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September 3, 2025 19 mins

George Noory and psychic medium Rich Martini explore his research into the disappearance of aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart during her attempt to fly around the world, his belief in a coverup of her survival on a small island, and how he was able to channel messages from her from the other side.

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Ben Welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Rich Martini Beck with US Award winning filmmaker, best selling author,
including books She Was Never Lost, the Amelia Earhart Saga.
After his close friend died in his arms and then
came to visit him and members of his family. He's
been writing about how it's possible to continue a conversation

(00:26):
with the afterlife and someone who is on the other side. Rich,
welcome back, my friend. Hi've you been.

Speaker 3 (00:31):
I've been great, Georgia. What a treat to hear your
voice and to be on your show. It's just fantastic.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
You're one of the good guys.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
My friend. Well, you know, I realized the other day
September eleventh, twenty twelve, was the first time I appeared
talking to you, and it's been a real delight every
time I've been on. All I can say is you're
an icon.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
I love your cover She Was Never Lost.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
Yeah, I listen. I was really about, you know, what
to call this new book, because of course, people have
been telling her story for you know, god knows how
many years, but the idea was to challenge people when
they saw the cover she was never lost, because you
can't be lost if you know where you are. And

(01:18):
that's been the issue all along, where people haven't really
looked at her point of view. What happened to her?
And is it possible that we can find out by
asking people that saw her? Can we ask people who
knew her? Can we look at like detailed records, and
can we ask her directly? That's that's the conundrum. And

(01:42):
what I found, as you know, George, what I found
is that if we try really hard, we can ask
questions to people on the other side and get answers.
But even then we have to then research the answers
and see how accurate they are. So I go ahead.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
Why did you get in interested in her?

Speaker 3 (02:02):
That's a great question, George. It was so many years
ago that a friend of mine wrote me a letter
after my second feature film, Limit Up, and she said,
you should do a movie about Emelia Earhart. No one
had at the point a point in time, so I
researched it and this girl came out. Abby Adams, my
old pal, and we wrote a screenplay in a weekend

(02:24):
and on Monday I was told that Diane Keaton was
going to make the movie, and I was in shock
because I hadn't even checked for typos. But then, of
course his Hollywood works. By the end of the week,
Diane Keaton hired another writer and they had kicked us
to the curb. And so I had gotten interested in
the story, and it just kept coming back over the years,

(02:45):
and eventually it was one of these things where I
was working on a movie in New York City with
Bill Noys and Angelina Joe Lee movie called Salt. A
Friend of Mine, Yeah, remember that, the spy thriller. Friend
of Mine introduced me to a medium named Patty Kenova.
She is known as the Medium to the mob she

(03:06):
was in those days, and I read her treatment. It
was very interesting and I gave her some notes and
after the reading, she said, I'd love to do a
Tarot card reading with you. And I said, look, I
don't believe in that stuff, so you don't really need
to and she said, no, it's what I do. So
she took got a regular deck of cards, flipped some
over and she said, you're writing a movie about a

(03:28):
female pilot, is it? Amelia air Hurt? And I looked
at my friend who had brought her to the table.
Like you know, when a magician does a trick, you
can't quite believe how could she possibly have known that?
And then what I decided to do is instead of
arguing of myself that it wasn't possible, I decided to
ask her questions. And she gave me such detailed information

(03:50):
that was very close to the research I had done,
and in fact it was more information. And then some
years later I ran into doctor at Least med who's
you know her, She's been on the show and she
was working with Jamie Butler, and she told me about
her work where she was talking to her son in
the afterlife interviewing people. And I said, oh, you should

(04:11):
interview Amelia Earhart and doctor Medow said, we're talking to
her on Tuesday. So I said, can I look at
you questions? And she had, you know, the Wikipedia questions,
you know where you lost at sea and blah blah blah,
And I said, do you mind if I supply the question?
So I supplied questions based on what Patty Kenoba told
me that she was the love of her life was

