Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan survived a landing in the Marshall Islands on July 2, 1937, only to be imprisoned by the Japanese, says a new History Channel documentary. According to investigators interviewed by the History Channel, former FBI Executive Assistant Director Shawn Henry and former U.S. Treasury Agent Les Kinney, a newly uncovered photo shows Earhart sitting on the edge of a dock, surrounded by Japanese, with Noonan a few feet away. In the background of the National Archives photo, a Japanese military ship, Koshu Maru, is towing a barge with an object appropriately sized to be the fuselage of the missing Lockheed Electra. The formerly classified photo is credited to a U.S. spy operating in the Japanese-held archipelago following the Japanese invasion of China.
The “Marshall Islands” theory is not a new one, and is partly corroborated by the accounts of witnesses who claim to have either seen a plane crash in the Marshall Islands or the execution of Earhart and Noonan on the Island of Saipan. The two-hour special, “Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence,” airs Sunday, July 9 at 9 p.m.
