17. The Japanese captured Earhart myth
In 1943 RKO Studios released a film entitled Flight for Freedom, with popular stars Rosalyn Russell and Fred MacMurray. In the film, an American aviatrix named Tonie Carter agrees to fly a spy mission over the Mandated Islands for the US Navy. She vanishes during the mission, and a massive search effort to find her proves fruitless. The film implies the Japanese, depicted as evil in accordance with the wartime propaganda prevalent in Hollywood during World War II, either killed or captured the flier. The connection with Earhart and her fate is intentional and unmistakable. Following World War II, Army Intelligence and United Press International investigated the allegations that Earhart had been spying for the United States and found them false.
The myth nonetheless persisted, and still does in the 21st century. In the early 1960s, during the turmoil following the shooting down of a real American spy flight, Gary Francis Powers in a U-2 over the Soviet Union, the myth returned. The 1966 book The Search for Amelia Earhart by Fred Goerner brought the myth to the forefront of public attention, though little evidence existed to support the story, and that presented proved false. Several books, magazine articles, and television “documentaries” kept the myth alive, including works on American spies and World War II. There exists no hard evidence that Earhart was either shot down or captured by the Japanese, nor that she spied for the United States.
