Blogger discredits claim Amelia Earhart was taken prisoner by Japan

[pluma]

I thought the History Channel was already widely considered non-factual. Aren't half the documentaries about space aliens?

"Source": http://www.cracked.com/funny-5720-the-history-channel/

[lawless123]

And the rest are mostly about Hitler, Hitlers dog, Hitlers secretary, Hitlers lunch.

[wil421]

It used to be a decent channel. Modern marvels was great. Discovery, NatGeo, Animal and History Channel used to be good a times. They all sold out for cheaper to produce reality shows.

PBS and BBC docs are still hanging on and pretty good. NOVA and Planet Earth series are great.

[aaron-lebo]

Who doesn't like "ancient astronaut theorists"?

http://chronicle.su/wp-content/uploads/tsoukalosaliens1.jpg

[gwern]

Another nifty example of how search engines and digitization are improving research. How would anyone have ever discovered that one super-obscure Japanese travel book happened to include one old black-white photo? This reminds me of another Japanese-related example of search-engine-driven historical research, the castaway Australian sailors: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/may/28/austr... Or more literarily, the recently-discovered Walt Whitman novel https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/arts/in-a-walt-whitman-no...

[badosu]

Indeed. Moving to the opposite direction though I wonder when will we discover the first pseudo-historical artifacts generated by AI (speeches, art, photos, and even videos).

This is the greatest weapon ever, the ministry of truth would never dream of something like this!

[autokad]

i remember watching ww II battle documentaries, and they would be talking about a battle, say battle of the budge. and I would be like 'wait a second, that stock video footage was a corsair shooting a drone.

then it hit me that almost all of the video shown on these things is just for aesthetics / effect and not actual footage from the topic in question.

then it hit me, the news was actually doing the same thing! like they would be talking about an event concerning the nimitz and would show stock video footage of the JFK

[kurthr]

I believe it's referred to as infotainment. The History Channel isn't news any more than Fox News is news. That it then made it onto mainstream media, "because it's out there", is another indication of the problems with Ad revenue based media seeking clicks.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/5497862627001/?#sp=show-clips

http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/amelia-earhart-survived-plan...

It's telling that HISTORY is also being transparent: https://twitter.com/HISTORY/status/884781394861469696 and that is also news.

p.s. thanks criddell!

[arkitaip]

It's the equivalent of tech's hacker baddie wearing sunglasses and a hoodie in a dark room with menacing green letters on the monitor.

[EliRivers]

Not entirely unrelated, there once was a time when the way to get news information was to be right there, at the source. Now, the way to get news information is to have it delivered electronically directly to the newsroom. It can then be passed back to a reporter standing outside the building from which that news originated, who has no idea what's going on, to be fed the lines to say over an earpiece and repeat them back into camera. This is what happens.

[toxican]

If you watch enough WW2 documentaries, you start to see the same clips across multiple documentaries. A lot of them don't seem to put much care into matching the visuals with the audio, but the ones that do seem to do a really good job.

[throwitlong]

At least it's not footage of the Liaoning.

In German newspapers often pictures of planes are plain wrong.

[flippyhead]

Besides a couple national newspapers I pretty much don't read or watch anything online or on TV anymore that purports to be factual. This kind of thing is just too common, I've completely lost trust in a lot of the media available to me.

[JBReefer]

Isn't that s very serious issue? I absolutely agree that journalistic/non-fiction integrity has collapsed in the post-print world, but what can we do about it?

When your choice is Vox or Breitbart, that's kind of a turd sandwich.

[phkahler]

The best part is the photo credit:

>> The woman said to resemble pilot Amelia Earhart is seen sitting on the dock in the centre of the picture. Photograph: Reuters

So Reuters is falsely taking credit for a photo when they didn't know its origin. Journalistic integrity is long dead.

[phkahler]

Oh shit there's this:

>> The documentary, hosted by former FBI executive assistant director Shawn Henry, also alleges a cover-up, claiming that the US government knew of her whereabouts but did nothing to rescue her.

So (former) government officials are promoting false notions of government conspiracies. It's all theater folks. We are being manipulated by everyone.

