S3 Ep40: Project Blackwater - A Chasing Earhart Update

An update on the Earhart/Noonan case from Chris Williamson. 

LINKS: Our Website  Vanished on Twitter  Vanished on Instagram  Vanished on TikTok Vanished Facebook Discussion Group Chasing Earhart on Facebook  Chasing Earhart on Twitter SHOW NOTES & FURTHER READING: Nauticos' Official Website About David Jourdan @ Nauticos LLC Nauticos Expedition Portal  How To Find Amelia Earhart Podcast YouTube Amelia Rose Earhart YouTube  Nauticos Reveals Breakthrough Data and Announces New Expedition to Locate Amelia Earhart's Plane @ PR Newswire Deep-sea explorers to launch new search for Amelia Earhart @ UPI

LINKS: Our Website  Rabbit Hole: The Vanishing of Amelia Earhart & Fred Noonan @ Amazon Vanished on Twitter  Vanished on Instagram  Vanished on TikTok Vanished Facebook Discussion Group Chasing Earhart on Facebook  Chasing Earhart on Twitter

LINKS: Our Website  Vanished on Twitter  Vanished on Instagram  Vanished on TikTok Vanished Facebook Discussion Group Chasing Earhart on Facebook  Chasing Earhart on Twitter SHOW NOTES & FURTHER READING: She Was Never Lost: The Amelia Earhart Saga @ Amazon Rich Martini's Blog: Earhart on Saipan Rich Martini's Youtube Channel: Hacking the Afterlife Bob Wallack & Julious Nabers Testimony  Amelia Earhart's Airplane Found on June 19th 1944

“I don’t think there is any closure. I think every generation if going to investigate her again.”There are names in the Amelia Earhart story that echo. Explorers. Historians. Theorists. Voices that rise, fall, and fade as the decades pass.And then… there are the ones that don’t. The ones that stay. The ones that shape the conversation. The ones that—whether you agree with them or not—you have to reckon with.My guest tonight……. is one of those names.She didn’t just step into the Earhart case. She dug in.Through archives, through personal correspondence, through the kind of painstaking research that most people wouldn’t have the patience—or frankly—the stomach to see through.The book she released in 1993, didn’t just tell Amelia Earhart’s story…It reframed it. It stripped away the myth.The headlines. The almost cartoon-like legend that’s been built up over nearly a century……and replaced it with something far more complicated. Far more human. And for a lot of people? Far more uncomfortable. Because she  doesn’t deal in easy answers. She doesn’t deal in tidy narratives. And she’s never been afraid to challenge the status quo—even when it means pushing back against the loudest voices in the room… or the most popular theories in the field. Including some that you—and I—know very well. And that’s what makes this conversation… different. Because today isn’t just about revisiting Amelia Earhart.It’s about interrogating the story. It’s about asking what we think we know… and whether it actually holds up under pressure. It’s about legacy. Memory. Myth-making.And the fine line between history… and storytelling. So whether you’ve read her work cover to cover…Or whether you’ve disagreed with her for years…There’s one thing that’s undeniable: When she speaks on Amelia Earhart—People listen. And tonight…We’re going there.The Final Boss Has Arrived. Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. From Lake Whales, Florida this…is Susan Butler.LINKS: Our Website  Vanished on Twitter  Vanished on Instagram  Vanished on TikTok Vanished Facebook Discussion Group Chasing Earhart on Facebook  Chasing Earhart on Twitter SHOW NOTES & FURTHER READING: East to the Dawn at Amazon Susan's Blog

