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Thanks for the great info on this intriguing case. Very very interesting.

Apparently a young girl in Florida ALSO picked up Amelia Earhart’s pleas for help after the crash.

“A 15 year old girl – whom we’ll call “Betty” for now – was living in St. Petersburg, Florida in the summer of 1937. One afternoon in July – the exact date is not known – at about 3 p.m. Betty was sitting on the floor in front of her family’s radio console. She liked to listen to music and kept a notebook in which she jotted the words to her favorite songs, made notes of current movies and drew pencil sketches of glamorous people. She also liked to listen to the “short wave.” Her father had erected a long wire antenna – perhaps 60 feet in length – across the back yard from the house to a pole near the street. Betty could routinely pick up stations all over the world.

This particular afternoon she was “cruising” across the dial in search of anything interesting when she came upon a woman’s voice, speaking in English and obviously quite upset. Betty listened for a while and was startled to hear the woman say, “This is Amelia Earhart. This is Amelia Earhart.”

Betty was always “crazy about airplanes” and was well aware of Earhart’s World Flight. Today, at 78, she can’t recall whether or not, on this particular day, she already knew that Earhart was missing but it was clear to her that Amelia was in trouble so Betty opened her notebook and started to make notes about what she was hearing. The words came too fast for her to get everything and often she would only write a word or two of what had been said. The signal faded in and out, sometimes stopped altogether for several minutes and at other times was quite distorted, but Betty tried her best to get down at least some of what was being said. If she wasn’t sure about a word she would just write down what it sounded like to her.

Betty heard not only Amelia’s calls for help but also her comments to a man who was with her. Betty had the impression that the man had sustained a head injury and was delirious. She gathered that they had crashed on land but that there was also great concern about rising water. The man would alternately struggle with Amelia and try to get the microphone away from her or panic and try to get out of the airplane.

The transmissions continued to come in, off and on, for about three hours until 6:15 p.m.

http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Notebook/notebook.html

Yes, it would be VERY hard to doubt the marines’ story — there are several Marines in my family and they are nothing but straight shooters with very little ‘joking around.’

Adding another link. Look for gaia227 ... 06-25-2009, 04:59 PM (1/3rd of the way down from top of link).

Diary of AP reporter who followed Amelia and was there at ISTASCA was found in 2007. This article talks about the distress calls heard. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,263087,00.html Meanwhile, several shortwave radio listeners as far away as the U.S. mainland were picking up the faint voices of a woman and a man, sending apparent distress calls. And both the Itasca and a New Zealand cruiser, HMS Achilles, reported what seemed to be Morse code "dashes." Among reports of voice messages, two from teenagers using shortwave antennas rigged by their fathers were most disturbingly credible. In Rock Springs, Wyo., Dana Randolph, 16, heard a voice say,"This is Amelia Earhart. Ship is on a reef south of the equator." Radio experts, aware that "harmonic" frequencies in mid-ocean often could be heard far inland, viewed the report as genuine. Turning the shortwave dial in St. Petersburg, Fla., 15-year-old Betty Klenck was startled to hear a woman say,"This is Amelia Earhart Putnam," followed by pleas for help and agitated conversation with a man who, the girl thought, sounded irrational. Having heard Earhart's voice in movie newsreels, she had no doubt that it was her."In my mind, a picture of her and what she was saying lasted for years. I remembered it every night of my life," Betty Klenck Brown, now 84 and widowed, said in a recent telephone interview from her home in California. The man, she recalls,"seemed coherent at times, then would go out of his head. He said his head hurt ... She was trying mainly to keep him from getting out of the plane, telling him to come back to his seat, because she couldn't leave the radio. "She was trying to get somebody to hear her, and as the hours went by she became more frantic." Betty listened for nearly two hours, taking notes in a school composition notebook as the signals faded in and out. They ended when the fliers"were leaving the plane, because the water was knee-deep on her side," she said. She believes she may be the last living person to have heard Earhart's distress calls. Her father, Kenneth, who also heard the voices, contacted the Coast Guard at St. Petersburg, but was brushed off with assurances that the service was fully engaged in searching for the fliers, she said."He got mad and chucked the whole thing because of the way he was treated." Both teenagers' accounts would support TIGHAR's premisethat Earhart crash-landed on Gardner's flat reef at low tide, was able to run its right engine to power the radio, and escaped the aircraft before tides eventually carried it off the reef into deep water. On July 18, 16 days after Earhart and Noonan disappeared, the Navy and Coast Guard ended what the AP called"the greatest search ever undertaken in behalf of a lost flier." To justify the official finding that the Electra was lost at sea, the government dismissed the radio distress calls as hoaxes or misunderstandings. Betty Klenck Brown's response today:"I know I am right."