The Lost Pleiad

by Sesh Heri

  “The Admiral was pulling your leg about that,” Tesla said. “Don’t you know?”

  “Certainly,” Putnam said. “He has an odd sense of humor.”

  “Yes,” Tesla said. “That is true.”

  Putnam turned to go in, but then stopped, and over his shoulder said, “And you and the Admiral went on the voyage in 1897.”

  “1898,” Tesla said involuntarily.

  Putnam turned slowly and looked Tesla in the eye, gave a nod, and then turned back around and went inside.

  At the Lockheed plant in Burbank mechanics worked to repair Earhart’s Model 10E Electra. In a separate hangar, surrounded by extreme security, the fourth Electra was being finished by another team of mechanics and engineers under the supervision of Lt. Thomas Townsend Brown. This fourth Electra was a Model 12 made to look in outward appearance like Earhart’s Model 10E. It had the weight of the 10E but the Model 12’s capacity for speed— 240 miles an hour at level cruise in conventional air-supported flight. This was accomplished by fitting the plane with two 550 horsepower Pratt & Whitney wasp senior engines and increasing the wing span. This special Model 12 was also fitted with an anti-gravity drive in the wings and fuselage, complete with a set of camouflaged control switches in the cockpit. The hidden rheostat switch to engage the anti-gravity drive was hidden under the pilot’s seat. Once this switch was fully engaged, Earhart could use the control yoke, throttles and rudder to control the movement of the plane just as she would in the conventional flight mode. On this Model 12, windows were cut into the belly of the plane to allow motion picture and still camera mounts to be placed inside. Sliding panels, controlled by hidden electrical switches in the cockpit, could cover the windows in the belly of the plane when the cameras were not in use. The more powerful conventional wasp engines would give Earhart an advantage of speed at a number of points in her World Flight, allowing her to do secret reconnaissance over Africa and the South Pacific. The antigravity mode was strictly reserved for flying over the island of Guadalcanal during the most secret phase of Earhart’s mission. New Bendix radio receivers were installed in both Earhart’s Model 10E and the secret Model 12, and Earhart was given a cursory training in the use of the receivers. In the secret Model 12, a top-secret Tesla electro-pulse receiver and sender was also installed. This device did not make use of the Hertzian waveband, but of modulated longitudinal electric waves, and it was this mode of communication that Earhart would actually use for direction finding during her World Flight.

  As the weeks passed, all of the details for Amelia Earhart’s World Flight coalesced into a single whole made of complex parts, some parts public, some parts confidential, and some parts majestically secret. In May, Earhart publicly announced a major change in her World Flight: its direction of travel. Instead of flying from east to west as planned, she would now proceed around the equator from west to east. Earhart explained that this was to take advantage of seasonal weather patterns. A fact known to all meteorologists was that the prevailing winds around the equator are always from east to west. The change in the direction of the World Flight was in actuality to facilitate the secrecy of Earhart’s activities in the South Pacific. A west to east flight path would allow all of Earhart’s secret reconnaissance photography of Japanese warship positions in the South Pacific to be removed from her plane when it landed on an aircraft carrier positioned north of Howland Island.

  On May 21st, 1937 Amelia Earhart made an unannounced departure from Burbank in her Model 10E Electra, bound for Miami. She took along on her flight her husband, her navigator Fred Noonan, and her mechanic Bo McKneely. Because of a late departure, Earhart decided to set down in Tucson, Arizona for the night. The next day she resumed the flight. On the evening of May 22nd, Earhart landed at New Orleans’ Shushan Airport. The next morning, May 23rd, 1937, Earhart and her passengers took off for Miami, Florida.

  Around 3:00 pm that day, Earhart landed at Eastern’s airport on Thirty-Sixth Street in Miami. Her landing was perfect, but the location of her landing, she announced, was “a mistake.” She had intended to land at the Miami Municipal Airport. She took off again for her intended destination.

  However, this incident was not a “mistake.” It was a carefully planned ruse to flush out spies at the Miami Municipal Airport who may have been waiting for Earhart’s arrival. The ruse worked. As soon as it was announced at the Miami Municipal Airport that Earhart’s plane had landed at Eastern’s airport by mistake, agents of Majestic Seven noted two men immediately turn and leave near the hangar where Earhart’s plane had been due to arrive. A few minutes later, Earhart arrived at the Miami Municipal Airport.