There’s something strange that happens when a person disappears. First, there are facts. Timelines, coordinates and in this case, fuel calculations. But as years past, facts begin to loosen and memory steps in. Speculation fills the gaps. And slowly — almost invisibly — a life turns into a legend.Amelia Earhart didn’t just vanish in 1937. She multiplied. She became a castaway,a spy, a prisoner, a martyr, a survivor living under an assumed name. A symbol pulled in every direction history could stretch her. And somewhere inside all of that, there was still a real woman. A pilot, a daughter a partner. A public figure navigating a world that both celebrated and constrained her.Tonight, I’m joined by someone who’s spent years examining not just what happened to Amelia Earhart…But what happened to her story. Her new book, does something bold. It doesn’t just chase a single ending. It explores the multiple “deaths” Amelia’s  experienced — culturally, narratively, and symbolically.Because in truth…Amelia has been lost more than once. Lost in the Pacific, in wartime rumor, in conspiracy, and sometimes, lost beneath her own myth.In an era where newly released files are reigniting debates - where social media theories can spread faster than peer-reviewed research - where every satellite image becomes potential proof, it feels important — maybe now more than ever — to pause. To ask, "how did we get here?"How did Amelia Earhart become a canvas onto which generations project their anxieties, hopes, and suspicions? And what does it mean to reclaim the woman from the noise?Tonight’s guest doesn’t approach this story with sensationalism. She approaches it with cultural curiosity. With narrative awareness. With a recognition that mystery doesn’t just live in oceans - it lives in memory. In the stories we tell. In the way each era reshapes history to fit its own reflection.Tonight, we’re going to talk about those reflections. We’re going to examine how Amelia’s story has been retold, repackaged, and sometimes misunderstood. We’ll talk about the tension between evidence and imagination. Between scholarship and spectacle. Between closure, and the human need for one.And maybe most importantly, we’ll talk about why this story refuses to settle. Why 88 years later, Amelia Earhart still occupies space in our collective imagination. Why we’re still here - still searching, still asking.Because sometimes the mystery isn’t just about what happened on July 2, 1937. Sometimes the mystery is about us. What we need from her story. What we fear about it. What we hope it says about risk, ambition, and disappearance.This episode isn’t about solving the case. It’s about understanding how the case lives.How it evolves. How it survives. And how, in many ways, Amelia Earhart has had more than one ending.Let’s get Lost. Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. From Washington D.C. by way of National Geographic, This is Rachel Hartigan.LINKS: Our Website  Vanished on Twitter  Vanished on Instagram  Vanished on TikTok Vanished Facebook Discussion Group Chasing Earhart on Facebook  Chasing Earhart on Twitter SHOW NOTES & FURTHER READING: Rachel's Official Website  Get Lost: Amelia Earhart's Three Mysterious Deaths & One Extraordinary Life @ Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or anywhere you get your books. What Really Happened to Amelia Earhart? @ WBUR Amelia Earhart's Life Is Way More Interesting Than Her Mysterious Death @ National Geographic TIGHAR's Official Website Nauticos' Official Website

