Amelia's SOS

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Also, just go on whatever platform you listen to it and please rate and review it. It really helps us in getting discovered. And if you have a suggestion for anything, just reach out to us at our website, True Weird Stuff dot com. And thank you so much for listening. It happened more than 89 years ago, and it's a mystery that's yet to be solved, which might account for the wild online frenzy that erupted in March 2026 or for the vanished aviator Amelia Earhart.

Not that she's ever been forgotten. Dozens of books have been written about her life from scholarly accounts to novels to children's picture books for history buffs and conspiracy theories and aviation nerds. The Amelia Earhart story is one of those baffling questions that always feels this close to an answer. But somehow it's an answer that never comes.

We act like Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan simply vanished in Earhart's Lockheed Electra over the Pacific without a trace. And that isn't even close to the truth. Multiple dozens, even distress calls were heard by ham radio operators, calls that included not just the call sign for Earhart's plane, but in a female voice.

Los Angeles, July 3rd, 1937, faint distress signals in a voice from Amelia Earhart were picked up by two amateur radio operators at 6.42 and at 7 o'clock a.m. Pacific time today. K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-N. K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-N. K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-N. K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-N. K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-N. One of those operators, Carl Pierson, recognized the voice.

It was Amelia Earhart, with whom Pierson had recently spoken face-to-face. His colleague, Walter McMenamy, also recognized her voice immediately. McMenamy had been in wireless contact with Earhart throughout one of her previous flights. The two men were among many who claimed to have picked up Earhart's distress calls.

They acknowledged that the signal was weak. It was hard to hear her voice in all the dense static. Their story was immediately backed up by a New Zealand warship, the Achilles, that reported a similar transmission using Earhart's call sign. And yet, it was somehow decided that all, or mostly all, of these so-called Earhart distress transmissions were...

K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-N. K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-N. K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-N. K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-N. K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-N. A hoax. And they got a small beam of light in here. K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-N. K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-N. True. Weird. Stuff. Distress signals signed with the call letters of Amelia Earhart's monoplane flashed over the Pacific today in the midst of a feverish sea and sky hunt for the famed aviatrix missing in equatorial waters surrounding tiny Howland Island.

Earhart was no novice pilot. Nine years before the fateful flight that brought her down, she became the first female passenger to fly across the Atlantic. The pilots for that journey, Wilmer Stutz and Lewis Gordon. Four years later, Amelia Earhart took the controls of a Lockheed Vega 5B and became the first woman in history to achieve a solo transatlantic flight.

Now, it was a miserable experience. The Vega had little insulation, so it was icy cold in the cockpit. The altimeter broke. The wings were coated with ice. Earhart missed her planned landing in Paris and instead put down in a cow pasture in Ireland. Having startled a plowman and his horses as her plane swooped in from the sky, Earhart later said she felt great relief at the sight of the Irish coastline.

Still, she exited the cockpit with the same breezy confidence that had marked her Kansas girlhood. She was exhausted but undaunted. The better word probably is thrilled. This was the flight that earned her the United States Distinguished Flying Cross. Oh, oh look, here's a chance to dust off Charles Curtis, vice president to Herbert Hoover.

Like many VIPs in our nation's brief history, he's lucky if he's even the answer to a Jeopardy question now. But he was a great big deal back in 1932 when he arrived in Los Angeles to open the Olympic Games. Thanks to the worldwide Great Depression, attendance would be down. Some countries wouldn't even participate. Vice President Curtis was there to put a good face on things.

And since he was there, why not award the Distinguished Flying Cross to Amelia Earhart while he was at it? The daring lady pilot, the aviatrix who captured headlines and hearts. It seemed like the whole country was talking about Amelia Earhart. The people needed inspiration. The people needed a hero. The moment felt right, what with the economic shadow cast over the Summer Olympic Games.

It was good to have something to hope for, to celebrate at a time when the American people were being ground into dust by the extreme hardships of the Great Depression. As Vice President Curtis made his way through the throngs of reporters and spectators at the State Building, the flight that would launch Earhart into tragic immortality was still five years away.

On that July morning in 1932, as Curtis stepped to the podium and beamed at his audience, the future for Amelia Earhart was just as bright and endless as the California sky. Dear Miss Earhart, the Vice President has been requested to represent me in presenting you the Distinguished Flying Cross authorized by the Congress in a joint resolution which was approved on July 2nd, 1932.

At the presentation ceremony, I am asking him to hand you this message of congratulations upon the many and well-deserved honors which your knowledge of the science and art of aviation and your great skill and courageous spirit as a pilot and navigator have brought you and through you to the womanhood of America. Faithfully yours, Herbert Hoover.

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For a limited time, try OneSkin with 15% off using the code TrueWeirdStuff at OneSkin.co slash TrueWeirdStuff. That's 15% off OneSkin.co code TrueWeirdStuff. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support TrueWeirdStuff. Tell them we sent you. Amelia Earhart once said, Women must pay for everything.

They do get more glory than men for comparable feats, but they also get more notoriety when they crash. That's broadly true, though. Now we'll have to fight it out in the comments with a bunch of ticked off chodes whose highest goals in life apparently include being routinely mistaken for bots. Anyway, the thing to remember when you look at Amelia Earhart's flying career is that commercial aviation was pretty much born in the 1930s.

It wasn't just that Earhart was a novelty. Flying was a novelty. Fewer than 6,000 Americans boarded a commercial flight in 1930. By 1938, that number had jumped to well over a million. As always, when it comes to human history, war played a huge part. In the aftermath of World War I, the victorious nations found themselves with quite a significant number of planes, both fighter and support vehicles on hand.

And just like that, the commercial air travel industry took off. New metallic planes weren't just more durable during wartime. They also withstood dramatic changes in climate that a vehicle might experience when traveling between, say, Boston and the Caribbean. Metal-bodied planes didn't just enable longer routes. They enabled air travel along longitudinal lines where climates change from arctic to temperate to tropical to arid and then back again.

Here's a fun fact. The very first commercial flight back in 1914 achieved a cruising altitude of just 5 feet. Yup, 5 feet off the ground. By the 1930s, planes were cruising at about 13,000 feet at speeds of up to 200 miles an hour. Flights could be wildly unpredictable back then, dropping hundreds of feet in seconds, and there was no seatbelt indicator to warn you.

It took till the 1940s for airlines to agree on standardized cabin pressure, which meant that early passengers needed oxygen on a regular basis. There was no heat or air conditioning on those planes. The crappy little acrylic blankets some airlines offer now are a remnant of the days when flyers actually needed blankets to avoid hypothermia.

And those little air sickness bags you find tucked into every airplane seat back? Those are pretty new, too. In the early days of flight, vomit bowls were stored beneath each seat. There you were, shivering or sweltering, barfing into a bowl, maybe gasping for air, and paying the equivalent of $6,200 to fly from New York City to Los Angeles.

Makes you appreciate the painfully stupid zone boarding, cramped seating, long security lines, and countless delays of today's commercial air travel. A little bit. Well, a tiny bit. So, you can see how a beautiful, bold adventure like Amelia Earhart, with that wide, almost cocky American grin, captured the attention of the entire world.

Tall and striking in her trousers and bomber jacket, Johnny Scarf nodded at her neck, gray eyes squinted against the sun, hair cropped in a tousled bob. She was brave and she was glamorous. She was a pioneer and she was a celebrity. Obsessed with flying since childhood, Amelia Earhart was a born explorer, her passion for the skies eclipsing any notion of risk.

I lay no claim to advancing scientific data other than advancing flying knowledge. I can only say that I do it because I want to. Huh. A woman just casually exploding gender stereotypes and doing a shocking and unexpected thing simply because she wants to? Wait, wait, what's that? Oh, that was just history reminding us that this sort of thing doesn't typically end well.