  When Earhart touched down on the runway, she landed the plane so hard that a metallic thud echoed all over the field. Later, meeting with reporters, Earhart said, “I certainly smacked it down hard that time.” This hard landing was, in fact, no accident, but part of a careful enactment of a prearranged script. The hard landing created an excuse for having the Model 10E Electra checked over by mechanics. Bo McKneely checked the landing gear while mechanics from Pan American checked the autopilot, radio, and rudder control unit. Earhart decided that since neither she nor Fred Noonan could use the Morse code key, she would scrap the 500 kilocycle channel and eliminate the need for a trailing wire antenna.

  By May 31st, 1937 all repairs had been made on the Model 10E Electra and Earhart and Noonan prepared to depart Miami the next day. Unknown to the mechanics working on the Model 10E and the reporters covering their work, a switch in planes was about to be effected that night. The Model 12 Electra with the secret anti-gravity drive had been flown into Miami the night before and now sat in a separate hangar under heavy guard. On the night of Monday, May 31st, Bo McKneely finished his inspections on the Model 10E Electra, had the plane filled with 600 gallons of fuel, and had it locked it up for the night. As soon as McKneely and his crew departed the area, agents of Majestic Seven opened the hangar, quietly taxied out the Model 10E, and taxied into its place the Model 12.

  The next morning at 4:30 am Earhart, Putnam, Noonan, and McKneely arrived at the hangar and McKneely opened its doors. Expecting to see the Model 10E, this is precisely what McKneely thought he saw. McKneely got into the plane and rolled it out on to the concrete apron. The Electra— actually the Model 12— was loaded with maps, coffee bottles and food. Then Earhart got into the cockpit and made a twenty minute engine check. At the end of the check, she came out of the cockpit and told McKneely that one of the cylinder head temperature gauges was not working. McKneely investigated and found a broken thermocouple wire. It took him less than half an hour to replace it. The World Flight was ready to begin.

  Noonan entered the cockpit first and then Earhart got in and sat down in the left seat. Putnam came up on the left wing and said a few words to Earhart through the open hatch. Photographers’ flashbulbs went off in rapid succession. Then Putnam came down from off the plane, and Earhart started the engines. She signaled for the chocks to be pulled from the wheels and then began her taxi to the runway.

  The sun was about to break above the horizon.

  Putnam and McKneely stood side by side as the plane approached them

  “Funny,” Putnam said.

  “What?” McKneely asked.

  “The plane,” Putnam said. “It looks…bigger.”

  “That so?” McKneely asked, scrutinizing the Electra that was now moving away from them. Suddenly McKneely’s eyes widened, realizing what he had just seen, and he blurted out: “Hey!”

  “What?” snapped Putnam.

  “Oil!” McKneely shouted, running toward his car. He jumped inside, started the engine, and started after the Electra.

  At the end of the runway, Earhart brought the Electra to a stop and McKneely came up in his car, jumped out, and ran up to the plane. Earhart threw open the hatch and stuck her head out.

  “I thought I saw an oil leak!” McKneely shouted up to Earhart. “But it’s just grease from the propeller bearings.”

  “You sure?�
�� Earhart shouted.

  “You’re O.K.!” McKneely said, and gave a wave as he ran back to his car.

  Amelia Earhart dropped back into her seat, closed the hatch, and applied power to the engines. The Model 12 Electra rolled forward on to the runway, gathered its speed, and lifted into the air. It was 5:47 am. Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were on their way around the world.

  Over the next month Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan would soar over three continents and three oceans. Their route would take them to Puerto Rico, South America, across the Atlantic to Dakar on the coast of Africa and then onward to El Fasher in central Africa.

  It was in central Africa that Earhart began an aerial reconnaissance, photographing areas that would serve as strategic positions in a world war. Fighting the rise of columns of superheated air from the floor of the desert, Amelia Earhart flew on across Africa through mid-June.