I think I wanna start tonight by telling you all a quick story. In 1932, Amelia Earhart completed the first solo transatlantic flight by a woman and became only the second person to make the flight period. She did it in NR7952 her beautiful Lockheed Vega.Now, I love all of Earhart’s famous planes and even though it may not be the most famous one, it’s my personal favorite and has been since I was a kid. During our visit to the Smithsonian a few years ago, I remember standing under it while my wife snapped a picture. “Now look at me and smile!” she said - as she snapped a picture that continues to hang in my office to this day. We stood under it together after the picture and just enjoyed being in the same space as something Amelia loved so much. It was real, we could touch it. “Can you believe we made it here?” she asked? I couldn’t. We were never supposed to make it past the first few episodes of the show and now we were standing in Air & Space in Washington D.C. and we’d already shot several guests for the documentary across the country before that point. I looked up, standing under that wing thinking that it was the most beautiful piece of winged machinery I’d ever laid eyes on. For nearly a century, Amelia Earhart’s name has lived in two worlds at once.One is made of headlines and legend…the kind of stuff  that turns a woman into a symbol, then turns that symbol into a battleground. The other world is quieter. Heavier. More honest. It lives in archives. In carefully preserved artifacts. In labels written by steady hands. In collections protected not for what we want to believe—but for what we can actually prove. Because if there’s one thing this case has taught me… it’s that the mystery doesn’t survive on a lack of answers.It survives on noise. On certainty sold too quickly. On the comforting illusion that the truth must be simple… or cinematic… or just one big discovery away.But Amelia wasn’t simple. And the story she left behind isn’t either.Tonight, we’re sitting down with someone who has spent a lifetime living in the space between myth and material… between the public story and the private record. She’s one of the most trusted voices in American aviation history— a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum curator whose work has helped preserve and interpret the artifacts that define how the world remembers flight. And when it comes to Amelia Earhart specifically, she’s not approaching this from the outside looking in. She’s spent decades stewarding the very things people argue about—general aviation history, flight materiel, aerial cameras… and the story of women in aviation as a living, breathing timeline—not a highlight reel.In other words…when she speaks, the room gets quieter.Because she’s not here to sell us a theory. She’s here to bring us back to the only thing that has ever deserved the steering wheel in this case: the woman and the record.And that matters—because right now, the Amelia Earhart conversation is loud again.New expeditions - new claims - new “finally solved” declarations are running laps around the internet, right now. But before we sprint toward whatever comes next… we need to do something most people skip: We need to slow down. We need to ask what the evidence can actually carry. We need to separate story from story-telling. And we need somebody who knows the difference.She’s devoted more than forty years to collecting and preserving aviation artifacts—not just to keep them safe, but to make sure the stories behind them are told responsibly… in a way that educates and inspires, instead of misleads and inflames.  That kind of work doesn’t make you famous in the way the internet understands fame. It makes you foundational. It makes you the person future historians cite.The person documentaries call when they want to get it right. The person you bring in when the legend gets so big, that the truth struggles to breathe.Oh and, something really cool. You’ve heard me talk about my original 25 - the list I made when I sat down to begin this project so long ago. Not only was she on my original 25 - but she was number 1. How bout that? So…….if you’ve ever wanted to hear what this case sounds like when the noise lowers and the facts step forward— This is your night. And we have one helluva instructor. Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. From Washington, D.C by way of the Smithsonian Air & Space, this is Dorothy Cochrane.LINKS: Our Website  Vanished on Twitter  Vanished on Instagram  Vanished on TikTok Vanished Facebook Discussion Group Chasing Earhart on Facebook  Chasing Earhart on Twitter SHOW NOTES & FURTHER READING: Dorothy Cochrane @ Smithsonian Air & Space  Amelia Earhart Project Recordings @ Smithsonian Air & Space Opinion: Amelia Earhart and the continuing search for her Lockheed Electra @ CNN Amelia Earhart’s Trailblazing Life in Aviation @ Smithsonian Magazine Amelia Earhart Pioneer of Flight: A Conversation with Dorothy Cochrane & Tom Crouch @ Chasing Earhart Aviation Expert Reexamines Amelia Earhart’s disappearance with Bold Claim @ Fox News

For nearly a century, the disappearance of Amelia Earhart has lived in the space between history and legend — a story told and retold, debated and dissected, yet never fully resolved. But every so often, the mystery shifts. Not because of rumor. Not because of speculation. But because of evidence.Tonight’s conversation centers on the physical remnants left behind — fragments of a story buried in coral, sand, and time. Artifacts recovered from the remote island of Nikumaroro have forced us to ask an uncomfortable question:What if we really have been looking in the right place all along?Tonight we hear an update from a man that’s very much been at the center of the Earhart/Noonan search as of late — an archaeologist whose work has focused on the scientific analysis of this material evidence. His research doesn’t promise answers wrapped in certainty, but it does something far more important: it challenges assumptions, tests long-held beliefs, and brings the conversation back to what the evidence actually shows and why it matters. Just a few months ago, the highly publicized trip out to Nikumaroro was postponed. Now, it’s time to find out why. It’s time to slow the story down,  examine what’s been discovered, how it’s been studied, and why these discoveries continue to reshape one of aviation’s greatest mysteries.This isn’t about closing the case. It’s about following the evidence — wherever it leads.Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. From Eugene Oregon, this is the return of Dr. Richard Pettigrew. LINKS: Our Website  Vanished on Twitter  Vanished on Instagram  Vanished on TikTok Vanished Facebook Discussion Group Chasing Earhart on Facebook  Chasing Earhart on Twitter SHOW NOTES & FURTHER READING: The Taraia Object @ The Archeology Channel  Taraia Object Deciphered @ TIGHAR Boards Expedition to locate Amelia Earhart's plane delayed by permit approval process, weather @ CBS News 1 month out: Countdown to the search for Amelia Earhart’s plane begins @ Purdue.edu Purdue Research Foundation and Archaeological Legacy Institute to embark on expedition to identify Amelia Earhart’s missing plane @ Purdue Research Foundation

