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Man, Welcome back to Coast to Coast, George Nori with you. Rich Martini back with us. Award winning filmmaker, best selling author. After his close friend died in his arms and then came to visit him, leader and members of his family, he's been writing about how it's possible to continue a conversation with someone on the other side. Rich Martini back on Coast to Coast. Mister Martini, I love running into you at live events. How are you, sir?
I am great, sir, and I'm just glad that we're running into each other live events as opposed to the opposite.
Well, even if we did on the opposite you'd still be able to communicate with us.
That's right, and we'd still have a fun conversation because George, every time I talk.
To you, you put a smile on my face. Likewise, great to hear your voice, and wow, I really.
Appreciate you inviting me on. I heard these guys were mounting a new trip to go out and look for Amelia, and I wish them all the best. But all I can say is when they don't find her give me a call because I know where she is, I know where her plane is. And as you mentioned, you know, I've been talking to people on the flip side is I like to call it for the past fifteen years. It just it's one of these logic things. So let
me let me just do a little logic puzzle. Winston Churchill says that he saw her, said that he saw Abraham Lincoln's ghost in the White House. Now, if we don't believe in ghosts, do we assume that he's lying, or do we.
Assume that he made it up?
Or is it possible that we just don't know because we didn't experience it. We weren't there. He says, that's what happened. And in the case of looking for Amelia, it's a little bit like one person telling us that Jimmy Hoffer was buried in Shase Stadium. And if one person tells you he's buried there, should we go dig up Shaye Stadium or maybe look at the place where two hundred people.
Have said that they saw her there.
I mean, if two hundred people saw Tom haff Fantineck, for example, or Poughkissie, wouldn't you go there wouldn't that be the most logical place to go and say, well, I don't know how he could possibly be there, but maybe he is, and that you would think exactly. And that's what Saipan represents. I've been to Saipan, as you know, and I've interviewed people there.
I've filmed fifteen.
New eyewitnesses, but I've gathered over two hundred eyewitnesses.
The people who were there.
I mean, I went to Saipan with Mike Harris and I know less Kenny went there many times, and other people have been and they've talked to people, They've talked to eyewitnesses. And when somebody tells you, oh, yeah, I saw her come ashore or as I've heard people who were interviewed. Vincent Lewis interviewed some of these people that Mike Harris did. She brought her plane down on Millia Tall.
People saw that happen. Then they saw her arrested by the Japanese, reported her being slapped by the Japanese, reported her and Fred being put aboard a ship and taken to Jaluid by the Japanese. There are eyewitnesses who said they saw her aboard that ship. There are eyewitnesses who said they saw her come ashore in Saipan all around that same time. I've interviewed a few of them. Then there's eyewitnesses who saw her incarcerated and who knew that
she was in a cell there. But there's also US Marines who when they got to the island in June in nineteen forty four, who found her briefcase, who found her passport, who saw the plane. I've interviewed at least a dozen people who claimed that they saw her plane, saw her briefcase, or the guy who decoded the message while he was in the marine headquarters that said, and he said it came from sync pack and he gave it to Clarence Wallace's COEO, and it said, we have
found Amelia Earhart's airplane at Aslito Airfield. Now, why would anybody ignore that? Why wouldn't you look there?
And it was in pretty good shape, wasn't it?
Apparently because they flew it.
A number of Marines claimed that they saw it flying around the south part of the island. A very unique plane. As one marine said to me, it had only been missing for seven years. We know exactly what it looked like and when we saw it. We recognized it instantly. Plus they heard people say, you can't go in there and look at Amelia Earhart's airplane.
There was a Lockheed model Tenny electure.
Right, That's absolutely right.
And so Dick Spank, I don't know if you've had him on the show, but Dick Spank and Lets Kenny and Mike.
Harris all went to Millie A.
Toll.
Dick has been many times and he's gathered.
Pieces of a plane from Millia Toll, and those were studied by Jim Hayton, who is an NTSB investigator in Seattle, Washington, and I I've seen him on film saying be got a shadow of a doubt because he owns the same materials, and he showed me where they fit on the plane that they could only have come from Amelia Earhart's model plane. So my point is, why bring your pull hair out of your head trying to figure out where she is somewhere else when all of these things line up one after the other.
I mean, I really bless these guys' hearts.
I hope that they have a wonderful trip there. I just I really feel it's time to.
Really and now here's the other part of it.