Yeah, well, look here, history. We're just going to ignore you like we always do. Amelia Earhart wasn't content to be the first woman to make a solo transatlantic flight. Her ambitions were bigger, far grander than that. What Earhart wanted was to be the first woman pilot to circumnavigate the globe. It had been done first in 1924 by a team of eight military officers.

They spent one hundred and seventy five days flying a twenty seven thousand mile route with 74 stops. Then in 1933, pilot named Wiley Post became the first to complete a solo flight around the world. Post was a huge figure in aviation. He discovered the jet stream. You'd think that would be enough to make you a household name.

And he developed one of the first pressure suits for pilots. And he even died in a famous plane crash, along with the legendary humorous Will Rogers in Alaska in 1935. But I guess a dude's got to be on The Bachelor or something these days if he wants to be remembered. Earhart saw Post's achievement and planned to kick it up a notch.

Her twenty nine thousand mile proposed route would differ from Post's dramatically. Where he had essentially hopped from landmass to landmass, Earhart's map took her over fast stretches of open ocean, including a stop for fuel on a tiny dot of land between Hawaii and Australia, a place called Howland Island. Though she intended to be accompanied by human navigators, Earhart would be alone at the controls.

There was no autopilot. The weather was unpredictable. Turbulence was unavoidable. The stamina a pilot would need for such a journey, the physical and psychological strength. Earhart was chomping at the bit, even as her two navigators may have nursed their own doubts. Because in the days leading up to that fateful departure, Earhart spent less time in the cockpit of her Lockheed Electra plane than she did giving lectures and making appearances for her sponsors.

The whirlwind of press and publicity that followed her every move was helped along by Earhart's husband, George Palmer Putnam, who was as much publicist as partner. It was Putnam who all but shoved Earhart into the spotlight after her 1928 Atlantic crossing. In fact, that whole flight in which Earhart was a passenger, not a pilot, that flight happened because Putnam believed he could make a fast, easy profit off of it by publishing a hastily slapped together memoir about it.

Publishing was Putnam's business, after all, and he had a sharp eye for what would sell. There were other female aviators at the time, all with far more experience. But Putnam took one look at Earhart and knew that her beauty and her sass would sell. The book was called 20 Hours 40 Minutes and allegedly involved a ghostwriter.

I should like to have made it better, but time was short and I done as good as I could. Of course, it sold well. It was Putnam, after all, who published Charles Lindbergh's blockbuster account of his own historic flight. And no one was more sold on Amelia Earhart than George Putnam, who, though already married, pursued Earhart romantically until she agreed to a trial marriage.

Trial because Amelia Earhart feared losing her independence. She insisted on equal responsibilities in all things and refused to change her last name. Amelia Earhart's fame and mass public appeal was the couple's greatest asset. And Putnam understood that this was an asset that just might be great depression proof. It was Earhart's paid appearances that paid their bills.

Earhart's sponsors who kept the lights on. Sponsors like Beach Nut Chewing Gum and Lucky Strike Cigarettes and Modern Air Luggage. Earhart joined the editorial staff at Cosmopolitan Magazine and the faculty at Purdue University. And when she wasn't on the ground earning her keep, Earhart was in the air setting new records.

She followed up her transatlantic achievement by making the first nonstop transcontinental flight by a woman. Burbank to Newark, August 1932, 19 hours, five minutes. In July 1933, she repeated that same flight in 17 hours and seven minutes, breaking her own record. In January 1935, Earhart made the first solo flight from Hawaii to California.

That might not seem like a big deal unless you understand just how far from California Hawaii actually is. That was a journey of 2,408 miles, just 39 miles fewer than her Burbank to Newark flight. A mighty cheer arose from the 5,000 persons assembled at the Oakland airfield. The crowd surged towards the plane and stopped little short of its whirring propeller blades.

It was at that point feminine instinct got the better of the globe trotting flyer and she reached for the comb. That flight had been a dramatic one, at least from the perspective of the watching world. There were long stretches when Earhart couldn't be reached via radio. There were reports of thick fog, low fuel and a pilot off course.

Earhart insisted that she'd never been lost, not for a minute, and also hadn't been worried. Though she did admit, I thought I would like to have the sight of land a couple of times. Earhart had been out of communication for about three hours. When asked how she'd spent that time as the world bit its nails and waited for word of the superstar aviatrix, Amelia said, I listened to a message broadcast from my husband and was greatly cheered by his voice.

I also listened to musical programs broadcast throughout the night. Then she added her opinion that the use of two way voice radio communication was highly advisable for planes making long distance flights. Maybe coming as a surprise to you that this wasn't already kind of a great big obvious given. Like, what do you mean we're just going to soar around the skies with no means of communicating with other planes or the ground?

Are you people insane? They were, I guess, until 1938 when the Army Airways communication system was established. It was strongly encouraged, if not outright mandated, that aircraft carry two way radios. This was the dawn of what we now call air traffic control. What my sensations were during the trip, I cannot tell. Anyone who wishes to know could attempt such folly himself.

Certainly, I don't experience nervousness knowing well enough to say whatever nervousness I might have for the time when it would be necessary. I only know I sat a very long time and got exceedingly dirty. But always when I fly, I'm impressed with the beauty of it. The loveliness of what I see. As Earhart headed off to her hotel for a hot bath and a long sleep, she said, commercial flights between the Hawaiian Islands and California are entirely feasible.

They're inevitable and will be flying everywhere in a short time. Here's a little taste of how the world viewed Amelia Earhart as she made plans for her next record setting flight. February 1936. The tall, slim, utterly charming girl. Amelia Earhart was 39 years old at this point. Mind you, an age you might be more inclined to call a grown woman.

The tall, slim, utterly charming girl in the very feminine brown lace dinner gown who ran down the steps of the Fifth Avenue entrance to the Tutwiler Hole. Friday evening was none other than the tousled haired boyish figure who has smiled at you from the front page of your newspaper a hundred times as the headlines screamed.

Amelia Earhart, first woman to fly the Atlantic. Amelia Earhart, first person to solo Pacific from Honolulu. Amelia Earhart, first woman to make transcontinental nonstop flight. Amelia Earhart, first person to solo from Mexico to New York City. Amelia Earhart, first woman to receive Distinguished Flying Cross. Here was none of the air complexioned, rough voiced, hard woman valiantly trying to live up to a real man's job.

This was Amelia Earhart who from graceful step to tousled and feminine blonde head was exhibiting two things, looks and intelligence. So much of the coverage of Amelia Earhart was fixated on gender and appearance. It just was. Reporters focused on her clothing, her hair, her twinkling eyes. There were breathless questions about silly things like what the lady pilot ate for breakfast.

Flyers are always hungry, whether it's apprehension over where the next meal is coming from or just appetite. We are ready to eat. Earhart preferred grapefruit bran flakes and hot cocoa. People were obsessed. They wanted every detail of her life the same way we do now with celebrities. Dramatic portraits of Miss Earhart and Mr. Putnam hang on the wall above a staircase leading to the balcony.

A staircase with posts made of beautiful Guatemalan carved wood. Bare skin rugs collected on Mr. Putnam's Baffin Island expedition. Walrus tusks and Peruvian shrunken human heads. An old Spanish chest and ancient Chinese hangings contribute a cosmopolitan mood. The Putnams share a study. Among the documents here is a matrix of front pages of newspapers that carried the story of Miss Earhart's last transatlantic flight.

See, even back then we were treated to breathless descriptions of celebrity houses. And of course, since you can't be a celebrity in America without at least a whiff of Scandal Dog in your days, Earhart was accused of pulling strings to get a man named Eugene Vidal appointed as director of the Air Bureau that was the federal agency responsible for regulating civil aviation.

