Amelia's SOS

Summary

TRUE WEIRD STUFF: “Amelia’s SOS”
Podcast: True Weird Stuff | Date: April 18, 2026
Host: Sheri Lynch

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Episode Overview

In this captivating episode, Sheri Lynch and her co-host dive into the enduring mystery surrounding Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, taking a closer look at the dozens of distress radio calls that were received in the days after Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan vanished over the Pacific in 1937. Through a blend of historical records, technical explanations, and modern revelations, the episode scrutinizes why many of those SOS calls—possibly Earhart’s last pleas for help—were dismissed as hoaxes, and explores new evidence that suggests they were very likely real.

The episode highlights both the drama and tragedy of one of history’s greatest unsolved mysteries, challenging mainstream narratives and emphasizing the human, technical, and cultural aspects of the Earhart disappearance.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Stage: Why the Earhart Mystery Endures

• Earhart’s disappearance in 1937 remains one of the 20th century’s most persistent unsolved mysteries.
• In March 2026, renewed online fervor exploded over possible evidence found by an Australian pilot using Google Earth, potentially identifying the resting place of Earhart’s plane ([44:59]).
• The episode’s focus: the distress calls received after Earhart’s vanishing and why they were largely ignored as hoaxes.

Earhart’s Aviation Achievements and Persona

• Earhart was a pioneering aviator—first woman to solo the Atlantic, first to fly from Hawaii to California, and a significant media celebrity.
• Her accomplishments were consistently celebrated alongside commentary about her appearance and “girlish” qualities ([6:00], [22:19]).
• Quotes illustrating Earhart’s perspective:
  • “Women must pay for everything they do. Get more glory than men for comparable feats, but they also get more notoriety when they crash.” – Amelia Earhart ([10:19])
  • “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.” – Amelia Earhart ([13:48])

The Fateful World Flight: Planning and Peril

• Earhart and Noonan’s round-the-world journey in a Lockheed Electra was plagued with equipment problems, notably around radio navigation, stripped-out gear for weight, and personal health issues ([30:13], [32:23]).
• Key technical failings included:
  • Removal of the marine frequency radio and lack of Morse code proficiency ([30:13])
  • A broken radio direction finder discovered in Australia ([30:22])
• Earhart’s last messages before setting out from New Guinea emphasized both exhaustion and technical shortcomings ([32:23]).

The Distress Calls: Evidence and Dismissal

• Multiple amateur radio operators across the U.S. and as far away as Canada and New Zealand claimed to have received faint distress calls carrying Earhart’s call sign KHAQQ ([2:39], [35:34]).

• Timestamps of discussion and dramatization:

  • [3:14], [4:08], [26:47], [27:44], [36:19], [41:09], [41:50], [42:19], [42:34], [43:02], [43:53], and other moments featuring recreated distress call audio.

• Technical breakdown:

  • The unique propagation of Earhart’s radio frequency (3105 kHz) and its harmonics made hoaxing virtually impossible ([38:37], [46:45]).
  • Signals picked up in Wyoming and Canada were harmonics of Earhart’s frequency, further supporting authenticity ([39:27]).
  • “Even if a hoaxer had a suitable transmitter… it would be impossible to control who would hear the signal…” – Technical Expert ([46:45])

• Dismissal by authorities:

  • Despite widespread reception by credible amateurs, the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and press dismissed these as pranks, citing lack of position info and technical skepticism ([37:56]).
  • “The official story was a diligent and careful search, disrupted… by rumors and pranks… But… the facts and the evidence don’t support that version of events. Not at all.” – Sheri Lynch ([47:46])

Modern Evidence and Reassessment

• Google Earth spotting by Justin Myers of what appears to be a submerged Lockheed Electra near Nikumaroro Atoll ([44:59]).
  • “You measure it, and it’s 12 meters long… there must be something else there… a half exposed radial engine, which coincidentally fits with the airplane.” – Justin Myers (~[44:59])
• The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) and others now assert:
  • The SOS calls were genuine and could only have come from Earhart’s plane.
  • The calls likely could only be sent during low tide, implying the aircraft landed on a reef and was washed over at high tide ([61:01]).
  • “We know pretty definitively… those distress calls were not hoaxes. They were real.” – Sheri Lynch ([61:54])

Cultural and Institutional Bias

• The episode challenges the narrative that Earhart was not taken seriously, both as a woman and as a pilot.
  • Earhart’s technical shortcomings are acknowledged (e.g., not understanding radio frequency operations), but the hosts argue that dismissing her valid distress calls reflected institutional arrogance more than malice ([51:16], [47:46]).
  • “The Navy knew what it knew… information that could have led to a rescue was ignored because it didn’t fit protocol.” – Sheri Lynch ([51:16])
• Discussion of how gender and celebrity shaped both Earhart’s legacy and media coverage ([68:28], [69:43]).

