Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (36 page)

• Earhart was also a poor navigator. During the flight to the African coast her miscalculations set her 163 miles off course—a mistake that would have been deadly if the plane had been low on fuel. Some theorists speculate that if her navigation and Morse code skills had been better, she might have survived.

UNANSWERED QUESTION: WHAT HAPPENED?

Theory #1:
Earhart ran out of fuel before sighting land, ditched her plane in the sea, and drowned.

Suspicious Facts

• This is the most popular theory...and it’s supported by the fact that no conclusive proof has ever been found indicating what really happened. According to one newspaper report, “nothing has been found that can be traced irrefutably to the plane or its crew: nothing bearing a serial number, for example, such as the plane’s engines or propellers, nor any numbered equipment known to belong to the aviators.”

• However, the islands in many areas of the South Pacific are scattered with the wreckage of 1930s-era planes. A lot of the major sea battles of World War II were fought in the Pacific; many fighter pilots ditched on nearby islands. This makes it next to impossible to confirm that any given piece of wreckage belonged to Earhart’s plane, unless it contains a serial number or includes a personal effect of some kind.

Esquire
magazine nominated Billy Carter “Primate of the Decade” in 1980.

Theory #2:
Earhart was captured by the Japanese.

• According to this theory, Earhart and Noonan were using their flight as a cover for a number of reconnaissance flights over Japanese-held islands in the South Pacific. The Roosevelt administration believed that war with Japan was inevitable and may have asked Earhart to help gather intelligence information. Some theorists suggest that after one such flight over the Truck Islands, they got lost in a storm, ran out of fuel, and were forced to land on an atoll in the Marshall Islands (which at the time were controlled by Japan). Earhart and Noonan were captured, imprisoned, and eventually died in captivity.

Suspicious Facts

• In 1967 CBS reporter Fred Goerner met a California woman who claimed to have seen two captured Americans—one man and one woman, matching the descriptions of Noonan and Earhart—on the Japanese island of Saipan in 1937. Acting on the tip, Groener went to Saipan, where he found more than a dozen island natives who told similar stories about “American fliers who had been captured as spies,” including one man who claimed to have been imprisoned in a cell next to an “American woman flyer.”

• Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific during the war, reportedly also believed that Earhart and Noonan had been captured and killed by the Japanese; in one statement in 1966 he said, “I want to tell you Earhart and her navigator did go down in the Marshalls and were picked up by the Japanese.” The Japanese government denies the charge.

• Goerner believes that when the Marines recaptured Saipan in 1944, they unearthed Earhart and Noonan’s bones and returned them to the United States. He thinks the bones were secretly turned over to the National Archives, which has kept them hidden away ever since. Why? The reason is as mysterious as the disappearance.

• Alternate theory: Joe Klass, author of
Amelia Earhart Lives
, also believes that Earhart was captured by the Japanese. But he argues that Earhart survived the war and may have even returned to the United States to live under an assumed name. According to his theory, the Japanese cut a deal with the United States to return Earhart safely after the war if the U.S. promised not to try Emperor Hirohito as a war criminal. The U.S. kept its promise, and Earhart was allowed to return home. She may have lived as long as the 1970s, protecting her privacy by living under an assumed name.

The average person sheds a complete layer of skin every 28 days.

Theory #3:
Earhart and Noonan crash-landed on a deserted island in the South Pacific, hundreds of miles off course from their original destination, where they died from exposure and thirst a few days later.

Suspicious Facts

• For three days after Earhart and Noonan disappeared, mysterious radio signals were picked up by ships looking for Earhart’s plane. The signals were transmitted in English in a female voice; some radio operators familiar with Earhart’s voice recognized it as hers. They were misunderstood at the time, but if they were indeed broadcast by Earhart, they gave several clues to her whereabouts.

• One signal said, “We are on the line of position 156-157”; another said, “Don’t hold—with us—much longer—above water—shut off.” Others had similar messages. At the end of the three days, the signals abruptly stopped.

• If those signals were indeed sent by Earhart, she must have landed
somewhere
to have been able to broadcast them. Nikumaroro Island, 350 miles north of Howland Island, is a likely candidate for the crash site. The mysterious broadcasts offer several clues:

Nikumaroro is one of the few islands within range of Earhart’s plane—and it was in their “line of position 156-157.”

