Amelia Earhart

As Gregory McNamee reminds us at the Britannica blog for 07/02/07, today is the 70th anniversary of The Disappearance of Amelia Earhart. He summarizes her legendary disappearance and some of the theories people have come up with about it:

A few hours before they were scheduled to land, Earhart radioed ahead and reported that she was flying into a storm whose extent she did not know. That was the last anyone heard from her.

Conspiratorially minded scholars have advanced several theories concerning Amelia Earhart’s disappearance. Some suggest that her trip was a front for espionage: she had been photographing Japanese military installations and ship movements and had been taken prisoner, held on the island of Saipan, and then executed. Others agree that she was a prisoner, but that she was confined within Emperor Hirohito’s palace in Tokyo. After the war, according to one book, she wound up living in Bedford Village, New York, under the name Irene Bolam, whose name “appeared to be a code which spelled out in degrees and minutes of latitude and longitude the precise location of a tropical beach where Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan crashed after being shot down.” (Asked about that, the real Irene Bolam said that she was not Amelia, then sued the authors.) Still others hold that the disappearance was staged, either to afford the U.S. Navy an excuse to poke around some of those distant islands or to give Earhart the chance to retire; by some accounts, she lived under a pseudonym in Chicago for many years. And still others argue that Earhart and Noonan survived the crash and found shelter on an uninhabited atoll, where, it is variously said, they died of exposure, thirst, or food poisoning.

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