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Well, I just don't buy the idea that Sauron did take the One to Númenor. Tolkien's reasoning is pretty flawed in the letter, and he clearly did not consult what he had written in The Akallabêth before or he would have stumbled on those lines claiming that Sauron put the Great Ring up again.
I mean, in context this is pretty clear. We don't have any lines mentioning Sauron leaving the One behind but if he took the One back from Númenor then he wouldn't have had no reason to pick it up somewhere - which he does in the text, in spirit form in his tower.
@Alcuin:
The problem with the reasoning there is that we have to jump through a lot of hoops to believe that no knowledge about the Rings of Power ever came to Númenor.
1. We know that there was contact between the Númenóreans and Lindon, and they eventually came to their aid. While it would make in hindsight sense for the Elves to not talk about the Rings back then Gil-galad could easily have talked about them. Even more so if he wanted to convince Telperien or Minastir to come to their aid.
2. Three great Númenóreans became Nazgûl. We don't know how or when exactly, nor who those guys were in life but if such a transformation did occur in Númenor then the Kings would have learned about that.
3. More importantly they would later also clashed with the Nazgûl on occasion in their wars in Middle-earth.
Tolkien himself fails to provide us with the possibility that the One might have been invisible, making it unlikely that this was the case. His scenario is that Ar-Pharazôn did not recognize the One as being important.
The idea that the One could be hidden the same way the Three obviously were doesn't feel right to me. It is an instrument of enormous power, it *wants* to be seen and the power its wearer gains through it would be visible, too. I doubt that a Sauron wearing the Ring could successfully fool the Númenóreans into believing that he was weak and so on. The Ring would have made Sauron appear powerful and regal, like the Maia he was, and that would have been more of an obstacle than a help.
Whether the Three can be made invisible or not is another matter, but one we don't have to decide. Gandalf, Galadriel, and Elrond should all have the power to conceal such an item without using its power but rather other innate powers they do have.
The idea that characters just don't recognize any visible rings for what they are makes no sense because Saruman kept Gandalf imprisoned at Orthanc. If he can take his staff from him he should also be able to Narya from him but he didn't. One assumes that Gandalf was indeed somehow able to conceal the Ring from Saruman.
This example would suggests that perhaps there was some 'invisibility spell' on the Three, or that the Three indeed gave their wearers the ability to keep them hidden. IF Gandalf tried to hide Narya with some Maia tricks from Saruman one assumes he would have seen through that.
But in the case of the One I don't think invisibility of the Ring itself was an option.
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