Amelia Earhart (25 page)

According to researchers, little to nothing was heard from the original Irene O'Crowley Craigmile after 1934.

T
he revelations concerning Mrs. Irene Craigmile Bolam were puzzling, conflicting, and suspicious, to be sure. As time went by, an undercurrent of communication as well as gossip began linking Irene Craigmile Bolam to Amelia Earhart. Another added layer of mystery, however, can be found in the person of William Van Dusen, whom a number of researchers are convinced was Earhart's navigator, Fred Noonan.

William Van Dusen, even in his old age, bore a striking resemblance to Noonan. It had been remarked on several occasions that Van Dusen's posture and manner of walking was identical to that of the navigator. Author David K. Bowman stated that when one compares photos of Noonan and Van Dusen, the faces appear to be “not just similar . . . [but] identical, down to their distinctive sharp noses and the deep creases at either sides of their mouths.” William Van Dusen appears for all the world to look like an elderly Fred Noonan.

In what may be little more than a curious coincidence, it was pointed out that Fred Noonan was fond of wearing polka-dot neckties. Oddly, William Van Dusen's preferred style of necktie was also those with polka-dots.

While a great deal of attention has been provided to the notion that Amelia Earhart did survive her alleged government-endorsed demise in the Pacific Ocean and returned, little notice has been given to the possibility that the same can be said for Fred Noonan. As it turns out, Noonan has been much harder to track than Earhart. Following his internment on the island of Saipan, little to nothing is known of his fate or whereabouts.

Fred Noonan was legally declared dead in 1938. Between 1939 and 1940, a man named William Van Dusen was suddenly and heavily involved with transatlantic and South Pacific flights, a role previously assumed by Noonan. In fact, Van Dusen has been credited with “pioneering” such flights. This credit had previously been applied to Fred Noonan. Van Dusen was also closely acquainted with Charles Lindbergh and other noted pilots of the day.

A search for Fred Noonan's birth certificate by researcher/author Gervais revealed none on file. Furthermore, a search for Noonan's personnel records at Pan American Airways resulted in the determination that none could be located. Consider this: at one time Fred Noonan was hailed as Pan Am's most distinguished trailblazing navigator, was regarded by his peers as the most skilled navigator in the country, and was involved in the most famous disappearance and mystery of the century. Yet the company he was associated with possessed not a single record. Van Dusen, however, had an extensive file.

It gets even more bizarre. It has long been standard procedure for members of the U.S. armed forces to be fingerprinted on enlistment. Noonan held the rank of lieutenant commander in the United States Naval Reserve, yet there are no fingerprints on file for him.

For William Van Dusen, allegedly born in Toledo, Ohio, there is likewise no birth certificate. Author Gervais learned that when Van Dusen learned of Gervais's investigations into the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, he immediately contacted the U.S. Air Force and Coast Guard as well as the National Archives in an attempt to learn what Gervais had discovered. When Gervais submitted a request to Pan American Airways in Los Angeles for information about Fred Noonan, the company's historian referred him to William Van Dusen.

On one occasion when Gervais was interviewing Van Dusen, he told him that he had learned the elderly man had had a profile search conducted on him. Gervais informed Van Dusen that he likewise ran a search on him and discovered there was no birth certificate on file at the location Van Dusen claimed. Van Dusen responded, “Sometimes I do have a little trouble proving who I am.”

If Van Dusen had told the truth about his identity, then why would proving it present a problem? The truth is, this kind of information gathering is cut and dried and normally presents few, if any, problems. Unless, of course, one is lying.

A
ccording to author Thomas E. Devine, the U.S. government “holds 113 sealed documents pertaining to the Earhart case.” Devine advances the notion that these documents are kept from the public in order to cover up the deceptions associated with and the mistakes made relative to the in-flight aid supplied to Earhart as well as the botched search. Others contend that the documents also reveal the fate of Earhart following her landing in the Marshall Islands, her subsequent imprisonment by the Japanese, and what ultimately became of her relative to her hypothesized repatriation to the United States.

There are two schools of thought relative to what happened to Amelia Earhart on July 2, 1937. The U.S. government issued a press release stating that Earhart, along with her navigator Fred Noonan, crashed into the Pacific Ocean near Howland Island and perished. This is the “official” version of what happened. It is also the version that is believed by the majority of people around the world since it is the one that was most commonly seen in newspapers and newsreels at the time. Furthermore, a number of books have been published purporting to tell the true story of the aviatrix but that adhere to the “official,” though clearly flawed, version of the event. For many, this position has become firmly established in their consciousness, and few have felt any need to remove it. It should be pointed out that despite being the official and most widely accepted account of what happed to Earhart, it carries with it no substantive evidence whatsoever. Curiously, reams of material related to the disappearance of and search for Amelia Earhart have been categorized as top secret by the U.S. government and made unavailable to researchers. One cannot help but wonder what sort of information the government found necessary to hide from public examination if it had been telling the truth all along.

There exist other schools of thought as they relate to Earhart's fate. The most prevalent alternative explanation relates to the notion that Earhart and Noonan's plane came down near a Japanese-controlled island and that the two were captured, arrested, and subsequently imprisoned by the rulers. While evidence for the first school of thought is lacking or absent, the evidence for the second is abundant and, frankly, difficult to dispute.

As a corollary to theory number two, the notion has been advanced that Earhart, after being freed from a Japanese prison on mainland China, was repatriated to the United States, where she underwent a period of rehabilitation and, for whatever reason, an identity change. A number of Earhart researchers are persuaded that Earhart lived out the rest of her life under the assumed name of Irene Craigmile Bolam.

It is incumbent upon any researcher/investigator to analyze any and all evidence pertinent to the Earhart/Bolam connection relative to making a determination with regard to the truth.

