of Irene Craigmile Bolam after being freed in 1945 and died in 1982

Amelia Earhart was captured by the Japanese whilst on a secret spying mission for the US and returned to America under an assumed name to cover it up for President Roosevelt, a new book claims.

The aviator lived out WWII in a Japanese POW camp and was given a new identity because the administration feared embarrassment if the truth came out.

Franklin D. Roosevelt supposedly thought he would be called a 'coward and incompetent' to let such a beloved figure as Earhart be kept as a prisoner with no rescue attempt.

Author W.C. Jameson says that Earhart's plane was fitted with special cameras to take pictures of Japanese military installations on islands in the Pacific Ocean.

When she came down in the Marshall Islands in 1937 she immediately buried a box in the sand before she and co-pilot Fred Noonan were captured by the Japanese, which likely contained damning evidence against them.

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Vanished: The disappearance of Amelia Earhart on her pioneering round-the-world trip in July 1937 has become one of the world's most enduring mysteries

Final flight: The white shows the route Earhart was expected to take and how a direct route to Mili Island - then Japanese-held - would have bee

Circumnavigation: Earhart and Noonan were beginning their crossing of the Pacific, the longest cross-ocean stretch of their journey, when their plane vanished

Co-pilots: Fred Noonan and Earhart in front of her Lockheed Electra. Author W.C. Jameson says it was fitted with spying equipment in a secret mission authorized at the highest levels

Earhart took her new identity because she was a 'marked woman' and wanted nothing more to do with her old name and the notoriety it attracted, Jameson claims.

His account is co-written by Gregory A. Feith, a former Senior Air Safety Investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, and is the first to be reviewed by such a figure.

They conclude that one of the greatest mysteries in the history of aviation has been a cover-up that has remained secret for nearly 80 years.

Earhart was a feminist pioneer, an author and an icon who led a glamorous life, counting President Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover and her male aviator counterpart Charles Lindbergh among her friends.

She had already become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic when she undertook her mission to go round the world aboard a specially manufactured Lockheed Model 10 Electra plane with Noonan.

The pair were 22,000 miles into the 29,000 mile trip and were due to land at Howland Island, 1,700 nautical miles southwest of Honolulu in the Pacific Ocean, when they got into trouble.

The US Coast Guard station Itasca on Howland Island lost radio contact with Earhart at 8.43am local time on July 2 1937 when she transmitted: 'We are running on line north and south'.

The official US government version is that Earhart, 41 when she died, and Noonan, 44, ran out of fuel, crashed and died within 40 miles of Howland Island, possibly because of heavy weather in the area at the time.

However, Jameson says that this is 'fraught with problems and errors and remains suspect'.

He says: 'This conclusion was arrived at in spite of the fact that not a single shred of evidence exists to support it'.

Legacy: W.C. Jameson believes that among the reasons for allowing Earhart to take a fake identity after being freed from Japanese captivity was the posthumous damage it would have caused to President Roosevelt

Friends: Earhart (left) was a friend of Charles Lindbergh (right, with his wife Anne)

Jameson says that 79 years on some 113 documents relating to Earhart's disappearance remain classified, some of them being top secret.

His theory is that the 'crash' was a cover for something else entirely.

He writes: 'Amelia Earhart was involved in a covert government-endorsed and government-sponsored operation wherein the objective was to take photographs of real and potential Japanese military installations on one or more of the mandated islands in the Pacific Ocean.

'This information was kept from the American public.'

Jameson's theory is that Earhart was either shot down or mechanical problems forced her to land on the Milli Atoll in the Marshall Islands, which was occupied by the Japanese at the time.

He bases this on eyewitness accounts by fishermen living there and says that Earhart and Noonan were taken to the mainland where they spent the next eight years as POWs.

Jameson writes that on August 17, 1945 an identified woman disguised as a nun was rescued from a Japanese prison camp in northern China, a woman Jameson claims was Earhart.