(04:31):
a woman and that it was a painter and other
details and so In that interview, I was not in
the room. Jamie Butler was talking to Amelia, and all
of the things that I asked Amelia answered. But when
I got to the point of what happened to you?
Where did you die or how did you die? Amelia's
answer was, I don't really want to talk about that

(04:53):
right now, but if the person who asked wrote this
question wants to speak to me, I'll do that now.
I wasn't really paying attention to the answer until I
did a transcript and I wrote it down and I realized,
oh my gosh, she's talking about me. And then it
was some years later that I met Jennifer Schaeffer, you know,
the medium that works in Manhattan Beach. They're doing a

(05:15):
series about her now and she and I met up
just casually. But at first I said to her, look,
I don't understand mediumship. I don't know what that is.
And she said, well, I helped law enforcement with missing
person cases, ding and my head a bell went off
and said, how'd you like to work on the most
famous missing person case in history? I didn't say who

(05:38):
it was, took my cameras over to her office, and
for three hours I spoke to somebody who knew as
much as I did after thirty years of research, which
included details which included the stuff that Patty Canova had said,
which included the stuff that Jamie Butler had said, including
where she died, how she died. I had just come

(06:00):
back from Saipan, and she confirmed all the details that
I had already gathered. That she had landed the plane
in Miliatoll, that she had been arrested by the Japanese,
that she had been taken to Sipan, which was the
military headquarters. She was incarcerated there. But the shocking thing
that came out of that conversation was to learn that

(06:21):
she survived seven years. And while I was on Sidpan,
I had interviewed a couple of guys who had seen
her on the back of a truck in May of
nineteen forty four, along with two American pilots who have
been shot down. Those American pilots are part of a
historical record. They were executed and their bodies were exhumed.

(06:42):
But she was on this truck with those two guys,
and people on Saipan had seen her on that truck
in May of nineteen forty four, So That was the
big question I had for Amelia. You survived all that time,
and not only did she tell us that, she revealed
where she her body was buried and where Catholic nuns

(07:04):
had moved her body to another place on the island,
you know. And it was fascinating because I knew that
that historical record, Fred Gerner had written about these two
gis who had dug up her body. That's the way
it was put back in nineteen sixty five. He wrote
about that. And while I'm talking to Emilia, she Jennifer

(07:26):
Schaeffer says to me, she says, those guys, when they
dug up my body, they only found an arm. I
didn't know that, and it took me six months to
find that those that is what those guys had said.
But here's the odd, you know, everything's odd. When I
got to the end of the conversation, my phone rang
and it was an ANTSB investigator from Seattle telling me

(07:48):
he had just looked over a private investigator's details and
research and he said, Rich, everything you told me about
Earhart's in there, he said, except when they dug up
her body, they only found an And I had just
heard that from Amelia herself. So since then and that
was it some years ago. And since then, Jennifer and

(08:09):
I have been doing a podcast. We meet together once
a week for the past ten years, talking to people
off stage, and Amelia has shown up many times, and
sometimes she brings people with her to the conversation. For example,
she said, I'm here with a movie producer, and I said,
is it Carl Lemley. People don't know that Carl Lemley

(08:33):
was the guy who founded Universal Pictures. He hired Amelia
to write a movie Alogan Mary Pickford, and he told her,
if you take this last flight, you know your movie career.
Is that going to happen? Which was true. But he
hired her to write the movie. And I have some
of the script because George Putnam published it years later.
But here was Carl Lemley talking to me about what

(08:57):
it was like for him. He died in nineteen thirty nine.
He was talking about what it was like in the afterlife.
He talks about being able to fly at the speed
of thought, of being able to travel to other dimensions
and realms. He said, when people get bored doing all
the amazing things you can do over here, that's when
they decided to reincarnate, which I thought was an unusual

(09:18):
way to put it.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
She was born in eighteen ninety seven. I couldn't remember
how long ago that was for her.

Speaker 3 (09:26):
Yeah. Well, and you know, if you think about you
think about this as time march is on you and I.
We both know. As I get older, I start to realize, oh,
you know, my parents are born in the twenties, okay,
and then Amelia was born in the eighteen nineties, and
it goes back, and we sort of have this idea
of time being so out of step with who we are.

