“Ajima, a jap trader, said three and a half years ago that an American woman pilot came down between Jaluit and Ailinglapalap Atolls [southeastern Marshall Islands] and was picked up by a Japanese fishing-boat crew. She was taken to Japan.”
In July of 1944, during the invasion of Saipan, in the Mariana Islands—far north and west of Howland Island—the Marines found in an abandoned Japanese barracks a photograph album filled with snapshots of Amelia Earhart in her flying clothes. It is known that AE carried a camera with her on the world flight but not that she was carrying a photograph album filled with pictures of herself.
Dr. Brittain, the same who had been on the searching Colorado, was queried in 1944 about the Saipan pictures. He felt that there was a definite connection between the album and the disappearance of the Earhart plane.
Of all the pieces of “evidence” in the stories about the disappearance, the most extraordinary was a piece of wood. It was a fragment of a fence post, with several nail holes in it and with one end badly charred. The piece of wood was found in July, 1942, by Robert D. Weishaupt while he was on beach duty with the Coast Artillery at Baranof Island, Alaska. Weishaupt noticed the burned piece of fence post as it washed in and out from the shore. It looked as if it had some writing on it. He waded in and picked it out of the water.
On one side was printed:
TO MY HUSBAND—I HAVE
CRASHED 250 MLLS FROM HAWAII—N.W.
OUR MOTOR WENT INTO FLAMES—SHARKS
ABOUT ME.
A.E.
and on the other side, simply:
MRS. A.E.
Whoever wrote on the piece of wood and set it adrift on the water perpetrated a cruel hoax. It is extremely unlikely that AE could have crashed 250 miles northwest of Hawaii; the Electra did not have enough fuel to fly another 2,000 miles beyond Howland. And if Amelia had written such a desperate message, on wood suddenly provided in the middle of the Pacific, she would have addressed the message, not “TO MY HUSBAND,” but, rather, to GPP, her husband’s well-known initials; and she would have signed her initials on the reverse side, not “Mrs. A.E.” but AE, because she was not Mrs. Amelia Earhart.