Her former technical advisor Paul Mance was embroiled in an ugly divorce with the press calling him a wife slapper. Earhart declared that she found the implication that she was somehow involved in any way unintelligible. Her own marriage was the stuff of near endless speculation. How much time did she spend with her husband?

How did he feel about her keeping her last name? And so on. What Earhart wanted to talk about instead of haircuts or houses or husbands. Fear is women's greatest handicap in aviation, or we might call it tradition. From the cradle, women are reared with the thought of fear and physical inferiority. Women's place is in the hum of things these days.

And why shouldn't she come out of the kitchen? Individuals, men or women should do the work for which they are best suited. If a man can wash dishes better than a woman, why shouldn't he? This all of this was the backdrop for Amelia Earhart's plan to circumnavigate the globe in 1937 and her Lockheed Electra. So, you know, this really isn't a story about Amelia Earhart's life or her career or even her death.

Others have already told that story far better and in much greater detail than we ever could. This is a story about a distress call that went unanswered. And why? K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-S K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-S K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-S January 25th, 1937. Amelia Earhart, ocean-spanning aviatrix and America's first lady of air, will begin a round-the-world flight in her $80,000 aeronautical laboratory in February 1937.

Her course calls for stops in French Indochina, India, Arabia, East Africa, Brazil, British Guinea, Venezuela and Miami. If completed, the flight will be the nearest to an equatorial circuit in aviation history. If completed. K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-S K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-S K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-S K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-S K-H-A-Q-Q-S-O-S If. As casually as a housewife outlining a shopping tour, Miss Amelia Earhart Putnam described the route to be taken as As close to the equator as I can go.

Her greatest scientific interest in the globe-girdling tour? To find out more about the reactions of human beings to flight. I'm going to be a guinea pig this time. I want to know what food is best for leg flights. To find out what happens to us humans after hours and hours of flying and why. It all began on May 20th in Oakland, California.

Earhart's Lockheed Electra flew from California to Arizona, to Louisiana, to Florida. The jump-off point for the international journey. Amelia Earhart took off for San Juan, Puerto Rico at 5.57 a.m. Eastern Standard Time today, June 1st, 1937. On the first hop of her proposed just-for-fun flight around the world. The slim aviatrix waved a bare arm in farewell and gunned the big twin-motored monoplane some 2,200 feet along the runway before she lifted it easily into the brilliant tropical dawn.

Just before takeoff, her husband, George Palmer Putnam, leaned into the cockpit to kiss her goodbye and shake hands with her navigator, Captain Fred Noonan. At 6.40 a.m., Earhart keyed the mic and sent out the first of many radio transmissions to come. Everything is okay. Proceeding. The world followed Earhart's flight path.

Brazil, Senegal, Mali, Ethiopia, Thailand, Singapore, and Australia. But there was a whole lot the world didn't know. For starters, Earhart's plane was heavy. So heavy that even officials at Lockheed were privately worried. The weight of the fuel alone, 1,150 gallons, each gallon weighing six pounds. The aircraft had been stripped of every non-essential part, including the marine frequency radio.

A reporter pressed Earhart for an answer as to why she'd removed the device that would allow the plane to send distress calls to ships at sea. Dead weight. Besides, neither Fred nor I have much use at Morse Code. Makes more sense to leave it behind. On the ground in Darwin, Australia, there was more bad news regarding radio on Earhart's plane.

An airport official named Stan Rose found that Earhart's radio direction finder was no longer in operation. Which meant she couldn't reliably fix her position over open ocean. A little foreshadowing there. Nor could she establish real-time contact with ships at sea or with listening stations. Shockingly, that radio had been stone-cold dead since Earhart and Noonan left the Americas.

Rose was startled by how little Earhart and Noonan understood about basic equipment maintenance. He gave her some spare fuses and taught her how to replace them. He also offered her some special assistance for her next leg. After she took off, he would give her back bearings, radioed directional readings, every 15 minutes to help her keep her course.

Earhart gratefully accepted. Rose ended up offering her precise bearings for an hour until the Electra flew out of range. By the time Earhart and Noonan took off from New Guinea for what would be the doomed and final leg of the flight, both were exhausted. Earhart was thin to the point of frailty, both from so many missed meals.

We don't really eat while we're flying, but we make up for it on the ground. Except, not really. At Indicentary, which Earhart picked up in Indonesia and couldn't seem to clear, tossed in her concerns about her navigator's sobriety. Noonan drank himself silly on the ground and toted his hangovers aboard for every takeoff.

Between that and some much-needed repairs on the Electra, Earhart delayed departing from New Guinea. She sent a clipped two-sentence telegram to her husband. Radio misunderstanding and personal unfitness probably will hold one day. July 1st, 1937. Earhart again tackled the problem of weight and balance, stripping even more from the Electra.

One item left behind, stashed under the bed in Noonan's hotel room? Smoke bombs intended to aid in what was hoped to be the unlikely event of needing a rescue at sea. 11,000 gallons of fuel were loaded, along with 64 gallons of engine oil. The plane now weighed in at more than 5,000 pounds over its normal gross weight.

But Earhart managed to coax it off the ground with her usual confident skill. Not much more than a month ago, I was on the other shore of the Pacific, looking westward. This evening, I looked eastward over the Pacific. In those fast-moving days which have intervened, the whole width of the world has passed behind us, except this broad ocean.

I shall be glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us. Earhart pointed the Electra east, and as she flew toward a bank of heavy clouds, she radioed back to the ground crew at New Guinea. Goodbye. I'm turning over to night frequency. That would be 3105 kilohertz for our fellow radio nerds. Earhart's daytime frequency was 6210 kilohertz.

And according to the non-profit International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, a.k.a. TIGER... At the time of the Earhart disappearance, by international agreement, the only legal voice radio transmissions on 3105 kilohertz anywhere in the world... ...were sent by U.S.-registered civil aircraft calling a limited number of airports in the continental United States...

...and Canadian commercial carriers flying between Vancouver and Seattle. The sole exceptions were Amelia Earhart, who had permission to use 3105 kilohertz as a calling frequency during her world flight... ...and the Coast Guard cutter, Itasca, whose calls were duly recorded in the ship's radio log. That Coast Guard cutter? The Itasca was stationed at Howland Island to support the Earhart flight.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My voice is reaching you from Honolulu, Hawaii, 2,000 miles southwest of the Pacific Coast. We're in the same little room off the main studios of KGMB, from which almost continuously since Saturday night... ...we have sent out, in cooperation with the Navy and Coast Guard, messages of instruction to the Earhart plane.

This search must go forward on the assumption that the plane was able to reach the surface of the water safely... ...or to make an emergency landing upon some small island or reef in the Pacific. We simply cannot allow ourselves to think for one minute that the plane and its two occupants... ...Amelia Earhart Putnam and Fred J. Noonan, are not safe somewhere.

The warship Achilles broadcast that it intercepted two SOS calls from Miss Earhart. None of the messages gave an estimated location of the plane, but by the best calculations... ...its fuel supply would have been exhausted. It was believed that the plane would be floating... ...possibly within 100 miles of this tiny dot of an island that offered the only haven for landing.

Howland Island, Amelia Earhart's last known destination. Two amateur radio operators in Los Angeles were listening. McMinimee and Pierson picked up the calls until 1.30 a.m. Pacific time. Well, the calls just say SOS, SOS, SOS, and then the call letters, KHAQQ, over and over. KHAQQ, SOS. KHAQQ, SOS. KHAQQ, SOS. KHAQQ, SOS.

KHAQQ, SOS. They're being repeated every 15 seconds, no position given, and the calls are very weak. But clear, apparently they're trying to conserve their batteries. Adrift hundreds of miles from land, a virtual dot on the water... ...which will be extremely difficult to locate either by air or from the sea. Howland Island, which the plane overshot, comprises only a few square miles...

