Dan Snow's History Hit - The Amelia Earhart Mystery with Amelia Rose Earhart

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

On the morning of May 20, 1932, 34-year-old Earhart set off from Newfoundland, Canada in her bid to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. 15 hours later she landed in terrible weather in Northern Ireland having completed this momentous feat. In this archive episode, Dan is joined by Amelia Rose Earhart to discuss the life, numerous flying achievements and mysterious disappearance of her namesake and inspiration.Amelia Rose Earhart is an American private pilot and reporter for an NBC affiliate in Denver, Colorado. Amelia is also an around the world pilot and keynote speaker.

Hello everyone, welcome to the pod. Today, May the 20th, 1932, a 34-year-old woman set off in a small aircraft from Newfoundland, heading east across the Atlantic. She was hoping to emulate the flight by Charles Lindbergh just five years earlier, the first solo flight across the Atlantic. She was hoping to become the first woman to complete that feat. She took with her a copy of the local newspaper, so that when she landed in Europe, they'd known that she couldn't be lying about when she'd set off. Just under 15 hours later, in terrible weather, she landed in a field in Northern Ireland, realising her goal of becoming the first woman to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic. Amelia Earhart is one of history's great aviators. She actually started learning how to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic. Amelia Earhart is one of history's great aviators.

She actually started learning how to fly 100 years ago this year and she's famous for her various record-breaking flights and for her mysterious disappearance as she attempted to circumnavigate the world in 1937. On the podcast today to mark the anniversary I've got Amelia Earhart. Believe it or not the very brilliant Amelia Earhart is an American pilot. Inspired by the woman whose name she shares she became the second youngest woman ever to fly around the world. She's now a motivational speaker, a pilot and a reporter in Denver, Colorado, where she lives. It was a great treat a few years ago to talk to her on the pod and learn more about her expedition

and that of the illustrious pioneer whose name she shares, but there's no family connection. If you want to go back and listen to other episodes of Dan Snow's History, you can do so at historyhit.tv. It's our new digital history channel. Lots of exciting new programs going up all the time. Tens of thousands of people supporting us, watching the shows, listening to the pods. Very grateful to everyone who's subscribing. Thank you so much. In the meantime, everyone, here is Amelia Rose Earhart. Enjoy.

news Earhart. Enjoy. Thank you so much for joining me. Oh, absolutely. Thanks for having me. I'm glad we were able to find each other on Twitter. It's what it's for. Now, listen, first of all, for those people that don't know about the legend that is Amelia Earhart, just give us a quick update on exactly who she is and why she's such an important figure. So back in the 1930s, Amelia Earhart was changing the face of not only aviation, but what women were capable of accomplishing in every realm. Now, as a social worker, she was a nurse, she was a fashion icon, which a lot of people don't know. But I think most importantly, she was an aviatrix. And Amelia's transatlantic flight that she completed in the Lockheed Vega was monumental. And that occurred before her flight around the world.

And that's what really got her on the map. Her next big goal, of course, was circumnavigation of the globe with her navigator, Fred Noonan. And on that flight in 1937, on July 2nd, is when she disappeared. And that is what hit the news today. New evidence about her disappearance. Can you give me a sense of what a huge achievement that was for a female aviator to fly across the Atlantic that early in the history of aviation?

It really was the flight that put Amelia in the record books. But it also put people, I think, it put Amelia in their hearts. They, they started to identify with this woman who was taking a new form of technology and a new form of transportation that most people had not even become comfortable with yet. And here was this woman who was saying, you know what, I'm going to get in. I'm going to play in that boy's world. I'm going to fly the plane. And she won people over. And there were lots of reasons that she did that. She had this sort of mysterious and infectious personality where you never quite knew what she was thinking, but you always knew that she was up to something.

And for Amelia to prove that a woman could make a flight that incredibly difficult, that many logistics to plan and for what seemed impossible to most people in general, I think really put her in a great position to attempt the flight around the world. Can you just quickly tell me what were conditions like for aviators in the early 1920s? Obviously, no GPS. Was there an enclosed cockpit? Was she open to the weather? No radar? What about radio communications? I mean, how lonely would that have been crossing the Atlantic at that period? It would have been incredibly lonely. And we are talking steam gauges. So picture,

