Documentary claimed photo showed aviator on Japanese-held Marshall Islands in 1937, but image was found in book published two years earlier
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[The woman said to resemble pilot Amelia Earhart is seen sitting on the dock in the centre of the picture. Photograph: Reuters]
Claims made in a US documentary that the pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart crash-landed on the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean and was taken prisoner by the Japanese appear to have been proved false by a
photograph unearthed in a travel book.
The History Channel documentary, Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence, which aired in the US on Sunday, made the claim that the American and her navigator, Fred Noonan, ended up in Japanese custody based on a photograph discovered in the US national archives that purported to show them standing at a harbour on one of the islands.
The film said the image “may hold the key to solving one of history’s all-time greatest mysteries” and suggested it disproved the widely accepted theory that Earhart and Noonan disappeared over the western Pacific on 2 July 1937 near the end of their attempt at a history-making flight around the world.
But serious doubts now surround the film’s premise after a Tokyo-based blogger unearthed the same photograph in the archives of the National Diet Library, Japan’s national library.
The image was part of a
Japanese-language travelogue about the South Seas that was published almost two years before Earhart disappeared. Page 113 states the book was
published in Japanese-held Palau on 10 October 1935.
The caption beneath the image makes no mention of the identities of the people in the photograph. It describes maritime activity at the harbour on Jabor in the Jaluit atoll – the headquarters for Japan’s administration of the Marshall Islands between the first world war and its defeat in the second world war.
The caption notes that monthly races between schooners belonging to local tribal leaders and other vessels turned the port into a “bustling spectacle”.
Kota Yamano,
a military history blogger who unearthed the Japanese photograph, said it took him just 30 minutes to effectively debunk the documentary’s central claim.
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[Amelia Earhart with her navigator, Captain Fred Noonan, in the hangar at Parnamerim airfield, Natal, Brazil, 11 June 1937. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images]
“I have never believed the theory that Earhart was captured by the Japanese military, so I decided to find out for myself,” Yamano told the Guardian. “I was sure that the same photo must be on record in Japan.”
Yamano ran an online search using the keyword “Jaluit atoll” and a decade-long timeframe starting in 1930.
“The photo was the 10th item that came up,” he said. “I was really happy when I saw it. 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.”
Yamano’s
Twitter post fuelled social media discussion of the possible cause of Earhart’s disappearance and
criticism of the History Channel documentary.
The photograph shows a woman with her back to the camera, whom the film suggests is Earhart, alongside a man – purportedly Noonan – whose face is visible, with other people standing on a dock on Jaluit atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Earhart and Noonan were last seen taking off in her twin-engine Lockheed Electra on 2 July 1937, from Papua New Guinea en route to Howland Island, about 2,500 miles away.
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