...and is but eight feet above the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Give us a few dashes if you hear this. KHAQQ, SOS. Searchers that was announced would have roughly 12 hours of daylight at this time of year... ...to hunt the vast Pacific for the speck that might be Earhart and Noonan. Despite the optimism expressed by Earhart's husband...

...that the pair were probably fishing for their dinner and sitting by a fire made of driftwood... ...optimism only faintly echoed by Noonan's wife, searchers were less hopeful. The equatorial sun was merciless. It wasn't clear that the over-heavy Lockheed Electra could float for any significant length of time. The Pacific is a vast and unforgiving thing.

Searchers put little faith in the numerous reports of amateur radio operators... ...of supposed messages from Earhart... ...and asserted that there was no convincing proof that she and Noonan remained alive. The Coast Guard cutter Itasca made a fruitless search in the Howland Island vicinity... ...belching black smoke in the hope of being seen by the flyers.

Then it was ordered to return to Howland. Regardless of how little faith the searchers had in those reported distress calls... ...we know now just how incredibly unlikely it is... ...that those distress calls picked up via ham radio were a hoax. No Central Pacific ground stations received on 3105 kilohertz. All transport aircraft in the area used assigned route frequencies instead of 3105 kilohertz.

Therefore, other than Itasca... ...Earhart's Electra was the only plausible Central Pacific source of voice signals on 3105 kilohertz. And not to get all kinds of crazy technical... ...but the transmitter on Earhart's plane enabled signals to propagate thousands of miles under suitable conditions. This involved something called harmonic frequencies...

...and the Electra did not have harmonic suppression circuitry. And sweet baby Jesus, in a monoplane, just trust me when I tell you... ...it'll make your head hurt, but the science and math of it all adds up to this. Credible sources in widely separated locations in the U.S., Canada, and the Central Pacific... ...reported hearing a woman speaking English...

...and in some instances saying she was Amelia Earhart... ...requesting help on 3105 kilohertz or a harmonic of that frequency. In one case, two widely separated credible sources... ...one in Wyoming and one in eastern Canada... ...simultaneously heard a woman saying she was Amelia Earhart and requesting help. The Wyoming reception was on 15525 kilohertz...

...the fifth harmonic of 3105 kilohertz... ...and the eastern Canada reception was on 18630 kilohertz... ...the sixth harmonic of 3105 kilohertz. The British freighter Morby and Navy radio operators at Wailupi Station near Honolulu... ...definitely have reported hearing a garbled message in code... ...from what was believed possibly to be the plane.

Ray Mahoney, Cincinnati radio amateur, reported tonight, July 5th... ...he heard Amelia Earhart, missing round-the-world aviatrix... ...broadcast distress signals at 10-minute intervals just today... ...from a position he interpreted to be within 57 miles of Howland Island. The signals were weak, he reported. Mahoney said that all he could make out were the call letters of her plane...

...and something about a reef. Earhart's technical advisor, Paul Mance, said... If those really were Miss Earhart's words, she and Noonan must be safe. She could not broadcast from the surface of the Pacific. Only if her plane has landed undamaged on some reef or atoll... ...could she transmit sounds. 218 North Howland, call KLHAQQ, beyond north.

Don't hold with us much longer above water. Shabazz. This transmission was sent more than 72 hours after Earhart's plane was forced down. It was picked up by the Itasca and a tramp steamer and at least three other operators... ...described the signal as extremely poor and fragmentary. Amateur radio operators along the West Coast reported receiving voice messages...

...believed to be Amelia Earhart. Still alive. Better hurry. Tell husband, all right. A five-year-old boy in Wyoming heard her. Lockheed Electra. Reef. Howard Koons in San Francisco heard her. KHAQQ. SOS. Ernest Henderson in Washington State heard her. 50. 128. QQ. Waterlogged. Can't look much longer. Mrs. Thelma Donovan, Indianapolis heard her.

Sending equipment is getting weak. Has landed on water. Don't know position. Navigator trying to check latitude and longitude. Getting hungry. But can survive for 24 hours. Mabel Laramore in Texas heard her. Down. Island. Uninhabited. The land. Heard on water. 15-year-old Betty Klenck in St. Petersburg, Florida heard her.

Water's high. Water's knee deep. Let me out. Help us, quick. KHAQQ. Tiger believes that that teenage girl probably listened to the harrowing final moments of Amelia Earhart's life. The U.S. Navy dispatched its fastest ships from San Diego, led by the aircraft carrier Lexington, with 37 pursuit planes aboard. The battleship Colorado left from Honolulu, toting three more Navy planes with medium cruising range.

The Colorado arrived on the scene first. Three Corsair float planes were dispatched, and a search was carried out in an altitude of 1,000 feet. The officer in charge of the mission stated that with visibility and sea conditions, he considered it possible to spot even a raft from a distance of five miles. After flying more than 20 hours, the Colorado's planes covered a radius more than 25,000 square miles.

The Lexington took over on July 12, 1937. This time the focus was on the waters north and west of Howland Island. The world seemed to hold its breath. After three days and thousands of square miles, though, the search was suspended. As one sailor wrote, I don't think they'll ever be found. We searched the most likely area.

Prophetic words and true until maybe now. Maybe that sailor could never have dreamed something like Google Earth would one day exist. And then an Australian pilot named Justin Myers would use Google Earth to spot an anomaly near a remote South Pacific island called Nikumaroro. Yeah, well, it was strange because, first of all, I know it's a cylinder and it could be anything, really.

But you measure it and I measure it and it's 12 meters long. And you think, well, surely someone knows about this. And there must be something else there to confirm it could be an airplane. So a few days later, I looked back on Google Earth and sure enough, 110 feet to the west of what I believe is a fuselage, which is a half-exposed radial engine, which is half-exposed out of coral.

Beneath it is what looks like a half-exposed wheel as well, which coincidentally fits with the airplane. So this all indicates that it possibly was a false landed onto the reef. And that discovery triggered an explosive reaction online. Not so much awe and wonder at the possibility of this near century old mystery finally being solved.

More like outrage and disgust that so many of the distress calls allegedly sent by Earhart were dismissed as a hoax. Which means for a whole lot of people that Amelia Earhart was left to die for reasons. Well, why? What reasons could there be to deliberately leave Earhart in noon in a drift in the Pacific condemned to an excruciating death at sea?

Because we know something now about all of those transmissions that were picked up by amateur operators. Even if a hoaxer had a suitable transmitter and was a woman or had a female accomplice, it would be impossible to control who would hear the signal and thus impossible to direct the hoax to a specific target or group of targets.

A hoax transmitter in the continental U.S. should have been heard by at least one of the 44 airport stations maintaining a continuous listening watch on 3105 kilohertz. A hoax transmitter on or near the West Coast should have been heard by the Special Coast Guard facility set up near San Francisco to listen for Earhart signals.

And a hoax transmitter in Hawaii should have been heard loud and clear simultaneously at the Navy, Coast Guard, and Pan American Airways stations in Hawaii listening for Earhart signals. No such signals were reported. Tiger couldn't be more blunt. Given the numerous constraints mitigating against successfully perpetrating a signal transmission hoax, the likelihood of such events is vanishingly small.

It's a fact that radio wasn't Earhart's strength. It was the technology she had little interest in. She really didn't understand the relationship between wavelength and frequency. On at least one occasion, she got the two scrambled and gave out the wrong frequencies to at least two ships. Not a fatal mistake, but worrisome.

Still troubling as that may be, it doesn't change the fact that those distress calls were being transmitted and received. The decision to dismiss those calls, that's a little trickier to uncover. The official story was a diligent and careful search, disrupted and distracted by rumors and pranks coming from amateur radio operators.

