Amelia Earhart: What The General Public Never Knew

About 'Operation Earhart' (1960-1970)

Joe Klaas	Robert Myers	Randall Brink	Col. Rollin Reineck	W. C. Jameson
It is worth noting how over the years four Amelia Earhart book authors; Joe Klaas (1970), Robert Myers (1985), Randall Brink (1994), Rollin C. Reineck (2004), and W. C. Jameson (2016), acknowledged that Joseph A. Gervais and his Operation Earhart findings were correct, where they revealed that Amelia Earhart's post-loss existence as "Irene" was an uncontestable reality that United States official historians were persuaded to unconditionally ignore.

USAF Major Joseph A. Gervais was a distiguished pilot who served his country in World War Two, the Korean War, and during the early days of the Vietnam War. An upstanding family man known for his good character, few ever came close to studying the subject matter of Amelia Earhart's 1937 disappearance and missing person case as much as he did. Serving as a captain in the Air Force in 1960, while stationed in Okinawa, Japan and ferrying planes to-and-fro the Pacific South Sea Islands, he learned from a variety of individuals that Amelia Earhart did not perish after she failed to locate Howland Island, rather, that she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, ditched in the Nipponese mandated territory of the Marshall Islands group where Japan's Imperial Navy rescued and sequestered them -- then retrieved and impounded Amelia's plane during the onset of the 2nd Sino-Japanese War. (The Marshall Islands was considered a 'no fly zone' for U.S. planes at that time.)

Inspired, Joseph A. Gervais launched 'Operation Earhart' with fellow Air Force sevicemen, Bob Dinger and Paul Briand, with an objective to learn what truly became of Amelia, and after five years, (1960-1965) Gervais himself had figured it out. Yet it took him another five years to be sure enough to go public with his discovery about Amelia's ongoing existence as 'Irene', that he did do in 1970, via the book, Amelia Earhart Lives, much to the former Amelia's consternation.

Joseph A. Gervais remained sharp always, especially after he clearly recognized that Amelia Earhart survived her disappearance and went on to assume the identity of Irene O'Crowley Craigmile within a 'witness protection' arrangement -- that involved the original Irene O'Crowley Craigmile's family -- and was personally overseen by J. Edgar Hoover, the long time head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, "whose fingerprints" as Joe said, "were all over the Earhart cover-up matter."

Ultimately, Joseph A. Gervais, against the grain of recorded history, maintained that his assertion about Amelia was correct to his dying day, in 2005. As for the legacy of Joseph A. Gervais; ignorance, disbelief, and official government silence from both the United States and Japan toward the 'Amelia became Irene' truth, enabled the U.S. federal government's preferred viewpoint to thoroughly erase Joseph A. Gervais and the most important findings of his 1960s' Operation Earhart investigation from the public mindset -- by allowing the promotion of other theories and ideas about Amelia's fate -- just as its Federal Bureau of Investigation tried to erase as much evidence as it could of the original Irene O'Crowley Craigmile decades before, so that Amelia could assume her identity.

Above, a 1987 Marshall Islands commemorative stamp marking the 50th anniversary of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan's rescue by Japan's Imperial Navy, and a 2002 news clipping that quotes the Marshall Islands Ambassador to the United Nations, Alfred Capelle.

Amelia Earhart, 1937

Irene & Amelia digitally combined

Post-1940 Irene, 1965   Digital Face Recognition identified the post-1940 Irene and Amelia as one in the same.

The controversial 1970 book, Amelia Earhart Lives, featured Joe Gervais' clear, somewhat candidly taken 1965 photograph of the former Amelia Earhart with her post-war British husband, Guy Bolam. The book was written and published without the former Amelia's cooperation or endorsement and she strongly disapproved of it. She immediately fought to discount it, denying her famous past in the process. McGraw-Hill removed it from book stores, although forty-thousand copies had already made it into circulation. Portions of it did contain some hard to substantiate speculations, but it presented an interesting alternate viewpoint of Amelia's fate and included some fascinating anecdotal information in the process. Although it ended up being widely discredited by historians, the writing of Joe Klaas gripped the attention of its readers as he profiled and expanded on the decade long Operation Earhart investigation efforts of Joseph A. Gervais. It was eventually republished through the Author's Guild.

Senator Hiram Bingham & Amelia Earhart

THE POST-1940 IRENE, 1977

Digital composite