The Government Just Declassified The Amelia Earhart Files After 88 Years

Thousands of pages of secret government records about Amelia Earhart's 1937 disappearance were just released to the public, but the mystery only deepens.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Something happened over the Pacific Ocean on July second, nineteen
thirty seven that has consumed researchers, explorers, and conspiracy theorists
for nearly nine decades. The United States government has been
sitting on thousands of pages of documents about what they know,
and they have finally decided to share them with the
rest of us. I'm Darren Marler, and this is weird

(00:34):
dark News. Director of National Intelligence Tulsea Gabbard stood before
the press on November fourteenth, twenty twenty five, and announced
the release of four thousand, six hundred and twenty four
pages spread across fifty three PDF files. They weren't just
any government documents gathering dust in some forgotten filing cabinet.
The batch included newly declassified files from the National Security Agency,

(00:59):
detailed information about Amelia Earhart's last known communications and her
exact location when those communications went silent, weather reports, send
plane conditions from that fateful day, and maps marking out
potential search locations. President Trump had ordered the declassification back
in September twenty twenty five, issuing a directive to release

(01:19):
every scrap of government paper related to Earhart her final
trip and anything else the federal government knew about her.
This wasn't going to be a one time document dump either.
More records would keep coming as federal agencies dug through
their archives. The NSA, FBI, Navy, and Coastguard were all
hunting through their classified holdings to identify anything related to Arehart.

(01:42):
The initial release reads like a collection of government investigative
work from the nineteen thirties and beyond, operational logs that
tracked every movement of the search effort, diplomatic cables sent
between nations as they coordinated rescue attempts, investigative memos written
by people who were there when it happened. One particularly
comprehensive document from nineteen thirty seven laid out the entire

(02:04):
US Navy search operation, complete with vessel log books from
the USS Lexington and USS Saratoga that detailed every single
flight path their planes took and every constraint they faced
when fuel started running low. Another document, written after World
War II ended, carried the rather pointed title Amelia Earhart's
Last Flight, A Tragedy of errors That analysis didn't pull punches.

(02:29):
It blamed the disaster on navigational miscalculations. Radio frequencies that
didn't match up properly between Aarhart's plane and the ships
trying to guide her in, and search planning that fell
short of what the situation demanded. Then there were the
hand drawn maps from the eleventh Naval District, where someone
had carefully plotted out potential crash sites across equatorial islands

(02:50):
under US administration. Earhart's Locket Electra lifted off from Oakland, California,
on May twentieth, nineteen thirty seven. She had one goal
that day, become the first woman to fly around the
entire world. Flying beside her was Fred Noonan, who had
been Pan American Airways lead investigator for their trans Pacific
trials of the Flying Clipper. The man knew his way

(03:11):
around an ocean crossing. By the time they touched down
in Lay, Papua New Guinea, they had already covered twenty
two thousand miles. They had seven thousand more to go.
They were on leg thirty one if what was supposed
to be a thirty four leg journey. They were so
close the clock read ten am local time on July second,
nineteen thirty seven, when air Heart and Noonan climbed into

(03:31):
their heavily loaded Lockheed Electra at Laay Airfield and pointed
the nose toward their neck stop. Howland Island sat out
there in the vast specific, a flat sliver of coral
and sand measuring sixty five hundred feet long by sixteen
hundred feet wide, rising just ten feet above the waves,
sitting two thousand, five hundred and fifty six miles away

(03:51):
across open ocean. Finding a speck of land that's small
in all that water would be like spotting a specific
grain of sand on a beach. They figured the flight
would take about twenty hours, and they loaded the Electra
with approximately eleven hundred gallons of gasoline. The math was tight.
There wasn't room for mistakes. The US Coast Guard had

(04:12):
positioned their ship Atasca right at Howland Island, waiting there
with barrels of fuel for the next leg of Earhart's journey.
Radio operators aboard the Atasca picked up their first intermitten
voice messages from Earhart at two forty five in the morning.
As the hours ticked by, those radio signals grew progressively stronger,
she was getting closer. The plan was working. Then the

(04:34):
signals stopped making sense. The last confirmed message came through
at eight forty three in the morning. Earhart reported she
was flying along a northwest to southeast navigational line that
cut right through Howland Island, but she didn't say which
direction she was heading along that line. Was she coming
from the northwest approaching from the southeast. The men listening