I'll describe the Lockheed Vega like this. Essentially, celestial navigation, so she's using the stars to navigate. So you have to be able to see the stars, a point on the horizon, and then use what's called a sextant, which is a navigational tool to triangulate your position in the sky. So that's how she was telling where she was. She didn't have GPS. She didn't have a glass cockpit like we do today. She didn't have radio transmission that was clear and reliable and an iPad plus two or three backup forms of technology in there to tell her where she was. So really it came down to Amelia using the very basics of aviation, navigating, communicating, and finding her own way there, even within the

elements. So we're talking cold temperatures. She's got her leather flight cap on, her leather jacket, and making her way all the way across the Atlantic. And people were hanging on every last transmission that was coming through, and people were really cheering her on. The biggest celebrity of our time today, that's what Amelia was the equivalent of, except that we couldn't just check out where she was on Twitter or Facebook and watch a live update. People were hanging on those radio calls to come through to find out if she had made it. I should ask a quick question about your own history. You're called Amelia. Did the flying follow the name or did the name follow your family's love of flying? How does that work out? I get that question all the time. And the flying followed the name. So my given name by my parents is Amelia Rose Earhart. Same spelling as the original

Amelia, different middle names, obviously. But it was always an oral tradition and a family story on my dad's side of the family that we were somehow distantly related to the first Amelia Earhart. And throughout my childhood, I got, you know, shared lots of stories and books about Amelia, lots of quotes and told a lot about who she was. And it was always stated that somehow we were distantly related to her. Well, I grew up, went to college and through the years, I got more and more questions about, you know, well, how are you related to Amelia? And so I hired a genealogist who shared with me that I had a distant common ancestor with Amelia, traced back to the 1700s,

and that our families lived in adjacent counties in Pennsylvania, here in the States. And through the years, I thought, well, gosh, you know, maybe I should try out some flight. And when I was 21 years old, I took my very first flight lesson in Boulder, Colorado, right down the street from Denver. And from the moment I took off, I just fell in love with that feeling of that separation from the ground, putting things in perspective and that freedom that flight really holds for people who want to get out and try it. So progressing through the years, I flew more and more. I got my private license done. I got my instrument rating, which allows you to fly through weather and read your instruments to determine where you are. And from that point, I started imagining and daydreaming a potential flight around the world.

And once I had planned it, and that's a longer story for a different time, but along the way, I started questioning and getting more questions about that relation to Amelia. I started questioning and getting more questions about that relation to Amelia. And unfortunately, and it's a very emotional story, but unfortunately, I learned right before my flight around the world that that relation to Amelia was actually inaccurate. So a second genealogist had done the research and said, you actually don't share any relation to Amelia. Well, at that point, I had raised all the money and gained partnerships and sponsorships and done all this training to fly around the world. And even though people were, gosh, mocking

and being rude like they can on social media, I decided to go anyways. And I said, you know what, I want to be related to Amelia, going to be related to her passion and her determination and her same cause. And that's how the flight around the world came to be so flying definitely followed the name you're listening to Dan Snow's history here I've got Amelia Earhart on the pod more after this catastrophic warfare bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles I'm James Rogers and over on the Warfare podcast we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict. We've got the classics. Understandably when we see it from hindsight the great revelation in Potsdam was really Stalin saying yeah tell me something I

don't know. The unexpected. And it was at that moment that he just handed her all these documents that he'd discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair. And the never ending. So arguably every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities. Subscribe to Warfare from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Join us on the front line of military history. That's a great story. It's even better because you're not a blood relative. I think that's so cool. So tell me about Amelia's flight around the world, because I mean, flying across the Atlantic is one thing. She became one of the first people to fly across the Atlantic. What made her want to fly around the world?

That's a huge, even bigger challenge. So Amelia married her publicist, George Putnam. And I do believe they were deeply in love in whatever version of love meant to them. But George Putnam loved the publicity that came along with Amelia and that draw that she had to the public. So the two of them crafted this flight around the world and said, you know what, this would be Amelia's last record-breaking attempt. It'll most likely be her last long-distance flight. But leading up to that trip, she planned in a Lockheed Electra 10E, which is a beautiful twin engine aircraft with basically steam gauges, limited

radio capability, but the ability to hold enough fuel for her to get across these major ocean crossings and planned that approximately 28,000 mile trip around the equator that would take her across the U.S., down through Brazil, all across Africa and through the Middle East, Singapore, down through Australia, and then eventually through Papua New Guinea and over and landing on Howland Island. And unfortunately, it was that stretch between Papua New Guinea and Howland Island in the South Pacific where Amelia disappeared. And through the years, because she was such a big celebrity, people just became infatuated with figuring out the outcome of Amelia and Fred Noonan, who was her navigator, what happened to them.