But as you now know, the facts and the evidence don't support that version of events. Not at all. In Washington, Charles Horner, president of the National Aeronautic Association, said it would be awfully painful to pronounce Earhart's flight foolhardy in the face of such a courageous attempt. A master stroke right there.

Charles Horner delivers the insult without getting his own hands dirty because it was whispered and not quietly. The Earhart had perhaps brought this terrible fate upon herself when they called her the for fun flyer. It was a compliment dipped in acid meant to sting, even if just a little. And there was a little bit of how do we solve a problem like Amelia vibe in the air.

Washington aviation officials viewed reports of the search for Amelia Earhart and her navigator with growing determination to discourage such flights in the future. And that search for Amelia Earhart was called off on July 18th, 1937. It had been extensive, heroic even, but no match for the Pacific. Hunting for Earhart's plane was like trying to find one specific grain of sand on the beach.

All but impossible, especially since the U.S. Navy dismissed those distress calls picked up by ham radio. How might history be different? Had those reports been taken seriously? Would it have mattered? Tigers concluded, based on the evidence we do have, that Earhart and Noonan were able to send messages via their two way radio only during low tide, which meant that the people who'd heard Amelia Earhart's calls were the very definition of being in the right place at the right time.

If children and housewives and hobbyists could hear her, why couldn't the Navy or the Coast Guard? The Navy searchers listening to Earhart's frequencies heard a carrier wave, which indicated that someone was speaking, but most heard nothing more than that. But thanks to the scientific principle of harmonics, Tiger says, others heard much more.

In addition to the primary frequencies, the transmitter also put out harmonics, multiples of those wavelengths. High harmonic frequencies skip off the ionosphere and can carry great distances, but clear reception is unpredictable. So some people believe that Amelia Earhart was left to die because she wasn't taken seriously as a pilot.

She was a woman lurking about for fun. Even the headlines announcing her death used phrases like the for fun flyer. That's a pretty dark theory, isn't it? This notion that she was intentionally abandoned. The truth is probably less deliberately evil, but in actuality, worse. Search attempts failed, not due to malice, but to arrogance.

The Navy knew what it knew and worked how it worked. And the fact that Earhart's transmissions didn't fit that model, which means that information that could have led to a rescue was ignored because it didn't fit protocol. The conclusion was that folks were just lying to make themselves part of the biggest story of the day.

We go looking for villains and stories like this. It's always nice to name the monster. It lets us feel safe in a world that isn't. But arrogance and institutional rigidity, we're just following orders, is a whole lot more common than outright mustache twirling evil. It's more dangerous, too. In 1993, the U.S. Naval Institute published these conclusions about the failed search for Amelia Earhart and those peculiar signals picked up by amateur radio operators.

If the peculiar signals were, in fact, from the Earhart plane, then the following may be deduced from the radio signals. A successful landing had been made. The plane did not nose over or break up. However, damage increased the mismatch between antenna and transmitter, which affected modulation enough to make voice signals unintelligible.

The landing was not in the open sea. Had it been, saltwater seepage would have disabled the transmitting gear in a relatively short time. Earhart survived the landing. Noonan survived. A man's voice was distinctly heard on the peculiar signal by Midway. It was unintelligible. Either Earhart or Noonan or both were alive with the plane at least until July 5th, 1937.

The peculiar signals were last heard then. Water's high. Water's knee deep. Let me out. Help us, quick. K-H-A-Q-Q. K-H-A-Q-Q. K-H-A-Q-Q. K-H-A-Q-Q. K-H-A-Q-Q. K-H-A-Q-Q. Next time on True Weird Stuff. Once upon a time, there was a village out in the far countryside. And all of the men went away to a terrible, terrible war.

When they came home, they were changed. They were broken. They were violent. And so, the women of the village made a plan. And one by one by one, the men began to die. It took about 20 years before they discovered the angel makers of Nagreve. And that's on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode.

Sam Moore, Kary "Doc" Bowser, Lamar Richardson, Don Morgan, who almost got on, but there was some kind of foul up, and Erin Cox as Amelia Earhart. Sherry, this is a story that I was somewhat familiar with. I mean, some parts of it I had heard before. But it seems like this story pops up every once in a while with somebody having some new possible information.

It seems like even though this happened back in the 1930s, we still have an endless fascination for what happened to Amelia Earhart. It's such a mystery, you know. And there have been so many crazy theories. One was that she and Fred Noonan were captured by the Japanese Army and made POWs. Another, that they lived for quite some time on this tiny atoll off of, like, you know, fish or whatever until they died.

There's a terrible, gruesome theory that they were eaten by giant coconut crabs. And the thing about the Amelia Earhart disappearance is that they'll turn up a compact, a sun-bleached tube of Freckle Cream, the same brand that Amelia was known to use. And they'll go, Well, lookie there, it's a compact of Freckle Cream, probably not Amelia Earhart.

It's like, excuse you, but how many other women might have found themselves in this remote speck in the Pacific? Bones have been found and studied and rumored and then debunked. This newest twist in the Earhart disappearance, this discovery of something that looks an awful lot like a submerged Lockheed Electra. Now, you know, who even knows what's going to come of it?

The way the news cycle is, who can keep up? But this is very intriguing. And, you know, will people be satisfied? Will they accept that, yeah, this is exactly where the plane went down? Because even knowing that that's her plane, we're still not going to really know what happened. So there's that part of the Amelia Earhart story, this enduring mystery.

And then there's this other part where dozens and dozens of distress calls were just dismissed out of hand as hoaxes in the moment that they were happening. And it's hard not to see that as at best incompetent and at worst kind of sinister. Well, I mean, you know, there's always the possibility that people are willing to inject themselves into a story, you know, just for the thrill of that.

However, it seems like there were so many of them and they all seem to be so credible with what they were saying and a similarity with some of the things that they were saying that I don't think that you can easily dismiss them. Well, and you can get into the weeds here really fast. My poor brain trying to comprehend all this radio engineering stuff.

So Amelia was broadcasting at 3105 kilohertz, which was a channel set aside for Amelia and the Itasca in this area. Now, when we talked in the episode about harmonic frequencies, like, okay, so our day job is in radio. And even though radio is invisible, quote-unquote, it's a physical thing. AM radio, FM radio, shortwave radio, this is physical.

It's not visible to you, but it's physical property. And so the 3105 kilohertz that Amelia was cleared to broadcast on, those harmonic frequencies, so she's broadcasting at 3105. And think of the harmonic frequencies as sound that's skipping and bouncing and going rogue off of that in the physical world, right? So the ham radio operators all over the United States were getting, thank you, Mojo, were getting, they were picking up those harmonic frequencies that were bouncing off the ionosphere and hearing that.

But the dealio was the frequencies these ham radio operators were listening to could only be derived from 3105 kilohertz. There was no other place it could come from. So we can kind of say for a fact that, and the detail that these transmissions had in them, you're really going to tell me that some random kid in Wyoming or Florida suddenly has, like, deep and detailed knowledge of call signs and distress calls and, you know, planes taking on water?

I think that it is such an enormous stretch to suggest that those were hoaxes. And now even today, we know that they were real. They were legitimate distress calls. They weren't being hoaxed at all in any way, which circles you back to the question, why was the Navy and the Coast Guard and the government, why were they so quick to dismiss those distress calls?

One of the things about how this radio works, and if you ever, I'm so, I'm like, as a kid, I was such a nerd about listening to the radio. But if you listen to AM radio at night, you can hear radio stations from far away. And this bouncing off of the ionosphere is part of the reason that you can hear that. So that lets you know, you're saying, well, how could they have?

And the two things that work in there was the harmonics that would allow it to go to, like, this other frequency and then this bouncing off of the ionosphere. So that's how, you know, that sort of thing could happen. So one of the really fascinating parts of this story, you know, as we bring the Amelia Earhart mystery into the current moment, is that Tiger, that's the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery.