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS

In an attempt to prove that Irene Craigmile Bolam was Amelia Earhart, a man named Tod Swindell arrived at a technique in 1997 wherein transparent photographic overlays were developed such that, he claimed, the facial features of Earhart and Bolam could be compared. Swindell was a member of the Screen Director's Guild as well as a member of the Amelia Earhart Society. His credentials for conducting a statistically valid photo-analysis technique were nonexistent.

Swindell obtained photographic images of both Earhart and Bolam from a number of sources. He searched for photographs of the two women that shared a common pose. An overlay of one, according to author Rollin Reineck, had to be the same size as the photo of the other. In the final analysis, any significant “problems were overcome,” and, according to Swindell, the experiment revealed that the images of Amelia Earhart from the 1930s aligned “precisely” with those of Irene Craigmile Bolam. In Swindell's opinion, as well as that of Reineck, it was a perfect match.

Reineck reported that Swindell “persevered and his tireless efforts have successfully produced outstanding results that are acceptable to the scientific community as proof that Irene Bolam and Amelia Earhart were the same person.” Furthermore, Swindell claimed to have done a “forensic analysis on her complete life story.” Quite a claim, indeed, though Swindell had no credentials for such an undertaking, and to date it has not been forthcoming.

In his book
Amelia Earhart Survived
, Reineck claims that two forensic anthropologists—Dr. Walter Birkby and Dr. Todd W. Fenton—“fully recognized the Earhart Bolam controversy through the quality of Swindell's extensive physical and personal traits comparisons.” “With the enormous amount of research presented to them,” according to Reineck, they felt that it was hard to disagree with the conclusion that “Amelia Earhart and Irene Bolam were one and the same.”

Reineck goes on to claim that “this was the affirmation needed using forensic science methodology” to determine that Earhart and Bolam were one and the same.

There was a second photo-comparison project involving Earhart and Bolam, this one independently conducted by a man named David Allen Deal and had two pages devoted to it in David Bowman's book,
Legerdemain
. Deal's “technique” involved employing photographic overlays of similar poses and then aligning the overlay/photo match to determine a resemblance or otherwise. Deal concludes his study with the comment, “I cannot see how these photographs can fail to convince a reasonable person.”

Swindell and Reineck, as well as Deal, could not have been more mistaken. While there appears to be an impressive array of compelling evidence yielding the strong suggestion that Amelia Earhart did not crash and sink in the Pacific Ocean and that she was returned to the United States under a new identity, the photographic experiments performed by Swindell and Deal have never been accepted by professional photo-comparison experts as part of it. Though Swindell's photographic analysis has been advanced on dozens of occasions to point out the similarities between Earhart and Bolam, it proves absolutely nothing. Likewise, Deal's project was so absurdly amateurish that it is difficult to believe anyone found legitimacy in it. While their conclusions were on target, their methodology was flawed.

Since the 1970s, computers and attendant hardware and software have been available with the capacity to conduct scientifically accurate and statistically valid photo-comparison studies. At least two oft-tested, validated, and statistically proven systems for facial pattern recognition have come into common usage by law enforcement organizations worldwide, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Scotland Yard, Interpol, and a number of other local and regional agencies. The most widely employed was developed by Y. Kaya and K. Kobayashi and made available via Academic Press in New York.

These photo-comparison techniques are widely used today, and the results are admissible in court. One such application of one of these scientifically valid systems was employed to make a determination related to whether or not a man named William Henry Roberts, who died in Hamilton County, Texas, in 1949, was actually the famous outlaw Billy the Kid. The results of the study proved that he was (
Billy the Kid: Beyond the Grave
, Taylor Trade Publishing, 2005).

It is therefore puzzling that Swindell and Deal, while having access to legitimate and recognized state-of-the-art photo-analysis techniques in 1997 chose to ignore them and pursue a line of “research” that amounts to little more than a junior high school classroom project. It is important to emphasize that the results arrived at were purely subjective and possessed no statistical validity whatsoever. They must, therefore, be rejected as proof that Amelia Earhart and Irene Craigmile Bolam were the same person.

Amateurish research projects by enthusiasts such as the above have created problems for legitimate researchers and investigators in pursuit of the truth. When opponents of the Amelia Earhart = Irene Craigmile Bolam hypothesis want to make a case for the unprofessional and unskilled nature of the proposals advanced by the other side, they invariably point to the projects conducted by Swindell and Deal, which made a mockery of photo-recognition analysis. The truth is, a legitimate, statistically valid photo analysis has, to date, not been undertaken involving Earhart and Bolam.

Further, Reineck's claim that two “renowned forensic anthropologists . . . felt that it was hard to disagree with” Swindell's conclusions is either a gross exaggeration or a huge error. If the two men had indeed been “renowned,” they would have known of the availability of existing statistically valid photocomparison techniques. One wonders why Reineck regarded the two men as renowned when at that time such unrefined and amateur techniques as applied by Swindell were completely rejected by those in the photo-comparison business. Reineck's use of the term “forensic science methodology” when referring to Swindell's study is completely misleading and untrue.

Based on scientific methodology as well as common sense, the Swindell and Deal photo-comparison projects are completely worthless when trying to establish a connection between Earhart and Irene Craigmile Bolam and do little more than provide ammunition for the proponents of the status quo.

On the other hand, however, there are numerous other aspects of the Earhart-Bolam connection that are conducive to generating suspicion about the true identity of the woman known as Irene Craigmile Bolam.

To compound the problems associated with the connection between Amelia Earhart and the woman named Irene Craigmile Bolam, there have been two different women carrying the Craigmile identity. An article in the Woodbridge, New Jersey,
Times Tribune
showed that photos of a woman identified as Bolam were those of a person different from the one Gervais met at the meeting of the Early Flyers Club.