For more than nine decades, Amelia Earhart’s name has been spoken with reverence and wonder—a flight path etched deep into the world’s imagination, and a disappearance that keeps us chasing echoes of her last sunrise over the Pacific.When I first started out on this journey so long ago, I was filled with optimism. Early in the project, I reached out to a woman who wrote one of my favorite Earhart books ever written. I never thought she’d say yes. But I was surprised a lot in those early days. She’s an award-winning historian whose work has helped broaden our understanding of women’s history, power, and the stories we tell about those who defy gravity—literal and figurative. But what happens when we step off the edge of the known and begin to look at the woman behind the myth? Not just the aviator who vanished, but the human being whose choices, context, and legacy ripple through gender, memory, and cultural terrain that often resists simplification?In her writing, tonight’s guest doesn’t just recount events. She situates them in the emotional landscape of their time, inviting us to confront not only what we remember, but why we remember it at all.In December of 2017, she made her Chasing Earhart debut. Nine years later, she’s back to discuss the latest developments in the Amelia Earhart case, for which there are many, and to remind us all what this story has always been about. Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. From Hoptiken, New Hampshire, this, is Susan WareLINKS: Our Website  Vanished on Twitter  Vanished on Instagram  Vanished on TikTok Vanished Facebook Discussion Group Chasing Earhart on Facebook  Chasing Earhart on Twitter SHOW NOTES & FURTHER READING: Susan Ware's Official Website Susan Ware @ Wikipedia Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism @ Amazon  Amelia Earhart: Pioneering Feminist @ The Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum's YouTube Records Relating to Amelia Earhart @ The National Archives

It’s been 86 days since we last released an episode for this show. I thought I could take some time off. You'd think I’d know by now. Back in May of this year, Amelia Rose Earhart made her Chasing Earhart debut as part of this reboot and we covered a lot of ground. What I didn’t know then, but am privy to know now, is that Amelia Rose, had a trick up her sleeve. At the time of our recording, she was being courted by several groups in the case, asking for her assistance in spring-boarding their searches, and the chase for her participation was very, very real. Since that episode, the search for Amelia Earhart & Fred Noonan has, let’s just say, taken a turn and we’re now in the middle of a race to the answer for a mystery that is now as white hot as it’s ever been. Amelia Rose has made her decision since that time, and it’s indeed given a boost to a team that’s been conducting one of the longest investigations this case has ever seen. Toward the end of August, it was announced that Amelia would join deep ocean exploration company Nauticos in its forthcoming trip out to the Pacific to pick up the search and bring Amelia Mary Earhart home. For good. But…..theirs isn’t the only search going on at the moment. Perhaps Amelia’s strongest professional connection at the time of her disappearance, Purdue University, has now also thrown their hat into the ring by pledging their support to Dr. Rick Pettigrew, and the Archeology Channels’ investigation in the lagoon of Nikumaroro Island - a locale that anyone listening will be very familiar with. I couldn’t write this if I tried. Oh, and one more thing. In the middle of all of this, our sitting president just called for the United States Government to immediately release the Earhart files. Tonight, I’m joined by two men that are making their Chasing Earhart podcast debuts. One is part of my original 25. And the other is at the center of everything Nauticos is doing for their next trip. We couldn’t ask for a better duo to open up all they can, in their efforts to finally finish this story - perhaps once and for all. Let's get to work. Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. This is Jeff Morris and Rod Blocksome of Nauticos. LINKS: Our Website  Vanished on Twitter  Vanished on Instagram  Vanished on TikTok Vanished Facebook Discussion Group Chasing Earhart on Facebook  Chasing Earhart on Twitter SHOW NOTES & FURTHER READING: Nauticos Official Website  Amelia Rose Earhart's Official Website  Amelia Rose Earhart on Youtube  "Nauticos Reveals Breakthrough Data and Announces New Expedition to Locate Amelia Earhart's Plane" @ PR Wire "Trump orders declassification and release of Amelia Earhart files nearly 90 years after aviator’s disappearance" @ The NY Post Amelia Mary Earhart @ The FBI Vault