(04:56):
to their radios aboard the Atasca had no way to know.
Her transmission crackled through Khaqq, calling it Taska. We must
be on you, but cannot see you. Gas is running low.
Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying
at one thousand feet. After eight forty three am, the
radio went silent. The ship waited, the island waited. Nobody

(05:18):
heard from Amelia Earhart again. What followed became the most
expensive air and sea search in American history up to
that point. The US Navy and Coastguard through everything they
had at finding that plane four million dollars worth of resources,
which would be equivalent to eighty seven million dollars today.
Ships criss crossed the ocean, planes flew search patterns until

(05:41):
they ran low on fuel themselves. Official search efforts kept
going until July nineteenth, nineteen thirty seven. They scoured a
quarter million square miles of ocean. They came up empty.
When the US government sat down to write their official
report on what happened to Earhart's aircraft, they didn't hedge
their conclusion. The plane ran out of fuel and crashed

(06:02):
into the ocean. Simple as that. No conspiracy, no mystery,
just bad luck and the brutal reality of nineteen thirties
aviation technology trying to cross the largest ocean on Earth.
Retired US Navy Rear Admiral Richard R. Black had been
in charge of the Howland Island airstrip that day. He
was sitting right there in the radio room aboard the

(06:23):
Atasca when those final transmissions came through. Years later, he
stated plainly what he believed happened. The Electra went into
the sea around ten in the morning on July second,
nineteen thirty seven, somewhere not far from Howland. Other military
analysts have reached the same conclusion, but they were not
quite as gentle about assigning blame. Retired US Navy Captain

(06:45):
Lawrence Safford spent years during the nineteen seventies analyzing every
detail of that flight. He went through the radio transmission
records line by line, studied the planning documents, reconstructed the timeline.
His verdict, the flight light suffered from poor planning and
worse execution. Earhart's own steps on, George Palmer Putnam Junior

(07:06):
put it even more simply. When someone asked what he
thought happened to his stepmother, he said that he believes
the plane just ran out of gas. Earhart biographer Susan
Butler had done her own calculations based on fuel capacity,
consumption rates, and the distances involved. She concludes the aircraft
went down out of sight of Howland Island and now
rests somewhere on the seafloor at a depth of approximately

(07:29):
seventeen thousand feet. At that depth, the pressure of all
that water above would have crushed the plane like an
aluminum can. Any remains would be nearly impossible to locate.
Even with modern technology. People have now spent millions upon
millions of dollars searching for Earhart's plane since nineteen thirty seven.
The pattern has become predictable enough that aviation historians can

(07:52):
almost set their watches by it. Someone announces a breakthrough discovery,
the media picks up the story. Headlines scream across newspaper,
papers and websites. Donations pour in. Expeditions get funded, Then quietly,
usually months later, with far less fanfare, the discovery gets debunked,
or the expedition gets postponed indefinitely. Coverage fades away, rints

(08:16):
and repeat. The most recent example happened just last year,
and it followed the script almost perfectly. In January twenty
twenty four, an ocean exploration company called Deep Sea Vision
released a sonar image that showed something sitting on the
seafloor about one hundred miles from Howland Island. The object
was more than sixteen thousand feet down, buried in darkness

(08:38):
and crushing pressure. The company had deployed a high tech,
unmanned underwater drone and brought along a sixteen member crew
to survey more than fifty two hundred miles of ocean floor,
and there on their sonar screen, clear as day, sat
something that looked remarkably like an airplane. The Internet went wild.
News organizations around the world ran stories, had someone find

(09:00):
only found Amelia Earhart's final resting place? Social media lit
up with speculation and excitement. Deep Sea Vision had captured
the world's attention. Then the company went back to double
check their discovery. They returned to the exact coordinates on
November one, twenty twenty four, this time equipped with better
imaging equipment that could get closer to the object and

(09:21):
produce higher resolution scans. The team waited twenty four hours
after launching their equipment before they could see the new data.
When those images finally came through, they told a different
story that anyone wanted to hear rocks, the whole thing
was just rocks. Company CEO Tony Romeo later described nature's

(09:42):
cruel joke to NPR, saying they found the cruelest formation
ever and added that it looked almost like somebody did
set those rocks out in this nice little pattern of
her plane, just to mess with somebody out there looking
for her. The ocean floor had arranged itself, purely by chance,
into a shape that resembled a twin engine aircraft from
the nineteen thirties. The odds seem astronomical, but apparently not impossible.

