Amelia Earhart's Lost Broadcasts

It was early July of 1937 when Betty Klenck was cruising channels on her short-wave radio in St. Petersburg, Florida. Fifteen years old, Betty was in the habit of switching between music channels and short-wave messaging to pass the time while she wrote and drew in her journal.

The AM radio of the day broadcast a boundless supply of lyrical and big band recordings, with Billie Holiday and Bing Crosby on repeat as well as the ubiquitous hit of the month, "It Looks Like Rain in Cherry Blossom Lane" by Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians.

Betty was extremely interested in aviation, which explains her use of the short-wave radio in conjunction with the musical AM radio waves. Between the hits, she’d turn the dial and pick up messages between air crews, weather stations and foreign news outlets. Only two years from the outbreak of WWII, tensions between European states made for interesting op-eds.

At about three o’clock in the afternoon of that particular day, the agitated voice of a woman broke through on the short-wave radio as Betty doodled in her notebook. It said, and repeated, “This is Amelia Earhart. Help me.”.

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It was still the early days of aviation, just 34 years after the very first recorded flights by Orville and Wilbur Wright in North Carolina. Airplanes varied greatly in design as enthusiasts and random engineers tried to work out the best way to capitalize on that initial prototype and pair it with one, two or more engines. Earhart wasn’t the first female to learn to fly, but she became the face of women in aviation thanks to the tireless marketing efforts of her husband, George Putnam.

Amelia’s first major claim to fame as the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane was nothing more than a publicity stunt – though a reasonably experienced terrestrial pilot, she was merely a passenger during that particular crossing, which was piloted by Wilmer Stultz.

During her own attempt to properly fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932, Earhart piloted a bright red Lockheed Vega from Newfoundland toward Paris. Fate had other ideas. Barely a quarter of the way across the ocean, the aircraft sprang a fuel leak. Flames suddenly erupted from the exhaust manifold outside the cockpit, illuminating the engine in the darkness.
"I saw flames shooting from the manifold," she later explained. "For a time, I was convinced the plane was on fire."

Then came something even stranger. Ice rapidly coated the wings, forcing the aircraft into violent, uncontrolled descents. One dive was so severe that Earhart later admitted she briefly lost all sense of orientation.

"There were moments," she recalled, "when I was not even sure whether I was right side up." A fellow pilot would later tell her that one or two more drops like that, and she’d have ended up in the ocean.

The altimeter spun wildly. Instruments froze. The Vega shook under the weight of accumulating ice while the Atlantic waited below. Instead of turning back, Earhart fought the aircraft for nearly fifteen hours before finally abandoning her original destination and landing in a farmer's pasture near Londonderry, Northern Ireland. She became the first woman—and only the second person after Charles Lindbergh—to fly solo across the Atlantic.

The flight transformed her from a celebrated aviator into an international icon. Newspapers portrayed her as fearless, but Earhart herself was far more pragmatic. "Courage," she once observed, "is the price that life exacts for granting peace."

Five years later, as she and Fred Noonan searched desperately for an island barely visible above the Pacific, she had every reason to believe she could survive another impossible situation.

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Just a few days before Betty overheard those crucial radio messages in Florida, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had departed Lae, New Guinea, aboard a gleaming twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10E. Their destination was a speck of coral in the middle of the Pacific called Howland Island—a flat strip of land barely two and a half kilometres long and less than a kilometre wide. It was one of the most difficult navigational challenges of the entire journey.

The flight itself was part of an extraordinary ambition. Earhart, already one of the most celebrated women in the world, was attempting to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe following a route close to the equator. She had already flown more than 35,000 kilometres across South America, Africa, India and Southeast Asia. Only about 11,000 kilometres remained.

With her was Fred Noonan, one of the most experienced aerial navigators of his generation. Before joining Earhart, Noonan had charted routes for Pan American Airways across the Pacific, guiding flying boats over vast stretches of empty ocean years before GPS, radar or satellite navigation existed. He relied on celestial navigation—using the stars, the Sun and precise calculations made with a sextant. But celestial navigation only worked when the sky cooperated.

