[Amelia Earhart on the wing of her plane]

According to the inscription on the back of this photograph, the picture was removed from a "dead Jap" in Okinawa during World War II. It was intended to prove that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan had contact with the Japanese. One theory, first introduced in the 1943 film Flight for Freedom and later elaborated in the 1970 book Amelia Earhart Lives, is that Earhart had been a spy for the U.S. government and that she had flown into Japanese territory so that the U.S. would have access to the area to make accurate maps of the Pacific islands. Another theory suggested that the flyers had landed on Mili Atoll after missing Howland Island and were taken to Saipan by the Japanese. Two Japanese battleships were in the area on July 2, but neither ship's log records seeing the Electra or rescuing the flyers.