Georgia and you know me. I've been talking via mediums meetings who work with law enforcement members of different law enforce from an agency, so I know how effective they are. They've told me consistently that Amilia wants to converse, that she wants to talk, and so over the past fifteen years, I've had continuing conversations with her, and I'm asking details
about her life and her journey. For example, I had heard from Elgin Long, who now says he didn't tell me this, but all I can tell you is I record everything. He told me that he had talked to Dorothy Putnam and that was George Putnam's wife.
And just before she divorced him, she had.
Walked in on a room with Amelia and George and another woman, and mediums were telling me that this other woman was the love of her life, that she was a painter, that she was from Europe. Different mediums who had never met me, didn't know anything about me, would tell me the same answers. And a couple of months ago,
I'm doing a session with Jennifer Shaffer. You know, we do a podcast hack in the Afterlife, and during this session, she said Emilia's telling me you should put this into chat GPT, you should go to AI and ask for what you're looking for. And so I thought, well, that's a weird thing to say, what a weird odd thing to say, But I said, why not? So I put all the parameters, and of course I've read all George Putnam's books, all Emilia's books, and all of these, all
of these different mediums I've talked to. I just didn't have a name of this painter. I put it all in there, and George, I pushed enter, and up came one name. And then I followed that person's life and I looked at all of her photo all of her paintings that she had done, and lo, the old nineteen thirty two she had a painting which she called anonymous,
but it was Amelia Earhart, clear as a bell. And of course then I took that information back to Jennifer Schaffer and said, hey, listen, I would look something up the other day, and Jennifer before I could, finished the sentence that Emilia is here and telling me you found her.
So I found the woman that was.
The love of her life, who was a painter from Europe.
Something she had to hide. She had so many seecrets in her life that she had to hide.
And what the last time we spoke, like last week, she said she was so disappointed that the Equal Rights Amendment has never been passed. It was something she helped create one hundred years ago. And even though, as I'm sure you heard that, people were talking about, well, it's been ratified by the entire nation, it just hasn't been gone into law.
She was saying. She was sad.
That was the word she used, sad that it had never come into law. So this is the point, and this is why it's important what we're doing. You and I talking about the ability to ask people on the other side questions about our journey, about our lives, what's their impression of how we're living, and is there anything we can do to fix it or to help the planet?
Does that make sense?
Sure?
Does?
But rich, why was she arrested and harmed by the Japanese four years before there was a war?
Well, first things first, nineteen thirty six, she applied for a permit.
To fly over Japan.
She was going to fly from Oakland and then in the westerly direction, but because of her plane got wrecked in Hawaii. The US Navy took over the repair of it and they changed her flight pattern, and it was around that time when they decided to put and there's a guy who was interviewed.
I interviewed his son.
They put us by camera on her plane and a fair Child aerial surveillance and it was supposed to take pictures of the deep water ports Japan was building in order to go to war, because they had said they wouldn't do that in the mandated islands.
But the problem was she flew over these islands because.
Of a storm at night, so there was no pictures she could have taken. However, when she landed the plane on Milia Toll, one of the locals there saw her bury a metal case. Now was that this fair Child camera, I don't know, but I do know that this person reported that, and they went and found a piece of like a medal there.
Vincent Loomis's book, I think he talks about it.
But the point is she was actively being a spy. She even said to a mechanic in the lockheed where they were fixing the plane, imagine me being a spy. That's been recorded, But that doesn't mean that she actually
was a good spy. I do know this, and this has come from Amelia herself and from Fred Noonan, that they were both accused of being spies by the Japanese because in those days, if you spied on another country with an active war, and the Japanese were actively beheading people who they captured who they thought were spy a British couple Shanghai, and they were paranoid at the time, exactly, and so and also there were I have also in
this new book. It's a number of sailors who were sailing in the same region, the same area, and their ships were taken away from them and they were incarcerated. And one of them claims that he saw Amelia there when he was incarcerated. But the point is she was in very dangerous territory.
She didn't mean to.
Now these guys that are going to look for her, that's where she wanted to go. She wanted to go to Gardner Island now called Nicka Morero. But was there's evidence and I showed the book that she constantly, at least three or four times, she was about two hundred and fifty miles northwest of where she thought she was. Something about her leaning on the controls.
I can only tell you.