Tragedy, Accountability, and Enduring Mystery

• Both authorities and Earhart/Noonan are critiqued for a series of mistakes: ignoring radio skills/protocols, stripping out vital safety equipment, and the lack of an effective rescue ([78:05]).
• Multiple theories are discussed—from abduction to survival on an island, to death by exposure, or (gruesomely) coconut crabs ([55:30]).
• The hosts ultimately see the tragedy as the product of a cascade of errors and misplaced confidence, not a deliberate cover-up ([87:36]).
  • Quotes: “Everybody here made absolutely colossal, fatal errors.” – Sheri Lynch ([78:05])
  • “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, you know?” – Sheri Lynch ([86:30])

Human Legacy and Personal Reflection

• Earhart’s legacy is not diminished by her death—it is amplified by the enduring mystery.
  • “She may not have had a long life, but she was alive for every minute of it.” – Sheri Lynch ([90:17])
• The emotional impact on families (Putnam, Noonan) is highlighted, alongside a recognition of Earhart's complicated, pioneering, and sometimes overlooked “humanity as a flyer” ([91:44]).
• The hosts underline the tragedy of the distress call listeners, haunted for life by hearing Earhart’s last words ([94:52]).

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On Earhart’s challenges as a woman pilot:
  “Women must pay for everything they do. Get more glory than men for comparable feats, but they also get more notoriety when they crash.” – Amelia Earhart ([10:19])

• On risk and adventure:
  “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.” – Amelia Earhart ([13:48])

• Earhart’s technical acknowledgment:
  “Dead weight. Besides, neither Fred nor I have much use at Morse code. Makes more sense to leave it behind on the ground.” – Amelia Earhart ([30:13])

• On missed rescue opportunities:
  “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… 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.” – Sheri Lynch ([61:01]-[61:54])

• On institutional arrogance:
  “The Navy knew what it knew and worked how it worked. And the fact that Earhart’s transmissions didn’t fit that much model… information that could have led to a rescue was ignored because it didn’t fit protocol.” – Sheri Lynch ([51:16])

• On Amelia’s humanity and the episode’s theme:
  “She may not have had a long life, but she was alive for every minute of it.” – Sheri Lynch ([90:17])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:34 | Introduction of Earhart’s vanishing and framing of the ongoing mystery | | 02:39-04:22 | Recreation and discussion of distress calls received after disappearance (various operator quotes)| | 10:19 | Amelia Earhart on gender, risk, and fame | | 26:12-26:47 | Framing: “This… is not a story about… her career or even her death… It’s about a distress call that went unanswered. And why.” | | 29:25-30:22 | The stripped-down Electra: technical issues and missing equipment | | 36:12-43:02 | Distress calls: detail and variety of recipients across the U.S. and beyond | | 44:59 | Justin Myers describes Google Earth discovery of possible Electra remains | | 46:45-47:46 | Technical evidence debunking the possibility of hoax distress signals | | 61:01-61:54 | Modern investigation: TIGHAR’s conclusions affirming the reality of Earhart’s distress calls | | 68:28-69:43 | Media focus on Earhart’s appearance and gender | | 78:49 | Host’s personal conviction the distress calls were genuine | | 86:30 | Reflection: cascade of errors and no grand conspiracy | | 90:17 | Earhart’s legacy and living fully |

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Conclusion

The episode meticulously lays out the technical, personal, and institutional blunders that combined to seal the fate of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan. The hosts convincingly argue that dozens of dismissed distress calls were, in fact, real—and that the tragedy was compounded not by malice, but by a blend of arrogance, outdated protocol, and lack of preparedness. Through contemporary evidence, plentiful quotes, and a humanizing portrait of Earhart, “Amelia’s SOS” invites listeners to reconsider the real lessons of this nearly century-old enigma.