As dawn broke over the Pacific on 2 July 1937, the weather deteriorated. Clouds obscured much of the sky. Rain squalls rolled across the horizon. Every mile they flew reduced their fuel reserves while making their position increasingly uncertain.
Waiting for them near tiny Howland Island was the United States Coast Guard cutter Itasca. The ship had been stationed there specifically to guide Earhart to the island by radio and smoke signals. Its crew generated thick columns of black smoke that could be seen for kilometres and maintained continuous radio watches, hoping to establish contact.

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The communication that followed has become one of history's most famous conversations.

Throughout the morning, Earhart's voice drifted in and out over the airwaves. She repeatedly reported that she could hear Itasca, but the ship could not obtain accurate radio bearings from her aircraft. The two parties were, quite literally, talking past one another.

Before the flight, there had been confusion over which radio frequencies would be used for voice communication and which would be used for radio direction finding. Itasca expected Earhart to transmit long enough on agreed frequencies for its direction-finding equipment to establish her bearing. Earhart, meanwhile, believed the ship should simply guide her by voice.

Compounding the problem, her trailing wire antenna—used for lower frequencies—had been removed earlier in the expedition after being damaged, limiting her radio capabilities. She also appears either not to have understood, or not to have been able to use, the radio direction-finding procedures available to her. Some historians believe she may have been unable to receive on the frequency Itasca was using to transmit Morse code bearings. Others suggest her receiver settings were simply incorrect.

The result was that Earhart could hear the Coast Guard cutter well enough to know it was nearby. The crew aboard Itasca could hear her increasingly anxious voice with remarkable clarity. Yet neither side could determine where the other actually was. Every failed transmission burned more fuel, and every passing minute widened the search area over an ocean that offered almost no visual landmarks.

Then came the transmission almost everyone has heard: "We are on the line one-five-seven, three-three-seven."

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It was a navigational position line—a calculation that placed the aircraft somewhere along a northwest-to-southeast line crossing the Pacific. Without knowing exactly where they were on that line, however, it was of limited use. Earhart added that they were running north and south along it, searching desperately for the island.

Then...silence. That was the last time the ship’s crew heard from the Electra.

Despite one of the largest search operations ever mounted in peacetime, involving nine ships and sixty-six aircraft over more than 650,000 square kilometres of ocean, no trace of Earhart, Noonan or the Lockheed Electra was found.

For decades, historians considered the mystery effectively solved. The prevailing theory held that the aircraft had exhausted its fuel, fell into the Pacific and sunk into waters more than five thousand metres deep.

In adulthood, Betty could no longer remember whether she already knew that the famous American pilot had missed her connection at Howland Island during her journey around the equator. What she never forgot was the shock at hearing that name repeated on the radio in her home, and the subsequent hours of frantic broadcasts that ultimately ended early that same evening.
Fortunately, Betty had done something few people would have thought to do.

As the desperate conversation unfolded, she began taking notes.

The pages record fragments of a woman who sounded increasingly exhausted and frightened.

"My head hurts..."

"Water's knee deep..."

"My navigator is badly hurt..."

At one point, Betty recalled hearing what sounded like a man's weak voice in the background before Amelia abruptly shouted at him to remain calm. Other passages mention rising water, aircraft balance and repeated pleas for help.

For decades, many dismissed Betty's story as the vivid imagination of a teenager seeking attention. But Betty never sought publicity. In fact, she tucked the notebook away for years before eventually donating it to researchers.

What made her account remarkable was not simply its detail, but that it was far from unique.

In the days following Earhart's disappearance, radio operators across the Pacific—and far beyond—reported hearing distress calls. The U.S. Navy, commercial radio stations, amateur "ham" operators, and ordinary civilians all claimed to intercept transmissions from the missing Electra.

In total, historians have documented more than 120 separate reports.

Most can be discarded immediately. Some were obvious hoaxes. Others were wishful thinking or radio interference.
But when researchers from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery—better known as TIGHAR—systematically examined every report decades later, they reached an unexpected conclusion.

Several dozen transmissions appeared technically credible.

Perhaps a little less credible were the myriad conspiracy theories surrounding the famous pilot’s disappearance at the time.
Almost immediately after her disappearance, another theory began to circulate. It claimed that Earhart and Fred Noonan had drifted far off course, landed in the Marshall Islands—then under Japanese control—and were captured as spies.