Tiger has been investigating the Earhart disappearance. And they have stated definitively that there is no longer any doubt that Amelia Earhart's last flight ended not with the plane being ditched or crashing into the Pacific Ocean, but in a forced landing on an atoll on the South Pacific. They have investigated this exhaustively, right down to the timing of these distress calls could only happen during low tide because Earhart's radio, the primitive radio that was left in the Lockheed Electra, wouldn't function if submerged.

So they could only transmit during low tide. And that told the investigators at Tiger that the plane, if the plane can transmit at low tide, that means the water goes away and it's sitting on land, right? So teeny tiny atoll. So we know pretty definitively, I mean, at this point, if you're still maintaining that those distress calls were a hoax, I'm not sure what you're basing that on because there's just no evidence to support the idea of a hoax.

And these amateur radio operators that picked up these calls, and I put this in the episode, and I know that makes your eyes roll back because it's such technical detail, but there was no way that some rando prankster anywhere in the continental United States could send these messages and have them received by the radio operators who received them.

There's no way that you could come from Honolulu East with a hoax. It just wasn't technically possible. So the thing we have to accept is that Amelia Earhart's distress calls were ignored. We just have to accept it. And we don't have to make it into a big sinister conspiracy theory and say they let her die because she's a woman and they thought she was an unserious person.

We don't have to go all that far. But we do have to accept the evidence, which is the calls were ignored. Now, you can then ask the question, would this story have had a different ending if those distress calls had been attended to? That's a harder question to answer. And you can also ask, and I think it's fair to ask, and I'm a girl's girl and I'm always going to defend whoever, especially in these stories.

I defend these people, right? But Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan took off to fly around the world about as clueless about radio as you could be. And because the Electra was so heavy from carrying fuel and oil, she kept stripping, stripping, stripping. And to her, all this extra radio nonsense was non-essential. So you have to say the Navy made a mistake on the distress calls.

Earhart and Noonan made a series of pretty costly mistakes in terms of the radio equipment that they, A, stripped from the plane, and B, weren't really clear on how to operate. Fair? Yeah, that's fair. It was a little surprising that you didn't have at least one of them that had a little bit more knowledge about some of that.

You would think that that would be an important part of taking on such a journey. The other thing that I do wonder about, and of course you touched on it before, there was in the Pacific, so World War II did not begin officially until Germany invaded Poland in 1939, as far as most Americans are concerned. And then we got into it when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941.

The thing is that the war was really going on long before then. Japan was taking over all kinds of things over in the Pacific during that time, starting, I don't know, sometime in the 1930s. So you caught that. There was a military in New Zealand flagged warship who picked up one of the distress calls in that part of the Pacific.

Yeah, you caught that. So I don't know that that had anything to do with it, but it wasn't peacetime over in that part of the world. The Japanese were invading all kinds of things in all kinds of countries. I just thought I would sort of point that out, because that's not hearsay. That actually did happen. That's a factor.

I mean, when we look at all the factors in this story, a lot of people really realized for the first time how big the Pacific Ocean was when the Artemis mission sent back a picture of Earth from the Pacific side, which is all blue. It's all water. Most of our, when we close our eyes, our mental picture of the Earth, we see water, we see continents, we see clouds, like the famous moonshot, right, Earth shot pictures.

But the Artemis crew sending back the Pacific side had a lot of people going, well, this launch is fake, Artemis is fake, where are the continents, not realizing how vast the Pacific is. And if you want an idea of how vast the Pacific is, go rewatch Cast Away, the Tom Hanks movie. Well, and also we've had a couple of airliners.

One was Indonesian. I think there was another one that were lost somewhere in the Pacific. I don't want to get into that. That's a whole other rabbit hole. But they weren't able to find where they were with the technology that we have now. And, of course, back then, of course, you didn't have that level of technology.

And it was, I'll just say it was fascinating. I didn't know, I love the story that what you told at the beginning of the episode where you're talking about what air travel was like, commercial air travel and whatnot, that you had to have a blanket because you're cold up there. It's cold up there and you're not insulated, not heated.

You're freezing, you're barfing into a bowl, and you're receiving supplemental oxygen. And that was commercial aviation. And I thought, you know, sometimes, like, should I leave it in, should I take it out? But I think to really appreciate two things, one, the magnitude of what Earhart was trying to accomplish, and two, the difficulty, the difficulty of the search makes more sense when you understand, like, just how new and primitive flying was.

You know, that's the thing about it. You know, when Lindbergh went across the Atlantic, he flew low over the ocean so he could get water splashed up on his face so he wouldn't fall asleep. I mean, and so you realize that what they were doing really was, what she was accomplishing was not just a media trick. It really was courageous.

And she was the person. It was interesting because, you know, you hear these names like Amelia Earhart, but you don't know anything about her. And I enjoy getting to learn a little bit more about her humanity through this as well. She was, I mean, she was writing a column for Cosmopolitan Magazine, okay? Like, she was a great big deal.

And she made for great press. She was beautiful and confident and sassy and all of the things. And at the same time that she was really setting out to achieve some big historic first, she wasn't necessarily treated with the kind of seriousness that Post or Lindbergh were. I mean, I can't remember a single news story about Wiley Post discussing his tousled hair and his piercing eyes.

Now, Lindbergh was described, you know, the handsome chiseled aviator and all that. There was a little bit of the lady flyer who's larking about and doing it for fun, this tall striking girl. She's 39 years old. She's not a girl. But there was this attempt to sort of make her into a pinup in a way, right? Right, right.

Well, and it's self-serving to them because if they do it that way, it will make more people interested. Do you see what I mean? Yeah. I mean, it's obviously, it's not fair. You could see in the coverage of Amelia Earhart, you could see the beginnings of the celebrity entertainment journalism machine. You can see it happening with Amelia Earhart.

So at the same time that she's this heroic figure who's just, you know, a superstar, she wasn't taken as seriously as you might think. I think contemporary people are surprised to learn that Amelia Earhart wasn't the only lady pilot. And in fact, as lady pilots went back then, she was the least, I don't want to say qualified.

That may not be the right word. But there were others with far more significant and deep experience. Absolutely. But there was something about Amelia. She was captivating. And George Putnam, here she's married to, as in Putnam Publishing, here she's married to a man who is not only just besotted with her, but he sees her as a cash cow.

And he knows just how to capitalize on it. So her own husband was a big part of the reason that Amelia became Amelia Earhart, in bright lights and all caps. Now, I think it's also, as we're saying to the Navy and the Coast Guard, hey, boys, what's up with just completely dismissing dozens of frantic distress calls with Earhart's call sign in Earhart's voice?

What's up with that, boys? At the same time, we have to turn around and say to Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, really, you're going to circumnavigate the globe and you don't really have functioning radio? You don't know Morse code? You don't know Morse code? Like your very life could depend on that. Noonan was a drunk.

That's not news. That's an open fact, right? Noonan was a terrible drunk. And he would be sober in the plane and drunk as soon as he got on the ground. But what do we know about what happens to you when you drink a lot the night before? Yeah, the next day you still have the effects of it. So I wanted to ask you, it's funny you bring him up because that's what I wanted to ask you.

She is Amelia Earhart at this point. Could she not get anybody better than him? There were supposed to be two navigators initially, but I mean the weight, you know, everything. Amelia was just obsessed with the weight of the Electra because you have to get the thing off the ground and keep it off the ground. There are reports of her, of this plane wobbling down the runway like a pregnant whale.

Even people that were a little bit critical were forced to agree that only a pilot of extreme skill could get this thing up. And she did, right? Noonan, you know, depending on which version of events you hear, Noonan catches a lot of blame and a lot of flack. But I think if Amelia Earhart were here, she would tell you, I am the pilot.