Transcript

[Host 1]

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[Narrator]

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[Host 1]

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[Narrator]

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[Sherry Lynch]

Hey, true weirdos. I hope you know how much all of us here appreciate you. You are the people we're making this show for, and your feedback means the world to us. We were so blown away for this show to win as many awards as it has. I mean, at this point, we're working for hardware and handouts, but at the end of the day, it's you people will walk up to us on the street. I had a guy wave at me wearing a true Weird Stuff T shirt at the park. It just is the coolest thing. And that's 100% you. And thank you.

[Host 1]

And we're just covering costs to be able to present this to you. We're not really making any money with it, so if you could do us a favor and patronize any sponsors that you hear throughout the show, that would be great. 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, TrueWeirdStuff. And thank you so much for listening.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 over 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.

[Narrator]

Los Angeles, July 3, 1937. Faint distress signals in a voice from Amelia Earhart were picked up by two amateur radio operators at 6:42 and at 7:00am Pacific Time today.

[Distress Call Voice]

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 N K H A Q Q S O N One of

[Sherry Lynch]

those operators, Carl Pearson, recognized the voice. It was Amelia Earhart with whom people Pearson had recently spoken face to face. His colleague, Walter McManamy also recognized her voice immediately. McManamy 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 and all the dense static. Their story was immediately backed up by a newspaper 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 KHAQQ SOS

[Distress Call Voice]

KHAQQ SOS K H a Q Q son K H A Q Q S O N K H A Q Q

[Sherry Lynch]

S O N a hoax.

[Radio Announcer]

Make out a small beam of light against the mirror.

[Host 1]

True weird stuff.

[Narrator]

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.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 Louis 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 ploughman 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'd 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.

[Host 1]

Dear Ms. 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 2, 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.

[Sherry Lynch]

You're a listener to true weird stuff. So you know what a giant science nerd fangirl I am. And I apply science to everything in my life, especially skin care. This is why I'm so crazy about One Skin. One Skin was founded by an all female team of longevity scientists. I'm talking stem cell biology and skin regeneration. Tissue engineering. And you will feel it and see it on your face. I am telling you. Texture, tone, brightness, glow. One skin is the one thing to have in your bathroom for your skin. Born from over a decade of longevity research, One Skin's OS1 peptide is proven to target the visible signs of aging, helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age for a limited time, try one skin with 15 off using the code True Weird Stuff at Oneskin Co. True weird stuff. That's 15% off off oneskin code TrueWeirdStuff after you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support True Weird Stuff. Tell them we sent you Are you

[Amelia Earhart]

really buying a car online on Autotrader right now?

[Sherry Lynch]

Really?

[Amelia Earhart]

At a playground?

[Sherry Lynch]

Yeah, really. Look at these listings from dealers.

[Amelia Earhart]

Wow, your search can really get that specific.

[Sherry Lynch]

Really?

[Amelia Earhart]

And you just put in your info and boom. Cars in your budget.

[Sherry Lynch]

Mom needs a second. Honey.

[Amelia Earhart]

You can really have it delivered.

[Sherry Lynch]

Really? Or I can pick it up at the dealership. One sec sweetie, Mommy's buying a car. I think your kid is walking up the slide. Kyle Again? Really? Autotrader? Buy your car online? Really? Amelia Earhart once said, women must pay

[Amelia Earhart]

for everything they do. Get more glory than men for comparable feats, but they also get more notoriety when they crash.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 6,000Americans 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.

[Narrator]

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 changed from arctic to temperate to tropical to arid and then back again.

[Sherry Lynch]

Here's a fun the very first commercial flight, back in 1914, achieved a cruising altitude of just five feet. Yep, five feet off the ground. By the 1930s, planes were cruising at about 13,000ft 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 seatback? Those are pretty new, too. In the early days of flight, vomit bowls were stored beneath. 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 adventurer 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's scarf knotted 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.

[Amelia Earhart]

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.

[Distress Call Voice]

Huh?

