“I am ordering my Administration to declassify and release all Government Records related to Amelia Earhart, her final trip, and everything else about her,” President Donald Trump announced recently on Truth Social, pulling one of America’s most enduring legends into the political present. For more than eight decades, Earhart’s 1937 disappearance has been fertile ground for speculation: pulp stories, Hollywood films, and best-selling books that turned a tragic accident into lurid melodrama or unsolved mystery.Underlying all these tales is the idea that Washington concealed the truth, a narrative that has never withstood serious scrutiny. Aviation historians are nearly unanimous: Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, ran out of fuel over the Pacific. The ocean swallowed the Lockheed Electra, as it had countless other planes. Earhart’s own family’s Bible records, which I saw firsthand while researching my recent biography of Earhart, put it plainly: “Lost at sea about July 4-5-6, 1937, in the Pacific.” Earhart wanted to be remembered for her courage, her flying, and her work on behalf of women. But she has also become something else: a national ghost story, repurposed for every era.What makes the hoaxes about Earhart endure is not evidence but appetite. She was glamorous, daring, and unfinished. Her abrupt disappearance left space for projection; the public has long been reluctant to accept that such a mythic figure could have died as mundanely as any other pilot who ran out of fuel. Conspiracy theories promise a more dramatic ending—espionage, capture, reinvention—and mystery sells far better than tragedy.[Kaitlyn Tiffany: What the JFK file dump actually revealed]Earhart was undeniably brave and determined. But the polished “Queen of Aviation” was also the invention of her husband and publisher, George Palmer Putnam, who promoted her as much as he managed her. In the late 1920s, before she had enough training to qualify for advanced licenses, she sometimes logged flights in which mechanics or co-pilots handled the controls. Putnam nevertheless presented her to the public as the flier, packaging those padded hours as proof of mastery. He even claimed that she was the fourth woman in the United States to hold a transport license, a major achievement she did not actually obtain until the following year, after additional training. By 1937, on the eve of her last flight, she had yet to master Morse code, the essential tool for long-distance communication. Months earlier, she had ground-looped her Electra on a Pearl Harbor runway, spinning out and collapsing the landing gear.Her first navigator, Harry Manning—a seasoned mariner with the very radio skills she lacked—quit in frustration, calling her obstinate. Noonan, his replacement, was famous for charting Pan Am’s Pacific routes but had flaws of his own: He was slow in Morse, and Pan Am had let him go for drinking. Putnam hired him anyway, partly because he came cheap. Newly unearthed audio preserved by the Smithsonian’s Amelia Earhart Project Recordings reveals that Noonan was drinking heavily in the days leading up to their fateful takeoff.The reframing of Earhart’s disappearance began almost immediately. During World War II, America needed female icons of resilience. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, through her widely read “My Day” column, celebrated Earhart as a reminder of women’s strength and service to the nation. She did not highlight the fact that Earhart’s final flight was an unnecessary gamble that even some of the pilot’s friends warned would amount to a suicide mission. Others—including Earhart’s own widower—were less high-minded than Roosevelt, spinning Earhart’s loss into pulp adventure and naked propaganda for profit.In 1942, Putnam quietly acquired Stand By to Die, a 1939 script by Horace McCoy about a female pilot. By then, Putnam was, according to his own son’s account in a Smithsonian oral history, broke and desperate. RKO Pictures, headed by Floyd Odlum—husband of Jacqueline Cochran, the celebrated speed-record holder and one of the most influential women in American aviation—bought the script from Putnam for $35,000 (about $700,000 today). Although he maintained a facade of outrage at the apparent appropriation of Earhart’s story, Putnam was in fact working with Odlum behind the scenes, a revelation that surprised even Cochran when it later became public. Putnam collected a $7,000 payout (roughly $135,000 today) for “material provided.”In late 1942, RKO released a version of Stand By to Die as Flight for Freedom. Starring Rosalind Russell as a character modeled on Earhart, the film portrayed “Tonie Carter” as a daring aviator who vanished on a covert mission. The screen never shows her capture or death, but the implication is clear—she is lost to the Japanese, a patriotic aviator-spy. The film premiered at Radio City Music Hall to a packed house, and Russell reprised her role in a Lux Radio Theater broadcast the following year, spreading the fiction to millions more.Putnam gave his blessing to other fictions too, despite knowing, from the first days of the search, that Earhart and her navigator had almost certainly crashed into the Pacific. In its November 1942 issue, Skyways magazine ran a piece ghostwritten by Putnam’s confidant Charles “Cap” Palmer, speculating that Earhart had been the first victim of Japanese aggression; Putnam got a cut. Woman’s Home Companion published a short novelization credited to McCoy, which paid $2,000 (about $40,000 today) and reached more than 4 million readers. Putnam, who had brokered the deal, again took his own cut even as he protested publicly.The Pacific-captivity theory had staying power. First framed as a World War II tale of Japanese aggression, it resurfaced during the Cold War because it echoed a broader American fear: that citizens could be captured in Asia and abandoned by their government, a theme that grew louder in the POW debates of Korea and Vietnam. Letters preserved in the University of New Hampshire’s archives show that in 1959, Captain Paul Briand Jr., a military man and would-be biographer, negotiated with a shady lawyer to secure paid “testimony” from Josephine Akiyama, who supposedly witnessed Earhart’s capture by the Japanese on the island of Saipan. Yet Josephine had been only 11 years old in 1937, a schoolgirl far too young to serve as a reliable eyewitness.Each subsequent decade has seemed to bring another “discovery”: grainy photographs, maps of phantom islands, bones misidentified in South Pacific graves. Earhart has become a fixture of tabloids and cable specials. In 2017, the History Channel went so far as to tout a “lost photograph” purporting to show Earhart and Noonan alive on a dock in the Marshall Islands after their disappearance. Within days, researchers had traced the image to a 1935 travel book—published two years before she vanished—collapsing the claim into farce.[Katrina Gulliver: Why we’re still looking for Amelia]Earhart’s younger sister, Muriel, who died in 1998 at the age of 98, fought back against these kinds of stories for years. She was appalled by pulp features that depicted Amelia in a Japanese kimono or claimed that her lucky African-elephant-toe bracelet had been recovered from a prison camp. In reality, the bracelet had never left Muriel’s possession, and the kimono—picked up as a souvenir from a Japanese dinner in a Honolulu mansion—remained in Amelia’s Boston home with her other effects. Muriel wrote privately, and later publicly, of her frustration at the exploitation of her sister’s name by profiteers chasing money and attention. “Absolutely ridiculous,” she called the espionage theories, pointing out that her famously pacifist sister would never have undertaken a spying mission without formal military backing.The 1937 disappearance will continue to attract opportunists. Link yourself to a glamorous, unsolved mystery and attention follows. But we owe Earhart something better: to remember the life she led, not just the myth she left behind. I have spent years in archives reading Earhart’s own words. She was funny, sharp, and sometimes impatient with the public’s need for spectacle. She wanted to inspire women to fly, to pursue adventure, to claim space in fields dominated by men. She was a record-setting pilot who became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, in 1932. She set coast-to-coast speed records and co-founded the Ninety-Nines, an international organization of female pilots still active today. She took risks—some calculated, some reckless—and in 1937, those risks caught up to her.Earhart’s final radio transmissions to the Coast Guard cutter Itasca are not the words of a secret agent, but those of a professional pilot doing her best, growing more desperate as her fuel dwindled. She was a woman who lived fully and died bravely. That is the story worth telling.