One of the last transmissions described a “ship on a reef south of equator.” For years afterward researchers assumed that the “ship” being described in the transmission was Earhart’s plane. But perhaps it wasn’t: one of Nikumaroro’s most prominent landmarks is a large shipwreck off the south shore of the island—four degrees south of the equator.

Why were those final broadcasts separated by hours of silence? For more than 40 years it was assumed that they were broadcast at random intervals. But in the late 1980s, Thomas Gannon and Thomas Willi, two retired military navigators, proposed a theory: Nearly out of fuel, Earhart and Noonan landed on a part of the island’s coral reef that was above sea level only during low tide. This meant that they could only broadcast during low tide, when the radio’s batteries weren’t flooded and the plane’s engine could be used to recharge them.

Real estate news: 81% of Alaskan territory is owned by the government.

To test their theory, Gannon and Willi compared the times the signals were broadcast to a chart listing high and low tides on Nikumaroro Island on the week of the disappearance. All but one of the signals were broadcast during Nikumaroro’s low tide.

Other Evidence

• In 1960 Floyd Kilts, a retired Coast Guard carpenter, told the
San Diego Tribune
that while assigned to the island in 1946, one of the island’s natives told him about a female skeleton that had been found on the island in the late 1930s. According to the story, the skeleton was found alongside a pair of American shoes and a bottle of cognac—at a time when no Americans lived on the island.

When the island’s magistrate learned of the skeleton, he remembered the story about Earhart and decided to turn the bones over to U.S. authorities. So he put the bones in a gunnysack and set sail with a group of native islanders for Fiji. But he died mysteriously en route—and the natives, fearing the bones, threw them overboard.

• Many aspects of this story were later confirmed; in 1938 Gerald Gallagher, the island’s magistrate,
did
fall ill while en route to Fiji and died shortly after landing. But it is not known whether or not he had any bones with him when he died.

UPDATE

To date, Nikumaroro Island and nearby McKean Island (thought to be another possible crash site) have been searched extensively. In March 1992, a search team on Nikumaroro found a sheet of aircraft aluminum that they believed was from Earhart’s plane...but that theory was later disproved. Other artifacts recovered include a cigarette lighter manufactured in the 1930s (Noonan was a smoker) and pieces from a size-9 shoe (Earhart wore size 9). But no conclusive evidence has been found. The search continues.

Five hundred cubic feet of air pass through your nose every day.

Uncle John’s

SIXTH
BATHROOM
READER

First published October 1993

UNCLE JOHN’S NOTES:

This is my favorite of the three books.

While we were working on it, my brother Gordon commented that the articles ought to be edited better. I challenged him to do it himself... and to my surprise, he did. Then he taught
us
how to edit.

The result, from my point of view, is that we made a transition from trivia to stories. Sure, there are still plenty of bits o’ information. But take a look at the piece on the Salem witches...or the Mona Lisa. They’re very different from anything found in the previous book. Pages on subjects like Sibling Rivalry and Three Memorable Promotions are tighter and better-organized than before, too.

We added new formats and regular features in this book. Our “Q&A: Ask the Experts” is something we now include in every new edition. So is “Oops.”

Some of our favorite pieces (we like a lot of this book, though):

•   Henry Ford vs. the Chicago Tribune

•   Myth-America: The U.S. Constitution

•   Barnum’s History Lesson

•   The King of Farts

•   Start Your Own Country

It’s fascinating to see how many pop characters—real and fictional—are inspired by other characters. Here’s a handful of examples.

T
INKER BELL.
Walt Disney’s animators reputedly gave her Marilyn Monroe’s measurements. (Some say it was Betty Grable’s.)

JAFAR, the Grand Vizier.
The villain in the 1993 animated film
Aladdin
—described by the director as a “treacherous vizier...who seeks the power of the enchanted lamp to claim the throne for his own greedy purposes”—was inspired by Nancy Reagan. The Sultan, a doddering, kindly leader, was inspired by Nancy’s husband.

THE EMPEROR in the
Star Wars
movies.
In early drafts of the
Star Wars
scripts, George Lucas portrayed the emperor as “an elected official who is corrupted by power and subverts the democratic process.” Lucas modeled him after Richard Nixon.

MICK JAGGER.
Studied the way Marilyn Monroe moved, and learned to mimic her onstage.

THE STATUE OF LIBERTY.
The face of Miss Liberty, sculpted by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, was inspired by his mother. Ironically, although the statue has welcomed immigrants to New York City since 1886, Madame Bartholdi was “a domineering bigot.”