[Sherry Lynch]

A woman just casually exploding gender stereotypes and doing a shocking and unexpected unexpected things 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 175 days flying a 27,000 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'd 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 29,000 mile proposed route would differ from Post dramatically, where he had essentially hopped from landmass to landmass. Earhart's map took her over vast 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 electroplane than she did giving lectures and making appearances for her sponsors. The whirlwind of press and publicity that followed her every move 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.

[Amelia Earhart]

I should like to have made it better, but time was short and I done as good as I could.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 Beechnut 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 non stop transcontinental flight by a woman. Burbank to Newark, August 1932, 19 hours, 5 minutes. In July 1933, she repeated that same flight in 17 hours and 7 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.

[Narrator]

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 globetrotting flyer and she reached for the comb.

[Sherry Lynch]

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

[Amelia Earhart]

thought I would like to have the sight of land a couple of times.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 Earhart]

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.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 gonna 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 communications 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.

[Amelia Earhart]

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 save 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 am impressed with the beauty of it, the loveliness of what I see.

[Sherry Lynch]

As Earhart headed off to her hotel for a hot bath and a long

[Amelia Earhart]

sleep, she said, commercial flights between the Hawaiian Islands and California are entirely feasible. They're inevitable and we'll be flying everywhere in a short time.

[Sherry Lynch]

Here's a little taste of how the world viewed Amelia Earhart as she made plans for her next record setting flight. February 1936.

[Narrator]

The tall, slim, utterly charming girl, Amelia

[Sherry Lynch]

Julia Earhart, was 39 years old at this point, mind you, an age you might be more inclined to call a grown woman.

[Narrator]

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

[Host 1]

headlines scream, amelia Earhart, first woman to fly the Atlantic. Amelia Earhart, first person to solo Pacific from Honolulu. Amelia Earhart, first woman to make transcontinental non stop flight. Amelia Earhart, first person to solo from Mexico to New York City. Amelia Earhart, first woman to receive Distinguished Flying Cross.

[Narrator]

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.

[Sherry Lynch]

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.

[Amelia Earhart]

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, prayer preferred.

[Sherry Lynch]

Grapefruit bran flakes and hot cocoa. People were obsessed. They wanted every detail of her life the same way we do now with celebrities.

[Narrator]

Dramatic portraits of Ms. 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. Bearskin 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 Ms. Earhart's last transatlantic flight.

[Sherry Lynch]

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.

[Amelia Earhart]

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?

[Sherry Lynch]

This, all of this, was the backdrop for Amelia Earhart's plan to circumnavigate the globe in 1937 in 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.

[Distress Call Voice]

K H A Q Q S O N K H a q q son k h a q q sos

[Sherry Lynch]

January 25, 1937.

[Narrator]

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, 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.

[Sherry Lynch]

If completed.

[Distress Call Voice]

K H A Q SOS Khaq SOS

[Narrator]

K H Q if as casually as a housewife outlining a shopping tour, Ms. Amelia Earhart Putnam described the route to be taken as.

[Amelia Earhart]

As close to the equator as I can go.

[Narrator]

Her greatest scientific interest in the globe girdling tour.

[Amelia Earhart]

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.

[Sherry Lynch]

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.

[Narrator]

Amelia Earhart took off for San Juan, puerto Rico at 5:57am Eastern Standard Time today, June 1, 1937. On the 1st hop of her proposed just for fun flight around the world, the slim aviatrix waved a bear arm in farewell and gunned the big, big twin motored monoplane some 2200ft 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.

[Sherry Lynch]

At 6:40am Earhart keyed the mic and sent out the first of many radio transmissions to come.

[Distress Call Voice]

Everything is okay.

[Sherry Lynch]

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.

[Amelia Earhart]

Dead weight. Besides, neither Fred nor I have much use at Morse code. Makes more sense to leave it behind on the ground.

[Sherry Lynch]

In Darwin, Australia, there was more bad news regarding radio and 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. 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.

[Narrator]

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.

[Sherry Lynch]

By the time Earhart And New 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.

[Amelia Earhart]

We don't really eat while we're flying, but we make up for it on the ground.

[Sherry Lynch]

Except not really Ed in dysentery, which Earhart picked up in Indonesia and couldn't seem to clear. Toss in her concerns about her navigators 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.

[Amelia Earhart]

Radio misunderstanding and personal unfitness probably will hold.