(09:48):
But in the research, what I find is that twenty
five years on earth feels like five or ten minutes
to people off stage, people on the flip side. So
for us to talk about Amelia, who disappeared in nineteen
thirty seven and passed away from dysentery in nineteen forty four,
we think of that as a long time ago for her.

(10:11):
It feels like it was let's say, an hour ago
or a couple hours ago.

Speaker 2 (10:16):
Why did they keep her rich? Why didn't they let
her go?

Speaker 3 (10:20):
Well, i'll tell you the two of them. When they
were when they came down a miliotoll, they were arrested
they were treated for wounds and then they were transported,
both her and Fred Nonan the navigator, and Fred, according
to eyewitnesses, was executed by the Japanese. According to our

(10:41):
interview with Fred, sorry to make them laugh about that,
but on our interview with Fred, he said he was
executed because he was the one who told the Japanese
he was the spy, and he took the fall for
Amelia because they were looking for somebody spying, and so
he sacrificed himself. He died and he was cremated and

(11:03):
his ashes were put in the ground, and they kept
Amelia as a playing card because they thought they could
use her at some point in the future. It's just
as time marched on. Seven years went by. That wasn't
that wasn't able to happen. You know. It's fascinating because
George Putnam, her husband, he had her declared dead in
nineteen thirty seven, and then years later in nineteen forty four,

(11:26):
when he was in the Army Air Corps, he put
in for a leave when he was stationed on Tinian,
which is right next to Sidepan, and he went to
Sidepan for two weeks and he drove around asking questions
about her. And this was just literally months after she
passed away, so it was go ahead.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
Did Roosevelt know she was still alive?

Speaker 3 (11:47):
You know? That's now? How do I know that question?
It's because I asked him on the flip side, you know,
we had we had a conversation with him. He said
from the flip side that he was not aware of it.
They didn't tell him that she had been captured. He
wasn't aware of it until later, So I think he
meant before he passed away. It was eleanor his wife,

(12:10):
who was adamant about finding out what happened to her,
And what she learned is that the men that were
in charge of her entire mission felt she was expendable,
meaning it wasn't that big of a deal that a
pilot gets lost when you're dealing with World War Two,
and the fact that she had been found. They found

(12:30):
her plane in July of nineteen forty four, and I
interviewed the marine who decoded the message. I interviewed the
marine who guarded that plane. I interviewed the marine who
found her briefcase and passport. They did what they did
was they held out of the plane for two or
three weeks they actually flew it and then they destroyed it.
And there's other marines who've seen that, who were there

(12:52):
witness it. That's all in the book. These are all
people who saw the US military destroy the plane. People
always ask me why would they do that, And the
answer is, you're in the middle of a war. If
you have to stop to argue or talk about what
she was doing there, that's a problem. And so instead
of of revealing that she was there, they just destroyed

(13:14):
the plane. However, it was pushed off the runway with
all the other planes, and the steel frame from the
Electra is there and buried there. And I've seen the
spot where it's buried. And as I mentioned, the NTSP
guy Jim Hayton said to me, if you go back
there with round training radar, you'll be able to measure
the steel and it's an exact measurement her frame, So

(13:38):
it wouldn't be that hard to.

Speaker 2 (13:39):
Find what caused your plane to go down?

Speaker 3 (13:42):
Rich it was. It was that she was running out
of fuel. So here was an issue with Amelia. In
one of her foibles, she was constantly drifting off her course.
She did that in Burbank with Paul Mantz when she
first flew the electric two hundred fifty miles. Then she
did that while she was flying. Actually, when she flew

(14:05):
across the Atlantic, she was supposed to go to Paris
and she wound up in Ireland. But also with on
the around the World trip, she was two hundred and
fifty miles off her course when she realized I think
it was in Karachi they were trying to land, so
she constantly did that. So when she was flying to
Howland Island, I don't think she realized she was two
hundred fifty miles northwest of where she was supposed to be.