It is my mission. I take responsibility, which I admire about her. But the day that they left for this doomed final leg of the flight, he was hungover and she was very, very sick. She was living on tomato juice. They kept cans and cans and cans of tomato juice in the cockpit. So she was living on tomato juice. She didn't have scurvy, but she had picked up dysentery in Indonesia.

And for those of you that weren't raised by superstitious Sicilian peasants, dysentery is like the worst kind of diarrhea. I mean, people die from it. It's dehydrating and terrible. She was described walking to the plane the morning of that final takeoff as being pale, shaky, extremely underweight. And Noonan is hungover, which didn't necessarily doom them because that wasn't the first time that either one of them had been in that position.

But it kind of speaks to the idea that let's say they got into some pretty serious trouble and they weren't in the best shape to solve the problems quickly or efficiently. You know, when you're sick, you're not thinking clearly when you're hungover. I mean, this is like a million tiny little details that added up to a tragedy.

But what made me want to do this particular episode was the discourse online after the pilot found what he believes to be the Lockheed Electra submerged near a reef in the Pacific near Howland Island. The discourse immediately ignited with they deliberately let her die because she was a problem. She was inspiring copycats at a time when aviation was brand new and just a million reasons that all sound kind of flimsy, but enough voices screaming them.

And pretty soon there was this whole running thread online about how they left her to die because she was a woman. But the only thing about that is and I mean, it's possible, but everybody connected with this. Exactly. I mean, it's hard. That's kind of hard to believe. You know, when people are in distress, the first thing you want to do is to save them.

Strangers, somebody is a stranger is stranded somewhere. What's the first thing you want to do? You want to save them. So I have to believe that not everybody was feeling that way in this situation. And if that plane was found on a reef, of course, the way the ocean goes, I mean, it might have been something that was above ground and they could have survived for a little while.

But now here we are, you know, 80 years later, 90 years later. And, you know, it's possible that the reef has shifted. The earth has shifted. And now the plane is underwater. Well, even if you if you listen to the distress calls and we had that, you know, the text of the I could find the text of the distress calls, what she said, and then Max recreated them, which was awesome.

When you listen to them, you hear her describing the water is up to my knees. The water is rising. So there were a couple of issues here. This idea that she and Fred Noonan could become, you know, ginger and the professor or something on Gilligan's Island. You need fresh water to drink. Yeah, you can't you. You're going to die of thirst long before anything else gets you stranded out there on an on an atoll or a reef in the middle of the Pacific.

So even if you know, even if they could like catch a fish or build a fire and the odds of building a fire completely like let that fantasy go because they could only transmit during low tide, which meant that the whatever they were perched on was submerged for a good portion of every day. And any wood that might have been there would have been saturated.

So, you know, when you start pulling the threads on this, you you begin losing hope in some sort of tropical survivalist fairy tale, which was something as a kid I remember really holding on to. So for me, the story wasn't so much like they let her die because she's a woman. It was more like, well, y'all y'all were awfully quick to rush to judgment on these distress calls.

Yeah, because if you had taken them seriously, there might have been a fighting chance of locating them. Now, at the same time, let me jump to the other side of the argument and say, hey, maybe if y'all hadn't thrown out the smoke bombs that were designed to help locate you. Yeah, from a passing plane or ship at sea. So we got no radio.

We can't contact ships at sea. We have no way to broadcast our position. We don't even have flares or smoke bombs now. So like everybody here made absolutely colossal fatal errors. There was one on one of those calls. It sort of it was something that was a little different than the other ones. She had a message for her husband.

I'm OK. And that that to me made it seem really credible because that is one of the things that you would want to do if you're in a situation. You want to let a loved one know. Oh, and by the way, yeah, we get all this going on. By the way, my husband, I'm OK. When I first dove into this rabbit hole, I believed that the distress calls were genuine and that they were not hoaxed.

And I believe them because some of the people that came forward, like the two amateur radio radio operators in California, one in California, one in Washington state. They both had spoken with Amelia Earhart. They recognized her voice instantly and they were both kind of on aviation geeks. So they were like really keen on tracking her flight.

They knew the call signs of her plane. Right. I thought those two guys had a tremendous amount of credibility. Yes, I agree with you on that. And they also understood the frequency and the harmonic thing, which, again, my brain is going to bleed. So I went into this thinking, I believe those I believe these distress calls were legitimate, even as I could not have told you one thing about harmonic frequencies.

And then the more I dove, here comes Tiger, which is incredibly respected group, an investigative group. And they said these were legitimate. No hoax, full stop. Our investigation is concluded. So we no longer have to debate whether or not some clever prankster was pretending to be Amelia Earhart. That that that party's over.

Now we have to wrestle with why the authorities were so quick to rush to judgment on that. And there's another conspiracy theory, to your point earlier about how in the Pacific in in 1937, there was already activity and that, you know, maybe the Navy and the Coast Guard were hesitant to go in to where the Howland Island might have been.

Right. Because the American public had had no expectation that, you know, we were very isolationist back then and no expectation that the United States would join the war. So there are layers upon layers and agendas nested within agendas. And I suspect that the truth is somewhere kind of like in the warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones.

You know, I suspect the truth is somewhere where it could be found. But I'm not sure that we'll ever definitively know, even if that's her plane and even if we send a ship out there and pull that thing out of the water and investigate, you know, till the cows come home. Do you think we're ever going to really 100 percent?

No, no, no. It will be interesting if they were if that is indeed the plane, if they're able to get get that plane, that certainly would. Well, I'm not giving closure to everything that happened with it. At least let us know where they ended up. Now, there were some early pioneers of aviation that were very careful. You can when you read like newspaper stories of the day, they were very careful in their choice of words.

But if there wasn't a tremendous amount of respect in that community, I don't think for Amelia Earhart, it seemed more like a stunt to some of those aviators than, you know, a legitimate mission of exploration. Whether or not that's fair, I guess that's up to you to decide. It's I don't think that it is fair, but I certainly understand why somebody may feel that way.

Who is a, quote, serious aviator? Do you know what I mean? Somebody who is who who is. Well, I would throw the I'd throw back as a counter argument to that. The great explorers of human history were often a little bit ready shoot aim. That there's something in that personality, that that that kind of individual, you know, that is prepared to leap into the unknown.

There is a little bit of that kind of, you know, ballsiness that that doesn't seem necessarily as analytical as you might like it to be. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. There's a lot of people who have accomplished stuff who were not qualified to accomplish them through the course of history because of that ballsiness.

Right. But I'll give you a recent example of this sort of spirit of exploration. But we didn't dot all the I's and cross all the T's. And that would be the submersible that imploded on its trip down to Titanic. That is an example of there was every reason to fear a catastrophic failure, which is what happened. There was every reason.

And there were people who were who were blowing the whistle and saying things like the equivalent of, hey, hey, don't dump the radio. Hang on to those smoke bombs. You know what I mean? There were people. Right. And involved in that Titan submersible tragedy that were pushing forcefully against that. But what did the CEO who went down with his ship and more of them should, frankly, what did this see?

What was the CEO's attitude? Can you remember if you think back on the Titan disaster? Now, when the CEO not not the not the person that died in it. Oh, no. The CEO died in it. Yeah. With his 15 year old kid. Right. Right. What was his attitude? You know, this is this is human exploration. There are risks. Right. He was kind of cowboy about it.

He was. Was he not? He was. And so we see this, like when you look at human history, we see this sort of like ballsy, bad ass cowboy mentality, cowgirl mentality. And often it ends in a ticker tape parade. But not always. No, that is. I mean, that's the risk. It's the risk we've taken with space exploration, even with everybody thinking all the T's were crossed and the I's were dotted.