[Sherry Lynch]

One day, July 1, 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. 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 confidence skill.

[Amelia Earhart]

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.

[Sherry Lynch]

Earhart pointed the Electra east and as she flew toward a bank of heavy clouds, she radioed back to the ground

[Distress Call Voice]

crew at New Guinea, Goodbye, I'm turning over to night frequency.

[Sherry Lynch]

That would be 3105 kilohertz for our fellow radio nerds. Earhart's daytime frequency was 6210 kilohertz. And according to the nonprofit International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, AKA Tiger, at

[Technical Expert]

the time of the Earhart disappearance, by international agreement, the only legal voice radio transmissions on 3105 kHz anywhere in the world were sent by US 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 3105kHz 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.

[Sherry Lynch]

That Coast Guard cutter, the Itasca was stationed at Howland island to support the Earhart flight.

[Radio Announcer]

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 set 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.

[Narrator]

The Warship Achilles broadcast that it intercepted two SOS calls from Ms. 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.

[Sherry Lynch]

Howland Island, Amelia Earhart's last known destination. Two amateur radio operators in Los Angeles. We're listening.

[Narrator]

McMenamy and Pearson picked up the calls until 1:30am Pacific Time.

[Host 1]

Well, the calls just say S.O.S. s.O.S. sJS and then the call letters KHAQQ over and over.

[Distress Call Voice]

K, H, A Q, Q. S.O.S. k, H, A Q,. Q.O.S. k, h A Q, Q. S. O. S. Khaqq son. Khaqq son.

[Host 1]

They're being repeated every 15 seconds. No position given, and calls are very weak, but clear. Apparently, they're trying to conserve their batteries.

[Narrator]

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 8ft above the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

[Distress Call Voice]

Give us a few dashes if you hear this. K, H A Q, Q. SOS searchers,

[Sherry Lynch]

it was announced, would have roughly 12 hours of daylight at this time of year in which 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 overheavy Lockheed Electra could float for any significant length. Length of time. The Pacific is a vast and Unforgiving thing.

[Narrator]

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 fliers. Then it was ordered to return to Howland.

[Sherry Lynch]

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.

[Technical Expert]

No Central Pacific ground stations received on 3105 kHz. All transport aircraft in the area used assigned route frequencies, frequencies instead of 3105 kilohertz. Therefore, other than Itasca, Earhart's Electra was the only plausible Central Pacific source of Voice signals on 3105khz.

[Sherry Lynch]

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. 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.

[Technical Expert]

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 kHz. 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 15,525 kilohertz, the fifth harmonic of 3105 kHz. And the Eastern Canada reception was on 18630 kHz, the sixth harmonic of 3105 kilohertz.

[Radio Announcer]

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.

[Narrator]

Ray Mahoney, Cincinnati radio amateur, reported tonight, July 5, 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.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 Mantz, said if

[Technical Expert]

those really were Ms. 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.

[Distress Call Voice]

218 north call KLHAQQ sound north. Don't hold with us much longer. Above water shut off.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 who described the signal as extremely poor and fragmentary. Amateur radio operators along the west coast reported receiving voice messages believed to be Amelia Earhart

[Distress Call Voice]

still alive. Tell husband all right.

[Sherry Lynch]

A five year old boy in Wyoming heard her. Howard Coons in San Francisco heard her down.

[Distress Call Voice]

K H A Q Q S O

[Sherry Lynch]

S. Ernest Henderson in Washington State heard her.

[Distress Call Voice]

5128 QQ waterlogged. Can't last much longer.

[Sherry Lynch]

Mrs. Thelma Donovan, Indianapolis Hearder Sending equipment is getting weak.

[Distress Call Voice]

Have landed on water. Don't know position. Navigator trying to check latitude and longitude. Getting hungry, but can survive for 24 hours.

[Sherry Lynch]

Mabel Lairmore in Texas heard her down.

[Distress Call Voice]

Island uninhabited. Hard on land, hard on water.

[Sherry Lynch]

15 year old Betty Klenk in St. Petersburg, Florida heard her.

[Distress Call Voice]

Water's high, water's knee deep. Let me out. Help us quick.