The story grew with every passing decade.

Some witnesses claimed they had seen a tall American woman in custody on Saipan. Others insisted they had watched a twin-engine aircraft being unloaded from a Japanese ship. During the Second World War, American servicemen stationed on Saipan heard local stories of a foreign woman pilot who had died in captivity years earlier.

Like all enduring legends, the details changed depending on who was telling them.

Some claimed Earhart had been executed.

Others believed she survived the war and quietly returned to the United States under an assumed identity.

Perhaps the strangest version of all involved one of the most recognizable voices of the Second World War: "Tokyo Rose."

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Tokyo Rose was never a single person. The name was coined by Allied servicemen to describe several English-speaking women who broadcast Japanese propaganda over the radio. The best-known of these broadcasters was Iva Toguri D'Aquino, an American citizen stranded in Japan after the outbreak of war.
Her broadcasts often opened with tongue-in-cheek greetings.

"Hello, you fighting orphans of the Pacific. How's tricks?"

Or, with a wink that many American servicemen recognized as more humorous than threatening:
"Greetings everybody! This is your Number One Enemy... your favourite playmate, Orphan Ann... the little sunbeam whose throat you'd like to cut!"

She affectionately mocked her audience, referring to them as: "My favourite family of boneheads, the fighting G.I.s in the blue Pacific."

Between Glenn Miller records, Boston Pops performances and jazz music familiar to American troops, she'd joke,
"Boy, oh boy, it stirs your memories, doesn't it? Or haven't you boneheads any memories to stir?"

To thousands of servicemen, the voices became instantly recognizable, and the belief that Amelia Earhart herself was speaking very popular theory during the forties. The story spread so widely that George Putnam—Earhart's husband—was asked by American authorities to listen to intercepted Japanese broadcasts. He did listen. And he said it wasn’t her.

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The disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan triggered one of the largest and most expensive search efforts in aviation history up to that point. Yet despite the involvement of some of the most advanced military resources of the 1930s, the official search ended without a single confirmed piece of wreckage, leaving behind one of the greatest mysteries of the twentieth century.

After Earhart’s final confirmed radio transmission on the morning of July 2, 1937, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca began searching the waters around Howland Island. The U.S. Navy quickly joined the effort, deploying ships and aircraft across a vast area of the central Pacific. The battleship USS Colorado and its aircraft played a major role, flying reconnaissance missions over hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean.

As the days passed, hope remained that Earhart and Noonan had survived and were stranded somewhere. Reports of possible radio distress calls — including those from civilians such as Betty Klenck and other shortwave listeners — encouraged some to believe that the missing aviators might still be alive. However, no military station was able to confirm these signals, and no reliable location could be established.

The search eventually expanded beyond Howland Island. Navy aircraft and ships investigated possible sightings and explored nearby island groups, including areas around the Phoenix Islands. On July 9, 1937, one of the largest aerial searches took place when aircraft from the USS Colorado surveyed parts of the Phoenix Islands, including Gardner Island (now Nikumaroro), but they found no clear sign of the Electra or its occupants.

On July 18, 1937, the U.S. Navy officially ended its search operations. The Navy had spent approximately $4 million on the effort — an enormous sum at the time — and had searched more than 250,000 square miles of ocean. The Coast Guard continued some limited efforts, but the large-scale military operation was over.

A private search funded by Earhart’s husband, George Palmer Putnam, continued briefly afterward, but it also failed to locate any evidence. On January 5, 1939, Amelia Earhart was officially declared legally dead, although the circumstances of her disappearance remained unresolved.

People are still looking.There have been bones and a skull removed from one of the small islands in the vicinity; fragments of what may have been a jar of face cream; relentless inspection of salvage photographs and real-life experiments on the potential trajectory of those 1937 radio broadcasts. Formally, we have no satisfactory answer.

Amy Otis Earhart, Amelia Earhart’s niece, said that her mother never accepted the idea that Amelia survived on an island or was captured, but instead believed the simplest explanation: that Amelia and Fred Noonan went down in the Pacific Ocean and were never found.

The evidence adds up.

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