(10:08):
Deep Sea Vision isn't the first company to come up
empty handed after extensive searching. A deep sea exploration company
called Nauticus has mounted three separate expeditions since two thousand
and two. They've used sophisticated sonar equipment to scan the
ocean floor near Howland Island, methodically covering nearly two thousand
square nautical miles of seafloor. They haven't found a single

(10:29):
piece of wreckage from the ELECTRA. The International Group for
Historic Aircraft Recovery they go by TIGAR has been in
this game even longer. Founded back in nineteen eighty five,
they've sent at least five expeditions to Nicka Morero Island
since twenty ten. Tigar's founder, Rick Gillespie told reporters last
year that he was absolutely certain that Earhart crash landed

(10:50):
at Nicka Morero and survived for some period as a castaway.
He's written a book about his theories, He's given countless interviews.
But when you dig into the facts, something becomes clear.
TIGAR has never recovered a complete aircraft of any type.
They've never even recovered a single verified piece of historic aircraft.
They have theories, and they have expeditions, but they don't

(11:13):
have evidence. Professional funding is still flowing toward new searches,
though a joint expedition between the Archaeological Legacy Institute and
Purdue University has been targeting something they're calling the Taraiah Object,
another anomaly photographed off Nika Mororo Island. The expedition was
originally scheduled to depart on November fourth, twenty twenty four.

(11:35):
Permit issues with the Carabodi government caused delays, and the
departure date has been pushed back to April twenty twenty six.
The Archaeological Legacy Institute keeps fundraising in the meantime, trying
to hit a target of nine hundred thousand dollars just
for Phase one of the expedition. Nobody has said publicly
what phase two and Phase three my cost, assuming phase

(11:55):
one finds anything worth investigating. Further, groups have different ideas
about where Earharts ended up, and they can't all be right.
They might all be wrong, but only one of them
can be correct if any Tigar has built their entire
theory around the idea that when Earhart and Nonan couldn't
locate Howland Island, they didn't just circle until they ran

(12:18):
out of fuel. Instead, they flew south along that navigation aligne.
Earhart mentioned in her last transmission about three hundred and
fifty nautical miles south of Howland sits Nikamarrero Island, which
used to be called Gardner Island. Tigar believes Earhart made
an emergency landing there, and she and Nounan survived the crash.
They lived as castaways, possibly for days or weeks, before

(12:40):
they eventually died. The theory has a problem, though, US
Navy planes flew directly over Gardner Island on July ninth,
nineteen thirty seven, just one week after Earhart disappeared. They
were specifically looking for any sign of a downed aircraft
or survivors. They saw nothing. No plane wreckage, no Earhart,
no Noonan, no distress signals arranged on the beach. A

(13:04):
completely different theory has developed around the Japanese held Marshall Islands.
This version suggests Earhart and Noonan didn't make it to
Holland or Nika Mororo. They ran out of fuel and
had to land somewhere in the Marshall Islands chain. According
to this theory, Japanese forces captured the two Americans and
transported them to saipan, An Island, about fourteen hundred and

(13:25):
fifty miles south of Tokyo. There, the theory goes Japanese
authorities tortured them as suspected spies before eventually executing them.
The Japanese capture theory has been circulating since the nineteen sixties,
fueled primarily by accounts from Marshall Islanders who claimed to
have heard stories about an American lady pilot being held

(13:45):
in custody on Saipan in nineteen thirty seven. These stories
supposedly got passed down through families and communities. The problem, though,
with secondhand stories passed down through generations, is that details shift,
memories blur, and verification becomes nearly impossible. No documentary evidence
has surfaced to support the Japanese capture theory. No prison records,

(14:08):
no execution orders, no photographs, no remains. Other theories have
floated around over the decades, each more outlandish than the last.
Some people claimed Earhart was actually a spy working for
President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Others insisted she crashed somewhere in
Papua New Guinea. A few even suggested she successfully survived
the flight, made it back to the United States somehow,