  On June 21st, Earhart and Noonan reached Bandoeng in the Dutch East Indies. Here, Earhart and Noonan were met by F.O. Furman, a maintenance specialist with Lockheed who had been assigned by Majestic Seven to remove the photographic film thus far exposed in the Electra’s cameras and to do a final check on the Electra’s antigravity drive. Before commencing work, Majestic Seven agents informed Earhart that German spies had been identified near the hangar where Furman had set up shop. In response to this intelligence, Earhart and Noonan immediately departed Bandoeng, headed back toward the equator. Three days later, Earhart was informed that the German agents had left Bandoeng, and so she turned back to Bandoeng, announcing that she had to make further adjustments to the Electra’s long-distance flying instruments. Back in Bandoeng, Furman removed the exposed film from the Electra’s cameras, reloaded the cameras with unexposed film, and then checked the Electra’s anti-gravity system. While Furman was doing this, Earhart announced that Furman was doing an overhaul on the Electra’s engines.

  On June 27th, Earhart and Noonan departed Bandoeng. From there, over the next few days they would wing southeastward over the Savu and Timor Seas, reaching Darwin, Australia, and, on June 29th, landing at Lae, New Guinea.

  On July 1st at 10:00 am, Amelia Earhart lifted off the runway at Lae, New Guinea supposedly headed in a 2,556 mile-long bee line for Howland Island in the South Pacific. Unknown to most of the world, Earhart’s actual course was quite different. Even at a secret level, there were two versions of Earhart’s flight plan.

  The first version took Earhart and Noonan northwest to the Truk Islands where it was suspected that a deep-water naval facility was in some stage of construction by the Japanese. From the Truk Islands the Electra would fly east toward Jaluit Atoll to photograph Japanese naval installations and ship positions. From Jaluit Atoll, the Electra would fly southeast— and become officially “lost”— actually landing on a secret U.S. aircraft carrier positioned a few miles north of Howland Island. Once landed on the carrier, all of the exposed film would be removed from Earhart’s plane. Two days later, it was planned that Earhart and Noonan would be discovered floating on a make-shift life raft several miles north of Howland Island. This two day period would give the U.S. Navy time to do an air-sea intelligence sweep of the South Pacific. It was hoped the combined intelligence from Earhart’s plane and the navy’s ships and planes would provide a complete picture of Japanese naval strength in the South Pacific. Yet this was only the first version of Earhart’s secret flight plan.

  The second and actual version of Earhart’s flight plan was known to only a very few individuals in the U.S. government. Earhart’s actual flight in the South Pacific would start in Lae, New Guinea and extend southeast to Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. There, Earhart had been instructed to fly in a tight, one-mile radius circle around the two hundred feet diameter sphere that was buried under a conical mound. After circling this site using the Electra’s anti-gravity drive, Earhart was to fly over a thousand miles northwest to the Truk Islands. This actual route formed a giant backward ‘z’ over the South Pacific. This flight plan was made possible by not only the Model 12’s senior wasp engines, but also the plane’s anti-gravity drive. From the Truk Islands, the Electra would fly over Jaluit Atoll and then land on the secret aircraft carrier north of Howland Island. The “Third Tier” of Project Electra— the flight over Guadalcanal— would be nested invisibly within its “Second and First Tiers.” Three versions of reality would be transmitted by Amelia Earhart to different segments of the watching world— version one: an experimental World Flight; version two: a spy mission directed at the Japanese navy; version three: a spy mission directed at Germany’s most secret weapons project, the Bell.

  Thus it was that when Amelia Earhart lifted off the runway at Lae, New Guinea on July 1st, 1937, she flew only a few miles on the bee line route toward Howland Island before turning to the southeast toward Guadalcanal. In less than two hours Earhart and Noonan reached Guadalcanal and were circling the site of the conical hill where the ancient time modulator had been buried.

  “I see the hill ahead,” Earhart said, speaking into the Tesla electro-pulse wireless.

  Aboard the U.S.S. Cosmos, Admiral Chester Nimitz and Nikola Tesla listened to Earhart’s voice.

  “Proceed around the site,” Admiral Nimitz said.

  Earhart turned her plane to the right, making an arc around the conical hill.

  “I’ve entered the field,” Amelia Earhart said into the Tesla wireless.

  Aboard the U.S.S. Cosmos, Earhart’s voice became almost inaudible in a buzz of static.

  “Hold to your course around the site,” Admiral Nimitz said, “and begin transmissions of the readings from your etheric compression detector.”

  Nikola Tesla stood by the communications console, watching a series of numbers flash by upon the surface of a glowing television screen. He glanced over to another television screen that was displaying a schematic diagram of the site on Guadalcanal. A flashing light indicated the position of the Electra in relation to the conical hill. Tesla kept scrutinizing the television screen displaying the schematic.