(14:28):
So when she turned to go to Gardner Island, which
was the backup plan, she instead went two hundred fifty
miles northwest of Gardner Island, which is Miliatole, and that's
where she brought the plane down. She looked for a
place to land, and she did one of the most
amazing feats in aviation history. She landed that plane on
a coral reef and it tore up the fuselage. And

(14:52):
Dick spink His unless Kinney have both been to that
island and retrieved pieces of the Electra Wow that have
been verified by Jim Hayten. This into sp guy up
in Seattle. I've filmed him like showing me where the
pieces that they found fit on her engine, because he
had an exact replica. So those things are known facts.

(15:17):
They're not coming from the flip side. What I do
when I talk to people on the flip side is
I have them verify is this right or is this wrong?
Or tell me how can I learn more about it?
And that's how this book came about.

Speaker 2 (15:30):
Now, when you say she was buried and they found
an arm, what happened to the rest of the body.

Speaker 3 (15:37):
It's a great question because you know in all these
stories about Henson and Burke, these two gis digging up
her body. They go, they were there digging up fred
and Amelia Well in the UPI report in nineteen seventy
seven Chicago Tribune and they said, oh, you know, by
the way, we only found an arm, a partial rib cage,
and a canister of ash ashes. Those ashes were friends.

(16:00):
The partial rib cage and an arm were Amelias. What
happened was Catholic nuns who took care of her when
she was dying. They knew the Japanese had buried her
in a pit, and so they moved her to an
appropriate place, which in the book shows where that place is.
It's right next to the Catholic Cemetery. It wasn't marked,

(16:21):
but I've marked it now. So if somebody wants to
go there and dig up her skull and the rest
of her bones, She's agreed that that's something that someone
could do, and it'll prove exactly what I'm saying, that
her body's still there, her plane is still there, and
she still exists because I got all this information from

(16:44):
her off stage. Amazing.

Speaker 2 (16:47):
Would DNA work?

Speaker 3 (16:50):
Yeah? I think so. But of course we have teeth,
you know, you can there, you know, dental records, there's
all that stuff, and I'm sure there's other stuff to
figure out. I mean, you know, I'm not a forensic guy,
by the way. I it was Tom Divine dug up
a bone when he was there on Sidpen looking for her,

(17:11):
and his wife kept it for many years and she
sent it to me and I ran into Michael Boden,
you know, the famous forensic pathologist, and I said, hey,
can you tell me what this is? I didn't tell
him where it was from, and he said, oh, it's
a cowbone and when you think about that, poor Tom
Divine had you know, kept us since nineteen sixty five
as if it might be a bone from Amelia airhard.

(17:33):
Of course he never had a you know, examined or study.
But you know, once you dig up where this skull
and bones are, I'm sure everybody in their brother is
going to figure out, you know, forensic tests to find
out is that actually her? But you know, like I say,
I'm talking to her already, so on a regular basis exactly.

(17:55):
She has shown up on our podcast, I swear maybe
a dozen times. And you know, Jennifer, she doesn't. We
don't talk about who's going to be on the show.
We just start the podcast and then she'll say, oh,
Amelia's here, and then I'll say, oh, what does she
want to talk about? She has a problem. Oh this
was interesting. She said, there's a problem you know, on

(18:15):
page the fifth chapter, in paragraph three, you're going to
look at that that's important to look at. Or in
another case, I was showing her a book. I had
a book with me at Vincent Loomis book and and
Emilia said, turn to page forty nine and I opened
it up, and in the book it said that this
guy had redesigned her gas tanks so that she could

(18:35):
fly further. Okay, but Vincent Loomis said the guy's name
was Clarence Beelin. What I did is I looked up
who the guy really was, and it was Kelly. Clarence
Kelly Johnson, the guy who designed the SR seventy one,
the YouTube playing. He did all the CIA skunk works.
His first job was fixing Amelia Earhart's gas tanks.

Speaker 1 (18:58):
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