In Search of Amelia Earhart notably Andy Roberts who shared vocals on the album, created an atypical British folk album conceived around the idea of the legends surrounding Amelia Earhart and her supposed demise. Matthews had read a book by Fred Goerner hypothesizing that Earhart and her flying companion Frederick Noonan had crashed around the Japanese held Marshall Island area and been taken prisoner by the Japanese on Saipan, in the Marianas, in 1937. Their plane had supposedly been outfitted with aerial cameras and had a bigger fuel tank than anyone outside of the US government knew. After being grilled by Japanese interrogators Earhart would
Fred Noonan 10E that she had purchased with funds donated by Purdue University. She planned to circumnavigate the globe at equatorial latitudes. Although this aircraft was of an advanced type for its time, and was dubbed a "flying laboratory" by the press, little real science was planned. The world was already crisscrossed by commercial airline routes (many of which Noonan himself had first navigated and mapped), and the flight is now regarded by some as an adventurous publicity stunt for Earhart's gathering public attention for her next book. Noonan was probably attracted to this project because Earhart's mass market fame would almost