  Suddenly, Tesla shouted, “She’s getting too far into the field! Tell her to pull back! Pull back now!”

  “You’re too close to the site,” Admiral Nimitz said into a microphone on the communications console. “Pull back immediately. Repeat. Pull back immediately.”

  A broken hiss rose through the static emitted by the speaker on the console.

  “Can you make that out?” Admiral Nimitz asked the radio operator.

  “She said she’s pulling back,” the radio operator replied.

  Then Earhart’s voice broke through the static: “We’re right on the edge of the field. The land below and the sky above it look clear and normal from here. But just a few feet inside the field everything changes. The whole place is lit up like an aurora borealis.”

  “Tell her to stay out of there,” Tesla said.

  “Stay out of there!” Admiral Nimitz barked into the microphone.

  “I’m making a circular course on the outer perimeter of the field,” Earhart’s voice cracked over the speaker. “I’m seeing some lightning dead ahead.”

  “Hold your course,” Admiral Nimitz said.

  “I’m holding course,” Earhart’s voice replied over the speaker. “If I see no other phenomena, will transmit again in ten minutes on 2160 kilopulses.”

  Earhart’s transmission cut off.

  Admiral Nimitz looked over to Tesla and asked, “Is she still transmitting the etheric compressions?”

  “Still transmitting,” Tesla replied, his eyes fixed on the television screen. “We’re getting all the frequencies. The computers tell us that so far there are no repetitions in the sequence.”

  “The Bell hasn’t finished its ringing,” Admiral Nimitz said.

  “The Bell and the time modulator,” Tesla said. “It’s both of them— a conversation. Miss Earhart must keep flying until we have the completed sequence of frequencies.”

  Ten minutes passed and then static burst forth on the speaker again
. Amid the static, Earhart’s voice sounded: “We’ve been flying around the site for ten minutes and continue to transmit the compressions.”

  Tesla spoke into the radio man’s microphone: “The computers tell us there have been no repetitions in the frequencies. The time modulator is producing a complex series. You must keep flying around the site until there is a repetition. We must have the complete sequence.”

  “We will continue on course,” Earhart’s voice crackled on the speaker, “and keep the channel open for further instructions.”

  Now everyone in the radio room of the U.S.S. Cosmos waited, listening to the open transmission of the Electra, while watching Tesla who stood before the television screen. Then, twenty-six minutes into Earhart’s flight around the time modulator, a green light flashed on the console next to the television screen.

  “That’s it,” Tesla announced. “We have the complete sequence. Tell Miss Earhart that she can proceed to her next destination.”

  “We have the complete sequence,” Admiral Nimitz said into the microphone. “Proceed to your next assigned destination.”

  “We are on our way,” Amelia Earhart replied over the speaker, and then the static cut off.

  For the next fourteen hours, Amelia Earhart maintained radio silence on the conventional Hertzian waveband of 6210 kilocycles and also on the Tesla 2160 kilo-pulse longitudinal waveband. This was done to avoid any possible transmission intercepts, whether they might be made by the Japanese, Germans, or Martians. During the night of July1st to the 2nd, Earhart flew across the Truk Islands and Jaluit Atoll, taking numerous still and motion picture photographs in the infrared range of light.

  At 2:45 am on July 2nd, 1937, three words on the Hertzian 6210 kilocycles were picked up by a radio operator aboard the Coast Guard cutter Itasca that lay off the coast of Howland Island. The words were spoken by the voice of Amelia Earhart: “…cloudy and overcast.” An hour later, the Itasca received a second message from Earhart: “Itasca from Earhart. Itasca from Earhart. Overcast. Will listen on the hour and half-hour.” Then Earhart maintained radio silence for another two hours, and then, in breaking the silence, only transmitted a brief message. At 6:15 am Earhart transmitted a radio message that she was approximately 200 miles from Howland Island. At 7:42 am, Earhart transmitted, “We must be on you but cannot see you. Gas is running low. Have been unable to reach you by radio.” At 7:46 am, Earhart transmitted, “We are circling but cannot see you.” And at 8:44 am Earhart’s voice, pitched high with desperation, came over the Itasca’s speaker, “We are in line position 157-337. We will repeat this message on 6210 KC. Wait. Listening on 6210. We are running north to south.”