And the theories include that she may have landed on an island and lived for a while. Maybe she had a false identity where she was working as a spy. Maybe she crashed into the ocean. But the evidence that came out today or the potential evidence linked to the Amelia story is so compelling that at least for me, I mean, I got chills when I heard the story this morning. This could be a huge key to this 80-year-old mystery that the whole world has just been infatuated by. So let's get, what is the evidence that came out today? Please explain. So what we learned today is that there is basically government files and historic files

here in the States that as an Amelia Earhart researcher was going through these files, he found a photo of a woman and a man, both Caucasian, both fitting the description of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, located on a photo that was labeled in the Marshall Islands on this tiny island atoll, which is basically just a small chain of islands in the South Pacific, that showed a woman that strongly resembled Amelia, strongly resembled Fred Noonan. And they're sitting with residents of this tiny island under Japanese control. And what the assumption of the researchers is, and of course, none of it is definitive

yet until further research is done, what they are insinuating is that Amelia and Fred landed on this atoll or nearby and were taken into Japanese control and essentially held prisoner. And may or may not have been held captive in small prisons that were there in the area. There's still so much to learn because essentially this big documentary that's coming out on Sunday night on major network channels is going to be two hours describing what they found. And they've only hinted at it so far. But it's also interesting that it comes on the 80-year anniversary of Amelia's and Fred's disappearance just a few days after. It's one of the great conspiracy theories of modern history. I mean, do you have, as a pilot who's been in these places, I mean, do you think it's more likely that they just crashed into the sea in bad weather? Or do you, have you got an attachment to some of these other theories that perhaps they landed and survived? You know, my whole life,

having this name and working in the public like I do as a broadcaster here in Colorado and doing the flight around the world, people have shared their theories with me basically my entire life. And I've been sent books and newspaper clippings and detailed accounts of what people really think happened. And what I found is through the years, it was very difficult for me to attach to one particular theory because each one felt so strong. And what I would say as sort of my, my politically correct response would be that I wanted to focus on Amelia's life and celebrate what she stood for, which was this passion for adventure. And I would let others focus on her disappearance and her death. And I've always said that until today, watching this evidence that was presented in a two or three minute clip in Tom Costello's story, I got chills. I'm watching them describe the receding hairline that Fred Noonan had, comparing it to images of

Fred in other photographs, the structure of his nose, Amelia, and it's an image of her from behind. She's sort of turned in a profile view. The haircut matches the style of clothing that Amelia wore with a very traditional, almost masculine pair of slacks that she wore, which was very contemporary for that time in the 1930s with a very simple button down shirt. But here's the thing that really struck me watching this story, Amelia's posture. She always sort of had, she was a taller woman. She was very thin.

She kept her shoulders sort of concave in a lot of images that we've seen of her throughout the years. And in this new photo that surfaced, they compared the bone structure, and it could match up to the original Amelia. And it just looks like her from behind. As soon as I saw that photo, it resonated with me. I felt like I was looking at Amelia. Now, on top of all of that, there's a shadowy image next to a ship that's parked on the shoreline. to a ship that's parked on the shoreline and it could be the Lockheed Electra. And the reason they think that it could be the plane is that they took the certain model of the ship that it was possibly being towed behind and they were able to scale what the length of the ship would be, what the length of the Electra would be.

And that shadowy image matches up exactly to the length of her aircraft. And I'm not one to latch on to these theories. Like I said, I've always sort of kept them at arm's length. This one is really speaking to me. And there's a big part of me that hopes that this is key to understanding more of what happened. Well, I mean, we're going to have to wait and see what this documentary says. But it's one of the great mysteries of the 20th century that could be cleared up.

Amelia Earhart, thank you for talking about your forebear in many ways as an aviator and as a pioneer. Another Amelia Earhart, what are you on Twitter so people can stay in touch with your adventures and hear what you're going to say about this whole story? inches and hear what you want to hear, what you're going to say about this, this whole story. Very easy to find, just search Amelia Rose Earhart. And gosh, I'm going to be on there communicating with folks about their theories and their ideas. And, you know, we've been getting a lot of naysayers in the last six hours or so saying, oh, there's no way this is true. Here's reasons why I invite those challenges. I want to hear all sides of this. I want to hear why it's impossible, possible, everything. Let's have the conversation because that is what is so intriguing about history in general. But that's why Amelia has captivated people for so many years, because people are passionate

about her. And I think that's because she led her life in such a passionate way. So I'm incredibly excited to see what else has come from this research. Well, Amelia, I hope you'll come back on the podcast when things become a little clearer and I won't be in the back of a cast. We'll have better sound quality. Thank you so much for joining us on History Hit. All the best. Thanks for having me. Blue skies. We will have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs,

this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Hi everyone, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars, and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further

up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well.