[Sherry Lynch]

K H A K QQ 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, planes with medium cruising range. The Colorado arrived on the scene first. Three Corsair floatplanes were dispatched and a search was carried out in an altitude of a thousand feet. The officer in charge of the mission stated that with visibility in 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 plan Plains 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.

[Narrator]

We searched the most likely area.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 Nikomoro. Ro.

[Justin Myers]

Yeah, well it was strange because first of all I know it's the cylinder and it could be anything really. But you measure it and I measure it and it's 12 meters long and you think, oh, 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, 110ft to the west of what I believe is a fuselage is a half exposed radial engine which is half exposed out of coral. Beneath it is what looks like half exposed wheel as well, which coincidentally fits with the airplane. So it sort of indicates that it possibly was full slanded onto the reef.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 by 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 and Noonan adrift 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.

[Technical Expert]

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 US should have been heard by at least One of the 44 airport stations maintaining a continuous continuous listening watch on 3105 kHz. 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.

[Sherry Lynch]

Tiger couldn't be more blunt.

[Technical Expert]

Given the numerous constraints mitigating against successfully perpetrating a signal transmission hoax, the likelihood of such events is vanishingly small.

[Sherry Lynch]

It's a fact that radio wasn't Earhart's strength. It was a 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.

[Narrator]

In Washington, Charles Horner, president of the National Aeronautical association, said it would be awfully painful to pronounce Earhart's flight foolhardy in the face of such a corruption.

[Sherry Lynch]

Courageous attempt, a masterstroke. Right there. Charles Werner delivers the insult without getting his own hands dirty. Because it was whispered, and not quietly, that 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?

[Narrator]

Washington aviation officials viewed reports of the search for Amelia Earhart and her navigator with growing determination to discourage such flights in the future.

[Sherry Lynch]

And that search for Amelia Earhart was called off on July 18, 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 US 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? Tiger has 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?

[Narrator]

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, Tigar says others heard much more. In addition to the primary frequencies, the transmitter also put out harmonic harmonics, multiples of those wavelengths. High harmonic frequencies skip off the ionosphere and can carry great distances. But clear reception is unpredictable.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 4Fun 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 much 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 in 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 insane 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 US Naval Institute published these conclusions about the failed search for Amelia Earhart and those peculiar signals picked up by amateur radio operators.

[Host 1]

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, salt water, 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 5, 1937. The peculiar signals were last heard then.

[Distress Call Voice]

Water. Tide. Water's knee deep. Let me out. Help us quick. Khaqq.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 Nagre. And that's on the next True Weird Stuff.

[Host 1]

Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode. Sam Moore, Carrie. Doc Bowser, Lamar Richardson, Don Morgan, who almost got on, but there was some kind of foul up, and Aaron 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.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 they. 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, looky there. It's a compact and some 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.

[Host 1]

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, that seems like there were so many of them, and they all seemed 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.

[Sherry Lynch]

Well, the, the. And you can get into the weeds here really fast. Some. And my poor brain trying to comprehend all this, like, radio engineering stuff, but. So Amelia was broadcasting at 3105 kilohertz, right? 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. Radio is invisible, quote unquote, it's. It's a physical thing. AM radio, FM radio, shortwave radio, these. 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, that, that those harmonic frequencies, they. 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, Right. So the ham radio operators all over the United States were getting. Thank you, Mojo, were getting. They were picking up those. That. 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?

[Host 1]

One of the things about how this radio works, and if you ever. So I'm like, as a kid, I was such a nerd about listening to 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. Know you're saying, well, how could they have two things that work that 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.

[Sherry Lynch]

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.

[Host 1]

Right.

[Sherry Lynch]

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?

[Host 1]

Right.

[Sherry Lynch]

So teeny tiny atoll. So we now 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, 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, because it's such technical detail, but there was no way that, like 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, 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, you know, an unserious person. We don't have to go all that far, but we do have to accept the, the evidence, which is the calls were ignored. Now, you, 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 you know, I'm a girl's girl and I'm always going to like, defend whoever, especially in these stories, I defend these people. Right? But Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan took off to fly around the world as about, as clueless as about radio as you could be. Well, and, and she kept, because the Electra was so heavy from carrying fuel and oil, she kept stripping, stripping, stripping. And to her, you know, all this extra radio nonsense was non essential. So you, you have to say the, 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.

[Host 1]

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 bomb 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.