(14:30):
and then lived out the rest of her days anonymously
under an assumed identity. Every one of these theories has
been examined and debunked by serious researchers. Dorothy Cochrane spent
years as a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and
Space Museum. She's now retired, but she watched the parade
of Earhart's expeditions and announcements for decades. By twenty sixteen,

(14:52):
she had had enough. She told reporters that Rick Gillespie
from Tigar had been using the same quote unquote evidence
over in over again, and that he does this on
a routine basis whenever he wants to mount another expedition.
Aviation experts who have reviewed the newly declassified documents aren't
particularly optimistic that anything groundbreaking will emerge. Many of the

(15:14):
thousands of pages that got uploaded to the National Archives
website on November fourteenth had already been released previously or
were already available to researchers who knew where to look
and how to request them. The declassification effort has made
access easier and centralized the records, which matters for transparency,
but the documents themselves aren't telling a new story. Professional

(15:35):
organizations that work in heritage preservation and underwater archaeology have
started raising concerns about the connage industry that's developed around
searching for Earhart. These private expeditions talk endlessly about finding
the wreckage and recovering the plane. They talk much less
about what would happen afterward. Who would preserve the artifacts,
who would analyze them properly, who would ensure they are

(15:58):
studied by qualified experts rather than just put on display
for publicity. When organizations focus exclusively on finding and recovery
without planning for preservation or serious research, professional archaeologists and
historians get nervous. The basic facts about Amelia Earhart's life
bookend her story neatly. She was born July twenty fourth,

(16:20):
eighteen ninety seven, and a court declared her legally dead
on January fifth, nineteen thirty nine. The years between those
dates contained more accomplishments than most people could fit into
three lifetimes. On the twentieth, nineteen thirty two, she climbed
into a Lockheed Vega in Newfoundland and took off alone,
headed for Paris. She was attempting to do something no

(16:41):
woman had ever done, fly solo and NonStop across the
Atlantic Ocean. Powerful headwinds blew her off course, and she
ended up landing in Ireland. Instead of France. But that
hardly mattered. She had flown more than two thousand miles
across the Atlantic in just under fifteen hours, and she'd
done it by herself. Congress awarded her the Distinguished Flying Cross,

(17:02):
one of the highest honors a pilot could receive. She
didn't stop there, though. She kept flying, kept breaking records,
kept pushing boundaries. She became a best selling author, She
gave lectures. She used her fame to advocate for women's
rights and women in aviation. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt counted
her as a friend. When Earhart disappeared in nineteen thirty seven,

(17:23):
she wasn't just some pilot attempting a dangerous stunt. She
was one of the most famous women on the planet,
and she vanished at the absolute peak of her career.
As far as unsolved American mysteries go, only the assassination
of John F. Kennedy rivals the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.
In terms of cultural staying power, people can't seem to
let it go. Every few years, someone announces a new

(17:47):
search expedition. Every time millions of people pay attention, the
pattern repeats. Money keeps flowing into these searches, despite the
consistent lack of results. Each high tech expedition costs millions
of dollars, funded through some combination of private donations, institutional backing,
and media partnerships. None of these expensive efforts has produced

(18:08):
anything that qualifies as irrefutable evidence of the wreckage. When
Gebert announced the document release in November twenty twenty five,
she framed the declassification as part of a larger effort
toward ending the weaponization of intelligence and restoring public trust
in government transparency. The documents are real, The declassification is happening.
The National Archives has set up a dedicated web page

(18:31):
where they are uploading records on a rolling basis as
more get declassified. Anyone can visit archives dot gov slash
Amelia Earhart and read through the files themselves. Whether those
files contain any revelations that will finally put this mystery
to rest remains to be seen. Based on expert assessment
of what's been released so far, that seems unlikely. The

(18:53):
disappearance of Amelia Earharts over the Pacific Ocean July second,
nineteen thirty seven might simply be a mystery that never
get solved. Sometimes the ocean keeps its secrets. Sometimes history
doesn't provide the closure we're looking for. Sometimes a plane
runs out of fuel over the deepest part of the
Pacific and seventeen thousand feet of water is just too
much to overcome, even eighty eight years later with all

(19:16):
of our modern technology. The search continues anyway. If you'd
like to read this story for yourself or share the
article with a friend, you can read it on the
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