Paul Manz reported it, so did Fred Noonan on their trip when in her book Last Flight, he talked about, you know, we're two hundred and fifty miles northwest to where I thought we were. Anyway, I think that's what happened, because Milia Tole, where she did bring the plane down, is roughly two hundred and fifty miles northwest of where she thought she was, so she came down in hostile territory.
The Japanese then came, according to islanders who saw her, came and arrested her and slapped her and put her aboard this ship and took her to Jaluit, where she was treated for her wounds by a young local native
who I've seen interviews with him. I've talked to his business partner who said he was beyond reproach, and he said that fred Nona was more injured than Amelia, but that the and he overheard the Japanese sailors calling her a mira, and then he's reported that the many people reported that, and his story never changed, and ultimately she's then taken a sidepan and they wanted her as a bargaining chip to use in this upcoming war that was
clearly happening because of the US oil embargo against Japan and all these other reasons. They were building these deep water ports to put their ships. Ultimately, they weren't able to use her as a chip, But they defended Saipan like it was Hawaii because Saipan had been part of Japan in nineteen fourteen and on it was they considered a homeland. They lost sixty thousand or they sent sixty
thousand troops. I think thirty thousand died defending that island as if it was Japan because from then the Americans could fly to Tokyo and refuel. The war was effectively over when they took Saipan, so that's why they spent so much time trying to defend it. But here she had been and this is the really bizarre part, George. When I was on Saipan interviewing.
Older people, I met.
This gentleman and he told me the story, which was corroborated by another older gentleman, that in nineteen forty four, in the spring of forty four, she was on They saw her on the back of a Japanese truck with two other pilots, two other US pilots alive and alive. And well, she's alive. These other two pilots are alive. And both of these guys said the exact same story, the same street, how she was dressed, et cetera. Once I was talking to less Kinney about this, he told
me the names of these two pilots. One was Lieutenant William Cornelis. The other and Jimmy McEwan. Both of them had been shot down because they were trying to map what Saipan was and they were executed. One was beheaded and one was shot.
And again, this is before there was a declared war.
Well, this was.
Months before they were already at war. So this is nineteen forty four. This is like May of nineteen forty four. She's still alive.
She's still alive, Okay, in May.
Of forty four.
That's what makes it so uncanny and unusual. And I try not to judge with people are saying to me. I tried to corroborate it, and so I was stunned when this guy was saying that, I thought she had died of dysentery early on, but no, she was still alive.
Then seven years later that she's still alive then, still.
Alive then and apparently taken around, and some Islanders said that she was very polite to them and tried to talk to their children and just continued being who she was, which was a really wonderful human being who really.
Embodied the spirit of this adventure.
And she, you know, lived the last years of her life in that way. But in the prison in Saipan, the prisoners had a family that brought them food. No one was there to bring food for her, and they had no cafeteria.
They didn't feed people.
So she really got sicker and sicker and sickre until she passed away. So all I can say is, you know, this story which has been I wouldn't call it haunting, which is in my sleeve for thirty over thirty years. I mean, I worked on the Amelia movie that Hillary Swank did, I worked on the Amelia movie that Diane Keaton did. I've been telling this story in variations, in various forms, really for forty years, and now I'm just
finally putting a book together. It'll be out probably by contact in the desert, where I'm just going to put it all out there and let people, you know, maybe they can go find her. I in the book, you'll see the maps of where she said she's buried.
What happened to the electro of the plane.
So the plane was found in a hangar, and I think it was in June of nineteen forty four. Like I said Erskine Neighbors, the US Marine decoded the message we found it. Then they would try to decide what to do with it. And it took about two or three weeks before they toned it out of the hangar. But they flew it one day to sea if it would fly.
Other guys saw that.
But then they took it out of the hangar and the way Erskine neighbors describe that Julius Neighbors was they covered it with gasoline and then they had a P.
Thirty eight a.
Plane come over across the runway and shoot it up as if it had been shot by the Japanese and it was. It burned on the runway. The casing of the plane is illuminum, so it would have melted.
However, as Jim.
Hayden, the NTSP guy told me, the steel frame wouldn't melt and it was unique.
To that model of planes, so the measurements.
Would still be exactly as they were. And I asked people where what happened, and they showed me there's a pit at the end of the old runway where they pushed all the planes off and it's buried there, and that's where I would have to if somebody wants me to, I'm happy to go take a ground penetrating radar and find a piece of steel that measures what Jim Hayden said would be the measurements of her plane.
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