Destination Saipan Was Amelia Earhart A Prisoner Of Imperial Japan? - Robert Grey Reynolds Jr.

Destination Saipan Was Amelia Earhart A Prisoner Of Imperial Japan?

By Robert Grey Reynolds Jr.

  • Release Date: 2014-05-07
  • Genre: Transportation

Description

American aviatrix Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished on July 2, 1937. The two fliers were flying in a Lockheed Electra Model 10E. They were flying on the next to the last leg of an around the world trip. Departing from Lae, New Guinea, Earhart's planned destination was tiny Howland Island in the South Pacific Ocean. In 1961 a reporter in San Francisco publicized his findings from a trip to Saipan in the northern Marshall Islands. The reporter, Fred Goerner, reported that an American army veteran, who was once stationed in Saipan, told him about several shallow graves on Saipan. The serviceman had been told by natives of the South Pacific island that the graves contained the remains of the lost American aviatrix and her navigator. I have taken some of Goerner's findings and expanded on them in my e-book. Most prominently I have included the eyewitness account of Josephine Blanco Akiyama, a Saipan native who said that she witnessed the crash of the Lockheed Electra 10E as a youth of 11 years of age. Readers can come to their own conclusions regarding the validity of Saipan as a probable crash location for Earhart and Noonan. If so, why did they fly so far off course? The Japanese had militarized Saipan before the beginning on World War II. Witnesses, including the still living, Akiyama, were encouraged to suppress any talk of what they had seen. Yet the mystery woman with a short hair cut who was dressed in a man's clothes, continued to be reported during and after the Second World War? Was she taken prisoner by Imperial Japan? Did she die on Saipan? What is the truth after so long?