[eyeinthepyramid]

Isn't that the Guardian misassigning credit to Reuters?

[e12e]

I assume most of this story was written up by Reuters, picked up by the Guardian and regurgitated:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-amelia-earhart-idUSKBN...

[criddell]

I wonder if History Channel will update their website with this information? It seems like if they actually give a damn about history, they should.

[dkarl]

Yeah, I wonder if they'll say aliens aren't real and it's embarrassing for grown men to be endlessly fascinated with Hitler when they don't know who their state representative is.

[criddell]

Just checked their Twitter feed and they are on it:

https://twitter.com/HISTORY/status/884781394861469696

[toxican]

spoiler alert: They have not given a damn about history in a looong time.

[versteegen]

Thank goodness. It's really unpleasant to see such history-rewriting claims made in the global press based on such flimsy evidence.

[dpark]

Not just flimsy. Complete trash. There is more resolution in the typical forum emoji than in the face of the man claimed to be Noonan. And the person claimed to be Earhart has their back turned. It's not even clear that it's a woman. All the people involved in this should be ashamed.

[jorgec]

The proof was stupid. It shows the back of some person and the photo concludes that its Amelia.

About this topic, its amazing how many people claim that its pro-science but never ask for proof, or scientific method.

[Bartweiss]

Most depressing: "Kota Yamano, a military history blogger who unearthed the Japanese photograph, said it took him just 30 minutes to effectively debunk the documentary’s central claim."

It was shoddy evidence, but it was also trivially disproven. Just... no one cared.

[WalterBright]

There's no particular mystery. Navigation in those days was rudimentary - not good enough to fly long distances across the Pacific and try to hit a tiny island at the limit of your fuel.

She missed the island, ran out of fuel, and crashed into the Pacific.

I saw a documentary on her long ago, and she was known to be sloppy in navigation, careless in handling the airplane, arrogant in dealing with her navigator, and would take unnecessary risks with the weather. It's all a recipe for disaster when taking a high risk flight.

It's all too easy to die in an airplane if you don't have a mania for doing it perfectly every time. People also had a hard time believing JFK Jr died because of a perfectly mundane mistake on a routine flight.

[shawnbaden]

This reminded me of a passage on pilot checklists from The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande:

> Commercial pilots have been using checklists for decades. Gawande traces this back to a fly-off at Wright Field, Ohio, in 1935, when the Army Air Force was choosing its new bomber. Boeing's entry, the B-17, would later be built by the thousands, but on that first flight it took off, stalled, crashed and burned. The new airplane was complicated, and the pilot, who was highly experienced, had forgotten a routine step. > > From http://old.seattletimes.com/html/books/2010737113_br08checkl...

[WalterBright]

Lindbergh, on the other hand, was extremely careful and meticulous. He knew exactly where the risks were, and minimized them as much as possible. His only mistake was not taking some amphetamines along (he fell asleep and nearly crashed).

[lawless123]

There are always so many jokers making money speculating on things like this, it's nice to see some taken down a peg.

[notadoc]

Is this suggesting that the same TV network which airs a show called "ANCIENT ALIENS" would have some completely inaccurate and poorly researched easily debunked claim on one of their TV shows?

What's next? Is some blogger going to reveal to the world that Seinfeld and Star Trek aren't real too??

[snickerbockers]

>What's next? Is some blogger going to reveal to the world that Seinfeld and Star Trek aren't real too??

On the contrary, this means that the episode of Voyager where Amelia Earhart was revealed to be transported to the Delta Quadrant can still happen.

[nikdaheratik]

It's kind of funny how the "History" channel is turning into the "Unsolved Mysteries" channel. Maybe they'll buy up the rights to re-air that old show and go full retro with UFO conspiracies and the like.

[mcherm]

>At the same spot the skeletal remains of a man and a woman were found with personal effects known to be hers.

I hadn't heard that. Do you have any references?

[roryisok]

Nothing about that on Wikipedia. Have you a source please?

[thrillgore]

Now there's a clickbaity title.