This kind of speculation never dies.
Back in the ‘50s I read an article in “Argosy” magazine wherein a native islander in that area told of seeing a white woman and man being led into the bush by Japanese soldiers and then heard shots. The theme was that they were shot as spies.
The recent History Channel show stated that they were both beheaded at their grave side by the Japs. They had a woman on who was 8 at the time and said she saw it. The show was interesting but I don’t know how truthful.
That sounds like it’s right out of the documentary on the History Channel.Numerous witnesses recall certain things they saw as children back then, and recall being told to never say anything about that woman and man they saw in the custody of the Japanese military.The pair of “stars” of this docu, a retired Treasury Agent and a high ranking former FBI guy,had an obvious agenda going in, and seized upon some documents recently declassified, all of which pointed to a cover-up-—which they feel further buttresses their claim that Earhart and her navigator were captured at the site of the plane crash, held, probably imprisoned, and killed “as spies”.Their most dramatic claim is that they were abandoned by the US Government so as not to reveal that we had a very active intelligence program re: the Japanese, that they supposedly should never find out about. That on the face of it was not too convincingly proved. Earhart’s own brother is convinced that she died of dysentery while in prison and that her navigator was beheaded. (That is certainly not outside the Jap Military’s wheelhouse—they were into the most savage kind of punishment, as was proved time and again during WW2. Some not inconsiderable amount of “proof” though, was put on this photo on the wharf , though,now proved to be from two years earlier, but it really doesn’t completely undermine the rest of their theories-—it merely throws the selectivity of their into question. Either way, it was a documentary exploration which left the viewer with a lingering sadness, and some degree of outrage, justifiable or not.