Amelia Earhart: The mystery continues with one secret disclosed

By William H. Stewart
Special to the Saipan Tribune

Part 3 of 3

Shortly after the end of hostilities in the Pacific, the islands became the responsibility of the United Nations’ Security Council, with the United States as the administering authority (where it had veto power).

In the ’50s, the U.S. Navy constructed facilities on Capitol Hill to support the covert activities of the U. S. Naval Tactical Training Unit, (NTTU) aka the CIA, for the purpose of training Chinese and other Asian ethnicities in guerrilla warfare. It was a time when some in the U.S. (John Birch Society and others) made threats to “unleash” Chiang Kai-shek’s army on Formosa to reclaim the mainland from Mao. This was a period when the Cold War was at its height and could turn hot at the slightest “spark” which, in fact, almost occurred in October 1962 as a result of the Cuban missile crisis.

For many years after the war, the U.S. Navy closed off the island to everyone except the military. This was to protect the NTTU’s secret training activities from being discovered. In those days Saipan was a very isolated place. The flight time from San Francisco to Honolulu was 9 1/2 hours; Honolulu to Wake, 9 1/2 hours; Wake to Saipan, 8 hours.

In the early ’60s, a CBS radio personality in San Francisco became interested in Amelia Earhart as a result of a conversation with a former resident of Saipan then living in California. Fred Goerner set out in an attempt to learn if he could locate anyone on Saipan that might recall seeing a female flyer on the island almost a quarter century earlier in 1937.

In his search for information, Goerner stumbled upon the NTTU’s facility, the remnants of which are still on Capitol Hill, and later mentioned it in a book planned for publication. It has been alleged that certain people in the government tried to “squash” its publication but failed to realize that Amelia Earhart’s husband was George Putnam of a famous publishing company.

Curiously, when the book entitled The Search For Amelia Earhart went on sale, the secret base on Saipan was abandoned. It should, however, be realized there is no proof of this connection. But, I do find the timing of the two events to be a bit more than a coincidence since I have heard that the NTTU activities were moved to Taiwan (even that is a rumor). If true, it indicates to me that they were interested in continuing with the business in which they were engaged—out of the public eye. Considering the purpose for which the training was presumed to be intended, there would be no “freedom of the press” or snooping investigators in Taiwan to interfere. I distinctly remember being told when I tried to check some of the details of the story to ”stay out of it as it’s none of my business.” So apparently the issue is still sensitive in some quarters.

I believe the NTTU’s departure from Saipan was due in part as a result of Fred Goerner, who visited Saipan (uninvited) in the early ’60s in search for a local indigenous person who may have remembered seeing, or hearing, of an American aviatrix rumored to have been picked up by the Japanese and brought to the island after her aborted attempt to fly around the world in 1937.

And so it leaves us with the following deeper question: Why are there so many unexplained mysteries? British poet Charles Colton wrote, “We injure mysteries, which are matters of faith, by any attempt at explanation, in order to make them matters of reason. Could they be explained, they would cease to be mysteries; and it has been well said that a thing is not necessarily against reason, because it happens to be above it.”

In other words, as mentioned above, could the lady have simply run out of fuel, crashed in the ocean—and there remains—and that’s the end of it?