I mean, we've had we had deaths with the Apollo before they even took off with the training mission. And then with the two. Gemini. The two Challenger and Columbia. Yeah. The two space shuttles that. So, I mean, that is always going to be the risk that you have, no matter how prepared you might be. And I wonder, too. I mean, this was 1937.

So it was just four short years later that we entered World War Two. I would imagine that any interest in trying to find out what happened to them wane during that time. And now all of a sudden, eight years have passed by the time you get to the end of World War Two. And people aren't aren't thinking about it nearly as much because of what has just occurred with World War Two.

So I imagine that if that hadn't occurred, there might have been a little bit more follow up on this. I think you're right that the you know, she got pushed off the headlines off the front pages, you know. And of course, the part of the Pacific where it's believed that Earhart's plane went down that, you know, that was Japanese enemy territory for a good chunk of the time.

So you can come up with you can come up with a million reasons. And I think what I suspect and it's unsatisfying because we like and we like a story to have a hero and a villain. We like a plot twist. We like a climax. And then we like a happy ending of some sort. Right. I suspect that if we could get into Indiana Jones's warehouse and tunnel all the way to the back and open up the box marked Amelia Earhart.

I suspect what we might find is a thousand miscalculations and errors and bad choices that snowballed into a tragedy that there wasn't some dark conspiracy to let the lady fly or die. Yeah. Now, there are people who are very critical of some of Earhart's decisions, you know, and they kind of that argument kind of falls under.

Well, she brought it on herself. And there you know, that's a that's an argument that a lot of people make. And the same argument was made, you know, in the case of the Titan submersible. And I think it's fair. I do. I think it's fair to be critical and to say you you offloaded safety equipment, you offloaded radio equipment.

You didn't know how to operate your gear. You didn't know Morse code. What did you think was going to happen if you ran into trouble? I I don't personally. That's like my personal take on it. But I think it's fair for somebody to feel that way. How about you? You can. But you can. You can. You can. But what about this?

And what about this to death? If you're going to make a bold decision to do something like this? And I think they must have said, yeah, that's all true. But we feel like we are confident enough to what we're doing that we're going to be able to to get this done. So I suppose that that's that's what happened, you know, in the midst of that.

I think, you know, as we as we wrap up this episode, I think that something that we have to accept is that there's always going to be a certain level of risk in something like this. You know, with the Artemis mission that just went up and, you know, you know, looped the moon. That we had a happy ending, but that that's not necessarily guaranteed, right?

It's not. We get we get used to these heroes and these brilliant scientists and these, you know, mathematicians. And here's a happy ending. We expect that. But at the same time, we also understand that stuff's risky, that not everybody comes home from these kinds of adventures. I'll tell you the thing that I take away from this.

It was something that you said when she was describing the situation. And this is true with the Artemis astronauts as well. And we got to, of course, get that shared to us. They looked at the world from a different perspective. And what they saw was the great beauty from that perspective. And the way that touched her passionately as a flyer, not just somebody who is and I'm going to do this and I'm going to accomplish that.

But the absolute joy she took in what she was doing. Yeah. She really was alive in a way that, you know, a lot of us aren't. We're so we're so beaten down by the grind and the routine. And, you know, one day blends into the next and the next. She may not have had a long life, but she was alive for every minute of it. And she was a trailblazer in many ways, including the time she spent in the skies.

She was a trailblazer in other ways, too. And her husband. So, you know, at some point the episode has to end. Right. But her husband was destroyed. By the loss of Amelia Earhart. So he might have, you know, functioned as a little bit as an empresario and he treated her a little bit like a meal ticket. But at the end of the day, he was head over heels in love and had this whole vision of this glorious future.

And that was that was taken. And, you know, can you imagine the shock and the horror that George Putnam felt because he had. And in this way, Amelia Earhart was lucky in that for a woman who didn't think marriage was going to be for her, she couldn't bear to have her wings clipped. She was not she was not someone that you were going to be able to keep home.

Right. And so she married him in this trial marriage, which is a concept that just gives me to go. I was wondering if it doesn't work out. Do you have a trial divorce? Yeah, just this trial. I guess that was living together back in the day. That's got to say that because that would be a sin or what have you. She entered into this trial marriage and and they made it work.

They were they were kind of devoted. They're kind of crazy about each other. And it it was going to take a very specific kind of man for to be Amelia Earhart's husband at a time when, you know, the other husbands at the country club did not have these kinds of situations. So there's a lot of heartbreak in this story, and it's easy to forget the heart, the hearts that were broken.

Fred Noonan's wife, Carol, was destroyed. OK, destroyed by the loss of her husband. These were real people with real families and real consequences. But Amelia Earhart, when she took off that day with her hungover navigator and her overloaded plane and her shaky hands and her rolling stomach, when she headed into that bank of clouds.

She just flew right into a kind of immortality that no amount of the truth is ever, ever, ever going to be able to change. Hmm. I mean, we're just not going to know. I am. I have become even more fascinated by this story with this episode. And I just it's it's there's a whole bunch of questions that have been raised that I had never thought about before with this.

There were I mean, we could have done, you know, like price. Like how many is this? You know what I mean? Yeah, we've had a few of these that you could probably do six episodes about. And I tried really hard. I told myself at the beginning self only the distress calls. But if you don't know about her stripping the plane for radio and safety gear, then you know what I mean?

Like you kind of have to know, because at the end of this particular story, you're looking at the Navy and the Coast Guard and Amelia Earhart. We're looking all around and going, I think everybody might have contributed to this tragedy just a little bit. And I can't help thinking what it must have been like. Let's go back in time. It's 1937.

There's no TV. Really? There's no movie theaters. Really? It's the Great Depression. People are busted. And you know, you might have a shortwave radio. How thrilling to spin that dial and hear the Amelia Earhart, the famous Amelia Earhart. Only to realize that what you're hearing, if you're that 15 year old girl in Florida, you're hearing her dying.

Can you imagine what it was like for the people, all the people, all the people, Max, who heard those distress calls? It must have been haunting. It probably haunted them for the rest of their lives. It's just, yeah. So next time on True Weird Stuff, listen. So the revelation that there's this online group called the Rape Academy, where men give each other tips on how to drug, sedate and rape their wives, roll video on it and post it online as so-called sleep content.

The revelation of that has rocked, I won't say the world, because it seems to mostly be rocking women. But it made me think as I was reading about that. And I thought, you know, there was a time when a man who got on your last damn nerve would fall ill, violently ill even, and then abruptly die. And people would be like, oh my goodness, it's too bad.

Well, once upon a time, before there was a divorce and, you know, an opportunity to exit an unhappy marriage in a safe way, women just poisoned the unholy living shit out of their men. And there's a, no, they did. And there's an infamous legendary story. It started in World War I in Hungary. And for about 20 years, the bodies just piled up.

Husbands, brothers, sometimes kids, in-laws, you know, just piled up and piled up. And finally, after a gazillion anonymous letters had been sent to police and ignored, an attorney opened up one of these letters and said, you know what, let's go have a look, let's exhume the body. And that opened the world's eyes to a village where about 300 or more men were murdered by poison.

And the women who did it weren't really very remorseful. So we're going to pay a visit to a tiny little rural place called Nagreve and meet the angel makers there. And I just want to say right now into a microphone while this is being recorded, if anything happens to my husband and they get a look at my search history, which has, I kid you not, arsenic in corpse, arsenic impact decomposition, half-life arsenic in the body.

Kevin cannot even get food poisoning or I'm going to prison for the rest of my life. And that'll be on, thank you all for listening, that'll be on the next True Weird Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner, and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered.

And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website TrueWeirdStuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything True Weird is waiting for you at TrueWeirdStuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production.

Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash.

Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2026 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.