Amelia Earhart mystery is personal

Even after more than 70 years, the mystery of Amelia Earhart lingers.

The movie "Amelia," which debuts today with Hilary Swank and Richard Gere, will only add more conjecture to the mystery that has befuddled writers, scholars and researchers.

What happened to Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan in 1937 when their plane disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean as they attempted to be the first to circumnavigate the globe in an airplane?

It held the attention of my dad, Paul L. Briand Jr., for much of his adult life.

In 1960 he was one of the first, in a biography about Earhart entitled "Daughter of the Sky," to offer a conclusion based on his research: That she crash-landed off the island of Saipan and survived, but that she and Noonan were captured by the Japanese military stationed there in violation of a League of Nations agreement, and that they were shot as spies.

In the years since, other researchers and writers offered other ideas about Earhart's fate:

• That she was on a spy mission at the request of President Franklin Roosevelt;
• That she was captured but spent the war years in Japan as "Tokyo Rose"'
• That she ultimately returned to the United States and lived to old age as Irene Bolam;
• That she simply crashed into the expanse of ocean and disappeared.

No theory has been proven to be true.

High-tech has come into play in recent years, particularly in the form of the research vessels deployed by TIGHAR for its Earhart Project.

TIGHAR (The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery) has taken a scientific approach to its search for Earhart and believes, according to its web site, that "Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan landed, and eventually died, on Gardner Island, now Nikumaroro in the Republic of Kiribati. Archival research and nine expeditions have uncovered a compelling body of supporting evidence. Archaeological excavations during the next expedition, scheduled for May/June 2010, will aim to recover artifacts from which Earhart’s DNA can be extracted. The expedition will also include a deep water search off the atoll’s fringing reef for the wreckage of the airplane."

For my dad's part, he got the opportunity after he wrote the Earhart biography to view Navy documents on Earhart and he wrote a follow-up, "Requiem for Amelia," published here for the first time.

At the time of the original biography and until just after he wrote "Requiem," he was a U.S. Air Force officer, a scholar teaching at the U.S. Air Force Academy, a researcher consumed by the passion of Earhart's life as a woman pilot.

His study of the Navy's official file was revealing. He wrote:

"Amelia Earhart was not on a spy mission for her government, she did not crash-land on Saipan; she was not taken as a prisoner; she was not executed as a spy or allowed to die. These are the conclusions of the Navy in the official report I was allowed to read. Considering their evidence, they could reach no other conclusions."

But he remained unconvinced, offering in "Requiem" his belief from information he received from corroborating witnesses on Saipan that she crash-landed there and died at the hands of the Japanese military, not because she was a spy, but because she was mistaken for one.

My dad pursued the Earhart mystery up until his death in 1986, never satisfied that he or anyone had found what he called "the truth."

Can the Hilary Swank-led epic of "Amelia" provide any answers, any flight path to the truth? No, it only deepens the mystery even more.