Amelia Earhart’s Bones Found?

Press, Volume C, Issue 29681, 27 November 1961, Page 15

Amelia Earhart’s Bones Found?

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) SAN FRANCISCO, November 26. A University of California anthropologist today will examine bones and teeth, recovered from a shallow grave on Saipan to see if they might possibly be those of the missing American fliers, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, the Associated Press reported.

The pair disappeared in 1937 between New Guinea and Howland Island, in the South Pacific, on their attempted round-the-world flight. Fred Goerner, a reporter for a San Francisco radio station, found the remains and said he thought the flyers were captured by the Japanese after being forced down near the Marshall Islands. He said he believed Miss Earhart died of dysentry and Noonan was executed. A professor of anthropology at the University of California, Dr. Theodore McCown, agreed to study the bones, which Goerner said he was not sure were those of Miss Earhart and Noonan. Mr Goerner said he found the remains of two bodies in a shallow grave, on the World War II battleground

of Saipan In the western Pacific, U.P.I. reported. Last year Mr Goerner went to Saipan to investigate reports that Miss Earhart’s plane had crashed at Saipan in 1937. He brought back a generator that was recovered from Gar a pan harbour, off Saipan, at the site where Saipan natives said a twinengined plane crash-landed in 1937.

The discovery of the generator led to the belief that the disappearance of Miss Earhart and Noonan had been solved. It was believed that they crashed off Saipan and were taken prisoner by the Japanese, who shot them because Miss Earhart saw the military preparations being made tor World War H. But the Bendix Aviation Corporation examined the generator and said it did not come from Miss Earhart’s plane. Mr Goerner told a press conference today that United States naval intelligence had information about the two flyers which it had not disclosed. As long ago as 1944, Lieutenant Eugene Bogen had reported to the naval intelligence that natives on Saipan had recalled the presence of the two flyers, who they said had been flown there by seaplane. Commander Paul Bridewell, the present United States commander on Saipan, said he had information that Miss Earhart had gone down near Jalliet Island in the Marshalls, Mr Goerner said. At the time. United States naval intelligence suspected that the mandated islands were being fortified but was unable to obtain information, he said. According to Mr Goerner, Commander Bridewell also said that a study of the logs of four United States vessels at the time of the disappearance would show that they i had picked up coded Japanese messages.