THE SEARCH FOR AMELIA EARHART

The search took this author six years and he's logged every frustrating minute of it in ferocious detail. In fact the book is so jammed with minutiae it reads like a cross between the Warren Report and an official military history. The fascinating thread that holds the whole thing together and will make the reader grope along to the conclusion is, of course, the question of whatever did happen to Amelia Earhart. Mr. Goerner became intrigued after noting an article in the San Mateo Times; Mrs. Josephine Blanco Akiyama had told newsmen ""a weird yarn about having seen two American Fliers, a man and a woman, on Saipan Island in the Marianas in 1937."" Umpteen trips to Saipan and back later, Mr. Goerner had uncovered a Lockheed generator of the type Miss Earhart used, the remains of two corpses (a false lead) a lot of witnesses (willing and unwilling) and the notion that Amelia and her navigator Fred Noonan had crashed and were taken prisoner by the Japanese. He was also in a lot of trouble for having discovered a top secret CIA spy training center for Chinese Nationalist guerrillas on the island. Hints, rumors and a lot of digging brought out the implication that Miss Earhart's highly publicized round-the-world civilian flight was also a secret reconnaissance mission for the government who wanted to find out just what the Japanese were up to on those islands. The plot thickens but never boils as Mr. Goerner was never able to come up with conclusive proof. He raises a lot of questions though.