Two Mysteries: Oak Island vs Amelia Earhart

Thursday night, the Conspiracies Decoded show on the Science Channel had a segment that asked, but never got around to answering, the perennial question, what happened to Amelia Earhart?

Well, she got lost and sisappeared.

So anyhow, they found a bunch of bones on an island she might have wound up on before World War II, but the bone doctor who looked at them at the time didn't think they belonged to a skinny female, and they got put in storage in some museum. They were rediscovered in 2019, but a DNA test said they still weren't Amelia Earhart, so the bone doctor was right. This was thin gruel indeed, and it probably wasn't worth even the segment on the show, but after all, it was Amelia Earhart, huh?

Except it wasn't. The question I had was she had a guy with her on the flight, Fred Noonan, the navigator. Did anyone check those bones for Fred Noonan's DNA? Even if he wasn't Amelia Earhart, if it was Noonan's DNA, that could have solved the mystery. Looks like nobody thought of that. After all, Noonan wasn't Amelia Earhart.

I muttered to my wife that George Putnam, her huaband, was probably happy to be rid of her.

Earhart has become a totemic symbol of the emancipated woman who spreads her wings and flies, but the end of the story where she gets lost and disappears is problematic. Thre has to be some sort of plot twist tht makes this OK, so a mystery is needed here. Maybe she was secretly spying on the Japanese or something, huh?

The problem is that the emancipated Earhart had to rely on Putnam's money -- he owned the Lockheed Electra she disappeared in. Putnam was one of th greatest publicists and promoters of his day, Axxording to Wikipedia,

A significant event in Putnam's personal and business life occurred in 1928. . . . Because of his reputation for working with Lindbergh, he was contacted by Amy Phipps Guest, a wealthy American living in London, who wanted to sponsor the first-ever flight by a woman across the Atlantic Ocean.

Guest asked Putnam to find a suitable candidate, and he eventually came up with the then-unknown aviatrix, Amelia Earhart. . . . Putnam had undertaken to promote Earhart in a campaign that included lecture tours and mass-market endorsements for luggage, Lucky Strike cigarettes (this caused image problems for her, and McCall's magazine retracted an offer) and other products.

So Earhart was basically the creation of a man, and not just any man, but a member of the post-Civil War moneyed elite. Ferdinand Lundberg would not be surprised. In fact, she was never more than a media-induced fantasy, and let's face it, she was going to have to disappear at some point right around then. She was 40 and not likely to sell much more luggage or cigarettes.

So Earhart's is a phony mystery promoted by the lizard people from the start. But let's face it, the hype can last only so long. Someone' rediscovered some old bones that still aren't hers, but it's now worth only a segment on a B-list TV show.

Contrast that with a TV mystery that's been extremely popular for nearly a decade, The Curse of Oak Island. There's a rich guy involved, Marty Lagina, but as far as I can tell, he's new money. Beyond that, he's a charming guy, nothing slick about him, and everyone on the show wears safety vests abd hard hats like railroaders or construction workers. Yeah, there are archaeologists and so forth with college degrees, but they're supporting characters.

The guy we love to watch is Gary Drayton. Nothing upper class about him at all. Mike Rowe would be at home if he were to visit.

Maybe this is part of what has the lizard people in such a snit.