discovery took place in an airplane hangar on the island of Saipan during World War II. Several others have made that claim including Earskin J. Nabers, the Marine code clerk who received and decoded the messages about the discovery of the plane, the plans to fly it and the plans to destroy it. Both Nabers and Devine claim they saw it destroyed. Arthur Nash, a captain in the Army Air Corps, said he saw "Amelia Earhart's airplane" outside a hanger very early on in the Saipan invasion.

These mysterious initials from Mike Campbell's book, "With Our Own Eyes," were found in a prison cell on the walls of the Japanese Jail, Garapan, Saipan, and were given to Tom Devine by William Grandt of Chicago. The symbols appearing next to the initials are Japanese and are believed to be crudely made lettering for the name “John” and the name “Mary” in Japanese. It was originally thought these letters referred to astrological and I-Ching symbols, but that has since been questioned by researchers. Today, at Garapan, the initials and the Japanese letters appears to have been written with a Japanese writing brush on the wall of one of the prison cells. The “AE” is not a character in either the Chinese writing or any of the three Japanese writings. Both words, especially "John," was misspelled, and they were written in a writing the Japanese reserve for foreign objects and people. There is evidence in the writing where the author made a mistake and backtracked trying to fix it.

His first book, With Our Own Eyes: Eyewitnesses to the Final Days of Amelia Earhart, written with Devine in 2002, presented the eyewitness accounts of more than two-dozen veterans of the Battle of Saipan that corroborated Devine's experience and firmly established the presence of Amelia Earhart, Fred Noonan and Electra NR 16020 on pre-war Saupan.

In 2005 he edited "The Atchison Report," which is an extensive debunking of the false Amelia Earhart-as-Irene Bolam theory. Campbell's second book, Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last, is scheduled for publication in Spring 2012 by Sunbury Press, presents many new findings and developments, including recently discovered eyewitness testimony and never-before-published correspondence from Fred Goerner that reveals the ongoing, institutionalized Earhart cover-up at the highest levels of the U.S. military establishment, and further establishes the fact that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan met their fate on Japanese-held Saipan in the years preceding Pearl Harbor.

From WWI to WWII the Japanese occupied Saipan and even taught the locals to speak and write Japanese. Those names could have been written by a local prisoner. But that adds other questions. The Japanese were not Christians and would never have those names. Before the Japanese occupied Saipan, Saipan was occupied by the Spanish who converted the locals to Christianity. Those names could have come from the Bible, however it would have been a spanish language Bible. The names would be “Maria” and “Juan,” common names for locals for that time. “Mary” and “John” would not have been used but “Maria” and “Juan” were common names. Perhaps “Maria” and “Juan” are better translations for those characters, and it may have been that two Saipan Christian natives, Maria and Juan, added their names and the initials ‘AE” on the wall of the Old Japanese prison at Saipan in memory of the events that happened there.

Picture Courtesy of Eric Johnson, Saipan

   Today, on the island of Saipan, Garapan, the Old Japanese jail is a tourist attraction. There are still natives there on the island who tell the old stories of seeing the white lady with the short haircut who was captured by the Japanese along with her navigator, Fred Noonan. The stories that they tell are that the two flyers were imprisoned by the Japanese at Garapan, and there they both died. Some of the stories are conflicting. For instance, you will hear stories that they were both beheaded by an executioner or that Fred Noonan tired of the food and threw it at the prison guards. In return, he was executed. There are stories that after Noonan was executed, Earhart died of dysentery. There are also stories that they were both executed by the firing squad. The remains have never been found. The missing airplane nor any piece of it has ever been found, and slowly, very slowly the only thing that is left is a legend ... a legend of the lost flight of Amelia Earhart.

    The prison in which Earhart was believed to have perished was infamous among the Saipanese as being a place of death. In the days of World War II anyone believed to be a spy was quickly executed. No trial. No one escaped.

    On the Island of Saipan today, there is a historian, Genevieve Cabrera, who has been fascinated since childhood by the Amelia Earhart enigma. She believes that the Japanese captured her and secretly brought Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan to Saipan to interrogate them. The Japanese, according to Cabrera, could not take the risk of drawing international attention to the disappearance of such a famous aviator. It would be logical to assume that they would have taken her to Japanese Headquarters. A pair of white strangers was a rare sight in 1937 Saipan. In the days before the attack at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese thought all Americans were spies.

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