[Sherry Lynch]

So you caught that there was a, a military in New Zealand flagged warship. Right. Who picked up one of the distress calls in that part of the Pacific. Yeah. You caught that? Yeah, yeah. So

[Host 1]

I don't know that that had anything to do with it, but I mean, it wasn't peacetime over in that part of the world. I mean, 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 just. That's not hearsay. That actually did happen.

[Sherry Lynch]

That's a factor. I mean, when we look at all the factors in this story. So 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. Like you, you know, most of our, like, we look, you know, our, like when we close our eyes, our mental picture of the Earth, you know, we see water, we see continents, we see clouds, like the famous moonshot Right. Earthshot pictures. But the Artemis crew sending back the Pacific side had a lot of people going, well, this is, this is a. 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 re watch Cast Away the Tom X movie.

[Host 1]

Well, and also we've had a couple airliners. One was Indonesian. I think there was another one that was. Were lost somewhere in the Pacific. I don't want to get. That's. That's a whole nother rabbit hole. But they, they weren't able to find where they were with the technology that we have now. And of course, back then, of course, he didn't have that level of technology. And it was, 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.

[Sherry Lynch]

You're. 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, do I. 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 to. The difficulty. The difficulty of the search makes more sense when you understand, like, just how new and primitive flying was.

[Host 1]

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.

[Sherry Lynch]

She was. I mean, she was writing a column for Cosmopolitan magazine. Okay. Like, she was a great big deal and, and that 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 firsts, she wasn't necessarily treated with the kind of seriousness that 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, now, Lindbergh was described, you know, the handsome, chiseled aviator and all that. There was a. There was a little bit of the lady flyer who's lurking about and doing it for fun. This, this tall, striking girl. She's 39 years old, she's not a girl. But there were all. There was this attempt to sort of make her into a pinup in a way.

[Host 1]

Right, right. Well, and now 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? I mean, yeah, it's obviously, it's not fair.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 there, 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.

[Host 1]

Absolutely.

[Sherry Lynch]

But. 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 the. You know, the. In bright lights, in 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, when they. 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.

[Host 1]

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?

[Sherry Lynch]

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.

[Host 1]

Right.

[Sherry Lynch]

She. There are reports of her. Of this plane wobbling down the Runway like a pregnant whale. And only. Even. 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 flak. 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. She was described walking to the plane the morning of that final takeoff as being pale, shaky, extremely underweight, and Noonan, you know, 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 emerged 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.

[Host 1]

But the only thing about that is. And it's possible, but everybody connected with this.

[Sherry Lynch]

Exactly, could have.

[Host 1]

I mean, 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. No matter 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.

[Sherry Lynch]

Well, even if you. If you listen to the distress calls and we had the, 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.

[Host 1]

Yeah.

[Sherry Lynch]

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, did they let her die because she's a woman? It was more like, boy, y'. All. Y' all were awfully quick to rush to judgment on these distress calls.

[Host 1]

Yeah.

[Sherry Lynch]

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.

[Host 1]

Yeah.

[Sherry Lynch]

From a passing plane or a ship at sea. So we got no radio. We can't contact ships at sea. We have no way to. To broadcast our position. We don't even have flares or smoke bombs now. So, like, everybody here made absolutely colossal, fatal errors.

[Host 1]

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 okay. 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 got all this going on, by the way. Tell my husband I'm okay.

[Sherry Lynch]

When I first dove into this rabbit hole, I believed that the distress calls were genuine and that they were not hoaxed. And I believed them because some of the people that came forward, like the two amateur radio ham 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 aviation geeks, so they were, like, really keen on tracking her flight. They knew the call signs of her plane.

[Host 1]

Right.

[Sherry Lynch]

I thought those two guys had a tremendous amount of credibility.

[Host 1]

Yes, I agree with you on that.

[Sherry Lynch]

And they also understood the frequency and the harmonic thing, which, again, my brain is going to bring lead. 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 and 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 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 into where that 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. Water. And investigate, you know, till the cows come home, do you think we're ever going to really 100% know?

[Host 1]

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, while not giving closure to everything that happened with it, at least let us know where they ended up.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 it, 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 a legitimate mission of exploration. Whether or not that's fair, I guess that's up to you to decide.

