Amelia Earhart the aircraft came close. "I did not understand it at the time," she said, "but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by." By 1919 Earhart prepared to enter Smith College but changed her mind and enrolled at Columbia University, in a course in medical studies among other programs. She quit a year later to be with her parents, who had reunited in California. In Long Beach, on December 28, 1920, Earhart and her father visited an airfield where Frank Hawks (who later gained fame as an air racer) gave her a ride that
Amelia Earhart miles northwest, a feat "not supported by the basic rules of geography and navigation." Additionally, had the Japanese found a crashed Earhart and Noonan, they would have had substantial motivation to rescue the famous aviators and be hailed as heroes. The unresolved circumstances of Earhart's disappearance, along with her fame, attracted a great body of other claims relating to her last flight. Several unsupported theories have become known in popular culture. The World War II-era movie "Flight for Freedom" (1943) is a story of a fictional female aviator (obviously inspired by Earhart) who engages in a spying mission in the