Introduction:
The key to understanding the Amelia Earhart mystery is found by learning how the mystery began, and by realizing the questions about it that could not be answered.
With what should have been an ample fuel supply remaining, and while Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan were still safely airborne, officially, after Amelia gave her last line of position all radio contact with her was lost. For hours she’d been unable to receive transmissions leading up to that moment. Suddenly she was heard from no more, while safely airborne with plenty of fuel. She never said she was in any danger.
Amelia had told her good friend in Bureau of Air Commerce Chief, Gene Vidal how if she had trouble finding Howland Island, she would try until she had at least four hours of fuel remaining, thus enabling her to make it back to the Gilbert Islands. And while in flight, after her last line of position transmission that included her final words of “we are running north and south” was received about an hour after her initial approach to Howland, Earhart was heard from no more. The date was July 2, 1937.
Interesting to note here, the ‘unabridged’ radio log of Earhart’s last transmission includes her given line of position only, while nowhere did it record her to have said, “we are running north and south.” Indeed, an Australian O-2 US Intelligence dispatch in 1938 specified it heard Earhart say she was heading “north” only and she continued to be “heard at intervals, her signals becoming weaker each time received.” So with her given line of position as 337 degrees as her northern heading, a slight jog to her port side would have found the upper Gilberts or lower Marshalls, and four hours of fuel would have allowed her to make it.
It appeared essential, to someone at least, that Earhart’s last words needed to be left as a question mark. By adding “and south” to the word “north,” it left the public scratching its collective head saying to itself, “Well… which way did she end up going(?) for she could not have flown both ways….” Eventually she chose one direction only, and the case of ‘north’ having been it was fortified.
STILL… and once more, officially Earhart, Noonan, and their plane were not seen nor heard from again beyond the morning of July 2, 1937...after Earhart last gave her line of position at 8:44AM. Again, she was still safely airborne at the time, and top Lockheed experts who described Earhart’s plane as still carrying enough fuel for Earhart and Noonan to select another ground-fall option, only leads one to believe in such a thing as a strong possibility, if not the outright probability.
No matter, for even where various “Earhart survived beyond July 2, 1937” theories exist, it can be fairly stated where so, to this date no one authentically knows where Amelia was or what she was actually doing at anytime after July 2, 1937 and before the end of World War Two.
This also equates to how no one knew the spirit of Amelia Earhart in any other way, than how it had been recognized up until July 2, 1937.
The idea that Amelia survived at all beyond July 2, 1937 is met by an exact challenge to ‘prove it.’ And although some investigative researchers declared how her post July 2, 1937 survival has been sufficiently proven, official silence only greeted all takers, and it would always remain that way.
So in 1991 when former Seton Hall University President Monsignor James Francis Kelley spoke of a woman he knew quite well for many years until 1982 to have formerly been known as Amelia Earhart, and where such a woman’s face and full body appeared as head to toe congruent with Amelia’s face and full body, official silence greeted this too. The U. S. Government has never said ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to it as a reality. Rather, it has always elected to say nothing at all instead.
In the case of the Irene Craigmile Bolam who Joe A. Gervais met, recognized, and photographed in 1965... realize too how twenty-six years later in 1991, Monsignor Kelley was talking about the same Irene Craigmile Bolam Joe Gervais referred to, when he claimed her to have been the living ‘former’ Amelia Earhart, while it was well known by his own family and friends how Kelley had been her long time ‘dear friend’ who had served as her ‘confessor.’
In essence, beyond the forensic evidence and argument presenting the sound logic of it all, both the distinguished and smart minded gentlemen as Joe Gervais and Monsignor Kelley described the same Irene Craigmile Bolam person, who was only identified that way from 1945 to 1982, to have hands-down been the non-recognized former Amelia Earhart. And to this day… no one has ever disproved either of them.
Today there are several Earhart research scholars who strongly agree with such a historically non-accepted, albeit realistic equation, although official silence dodges their collective desire to learn the missing facts, that pertain to the former Amelia Earhart’s existence as it would have been between the dates of July 2, 1937 and VJ Day in August of 1945.