While in Japan she had adopted the name Irene Craigmile Bolam, a pilot and contemporary of hers who lived in New Jersey.

According to Jameson there were many theories as to why Earhart changed her identity.

She could have been so humiliated at being returned to the US as a 'Tokyo Rose', one of a group of Western POWs who were made to give propaganda broadcasts on behalf of the Japanese.

Jameson writes that Earhart could have been given the new identity so as not to bring shame on the round-the-world flight program.

Another theory is that she was sick of all the attention her case had been getting - and then there were the political reasons, especially protecting the recently-dead Roosevelt's reputation.

Jameson writes: 'The political implications of the knowledge that Earhart had been a prisoner of the Japanese and had been moved through a succession of prison camps were immense.

Proof: These are some of the metal objects found on the atoll where W.C. Jameson says Earhart went down - and which could prove his book's claim that she was captured by the Japanese and held until 1945

Evidence: Researchers who found this piece of metal believe it may have been a dust cover from the wheels of Earhart's Lockheed Electra. W.C. Jameson claims her capture was covered up from 1937 onward

Alive? A 1970 book first made the claim that Earhart (at the controls of her Lockheed) became Bolam after the war but Bolam sued for the breach of her privacy and received a settlement for the claim

'Roosevelt would have been branded a coward and an incompetent. His image would not have survived such an assault.'

The theory that Earhart was Bolam was challenged by Bolam herself before her death in 1982.

She was outed by air enthusiast Joseph Gervais who in 1956 had a chance encounter with her and his research was used as the basis for a book by author Joe Klass.

'Amelia Earhart Lives' came out in 1970 and sparked a furor but after its publication Bolam sued publishers McGraw-Hill for breach of privacy for $1.5 million, resulting in an out of court settlement.

Jameson dismisses this and says that there are a string of unresolved mysteries about Bolam's life which cast suspicion on her claim she was not Earhart.

Firstly there was physical resemblance, which was the reason Gervais' interest was first piqued.

Earhart was five feet seven inches and trim whilst Bolam was five feet five and more curvy, but Jameson points out that after being kept as a POW for eight years in a Japanese camp would have altered Earhart's body.

Jameson writes that Bolam filing a lawsuit in itself was suspicious because Earhart was a much-admired figure and to be accused of being her was far from defamatory.

During her life she refused to provide fingerprints to investigators and on her death certificate next to her mother and father was written: 'Unknown'.

Jameson writes: 'Despite the abundance of evidence and the clear indication that Earhart was involved in a clandestine operation and resumed life under a new identity, there exist a number of traditionalists who cling to the government's position and who further deny any credibility in, and seek to discredit, the Amelia Earhart-Irene Craigmile Bolam association.

'The truth is that such evidence - from a number of sources and at a variety of levels - is quite abundant.'

Jameson says that further evidence of the wider cover-up was that, after Earhart vanished, the logs from the Itasca Coast Guard station which was the last to communicate with her were tampered with and key documents went missing.

He quotes John Ream, the nephew of Louis Ream, a senior official in the US Army who was later connected with former CIA director Allen Dulles.

John Ream said: 'It was well known within high ranking intelligence circles that Miss Earhart, at the time of her disappearance, was involved in an intelligence-gathering operation... ordered at the request of the highest echelons of government.'

He added that there were 'serious blunders by the Navy in their attempt to provide Miss Earhart with proper guidance, and they Navy was and is determined to conceal their participation in their part of the operation'.

On top of that, the search for the Electra was 'illogical and botched', suggesting the government may have known exactly where she was all along.

Jameson is the latest in a long line of investigators who have tried to crack the Earhart case.

In June this year investigators investigators Les Kinney and Dick Spink claimed that corroding pieces of metal found on the Mili Atoll in the Marshall Islands could be the the wheel trim and dashboard from Earhart's plane.

The parts are still being analyzed but if the plane landed on Mili Atoll it lends credence to speculation that the Earhart and Noonan fell into the hands of the Japanese.