[Host 1]

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.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 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.

[Host 1]

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.

[Sherry Lynch]

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'd be the submersible that imploded on its trip down.

[Host 1]

Oh yeah, the Titanic.

[Sherry Lynch]

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, 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, what was the CEO's attitude? Can you remember if you think back

[Host 1]

on the Titan disaster, the, the now when you. Oh, the CEO. Not, not the, not the person that died in it.

[Sherry Lynch]

Oh no, the CEO died in it with his 15 year old kid. Yeah, 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?

[Host 1]

He was.

[Sherry Lynch]

And. And so we see this, like, when you look at human history, we see this sort of, like, ballsy, badass cowboy mentality, cowgirl mentality, and often it ends in a ticker tape parade. But not always.

[Host 1]

No, that is the. I mean, that's the risk. It's the risk we've taken with space exploration, even with everybody thinking all the. The T's were crossed and the I's were dotted. I mean, we had deaths with the Apollo before they even took off with the training mission. And then with the two Gemini. Yeah. The two

[Sherry Lynch]

Challenger and Columbia.

[Host 1]

Yeah. The two space shuttles. So, I mean, that is always going to be the risk that you have, no matter how prepared you might be. Be. And I wonder, too. I mean, this was 1937, so it was just four short years later that we entered World War II. I would imagine that any interest in trying to find out what happened to them waned during that time. And now all of a sudden, eight years have passed by the time you get to the end of World War II, and people aren't as thick, aren't thinking about it nearly as much because of what has just occurred with World War II. So I imagine that if that hadn't occurred, there might have been a little bit more follow up on this.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 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, you know?

[Host 1]

Yeah.

[Sherry Lynch]

Now, there are people who are very critical of some of Earhart's decisions, you know, and. And they. They kind of. That argument kind of falls under. Well, sprouted on herself there. And, 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 offload at safety equipment, you offload at 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?

[Host 1]

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 get this done. So I suppose that that's what happened, you know, in the midst of that,

[Sherry Lynch]

I think, you know, as we wrap up this episode, I think that something that we have to accept is, 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, nav is, you know, loop the moon, that we had a happy ending. But that, that's not necessarily guaranteed. Right.

[Host 1]

It's not.

[Sherry Lynch]

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.

[Host 1]

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, going to accomplish that, but the absolute joy she took in what she was doing.

[Sherry Lynch]

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.

[Distress Call Voice]

Yeah.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 impresario, 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. And 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 the giggles.

[Host 1]

I was wondering if. If it doesn't work out, do you have a trial divorce?

[Sherry Lynch]

Yeah, just this trial. I guess that was living together back in the day.

[Host 1]

That's got to be.

[Sherry Lynch]

Say that, because that would be a sin or what have you. Yeah, 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, okay, 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. And we're just not going to know.

[Host 1]

I am. I have become even more fascinated by this story with this episode, and I just.

[Distress Call Voice]

It.

[Host 1]

It's. It's. There's a whole bunch of questions that have been raised that I'd never thought about before with this.

[Sherry Lynch]

There were. I mean, we could have done, you know, like, price, how many. You know what I mean?

[Host 1]

Yeah. We've Had a few of these that you could probably do six episodes about.

[Sherry Lynch]

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 from 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, 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, the. All the people, all the people, Max, who heard those distress calls?

[Host 1]

It, it must have been haunting it, it probably haunted them for the rest of their lives.

[Sherry Lynch]

It's just.

[Narrator]

Yeah.

[Sherry Lynch]

So next time. True, weird stuff. Listen, so the revelation that there, 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, 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, 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 Nagriv 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. Like it really Kevin cannot even get food poisoning or I'm going to prison for the rest of my life. And that'll be on the thank you all for listening. That'll be on the next True Weird Stuff.

[Host 1]

And if you listen to us on Apple Podcast, 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

[Sherry Lynch]

Weird Stuff hit our website true weirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it, and bonus content. Everything True Weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff.com and follow true

[Host 1]

Weird Stuff on Instagram.

[Sherry Lynch]

True Weird Stuff is in NOW Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sherry lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Carrie Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Fur. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axelin. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and zayn Nash.

[Host 1]

Copyright 2026 Now Media.

[Sherry Lynch]

All rights reserved. All wrongs Remember.