Nearly nine decades after Amelia Earhart vanished into legend, a new expedition believes it may finally be on the verge of finding her long-lost plane.
Earhart May Have Crashed Near An Unpopulated Island
July 3, 1937; Worchester; Mandatory Credit:Amelia Earhart Feared Down; Search Pacific Near Tiny Isle. The Worchester Telegram-USA TODAY NETWORK
Researchers from Purdue University and the Archaeological Legacy Institute will travel to Nikumaroro — a small, uninhabited island in the Republic of Kiribati — to investigate what they call a “visual anomaly” beneath the surface of a lagoon. They believe the object could be the wreckage of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E, the aircraft she was piloting when she disappeared with navigator Fred Noonan on July 2, 1937.
Earhart Wanted To Be The First Woman To Circumnavigate The Globe
Earhart’s goal was ambitious: to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. She and Noonan vanished somewhere over the Pacific Ocean near Howland Island, a pinpoint of land between Hawaii and Australia. Despite decades of searching, neither their plane nor their bodies were ever recovered. The mystery of what happened next has fueled nearly a century of speculation — from theories that they ran out of fuel and crashed at sea, to claims they were captured by Japanese forces, to stories that they lived out their final days as castaways on a remote island.
The “Taraia Object” Appeared One Year After Earhart Vanished
Now, a small patch of coral reef might hold the answer. According to Purdue University, satellite imagery first captured the anomaly in 2020 in a lagoon on Nikumaroro, about 400 miles southeast of Howland Island. The object — nicknamed the “Taraia Object” — appears in aerial photos dating back to 1938, just one year after Earhart vanished. That consistency across time, researchers say, makes this discovery different from past false leads. “We gathered up many more satellite images, did historical research, found other imagery that relates to it,” said Richard Pettigrew, executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute. “We’re going to go look and identify it. And if we’re right, we’ll in fact identify the lost Electra. We could be wrong, but I think the evidence is very, very strong that this is, in fact, what it is.”
A Full Circle Moment
People gather at the Purdue University airport’s groundbreaking event for the new Amelia Earhart Terminal and inaugural flight of Southern Airways’s new Purdue-themed aircraft, on Tuesday, May 14, 2024, in West Lafayette, Ind.
The Purdue team will conduct a detailed survey of the site, using magnetometers, sonar, and underwater cameras before dredging and attempting to lift the object. If it’s confirmed as the Electra, it would be the most significant aviation discovery of the century — not just resolving one of history’s great mysteries, but returning a piece of Earhart’s legacy to the university that helped launch her final flight. Earhart worked at Purdue in the 1930s as a visiting counselor for women students, and the Purdue Research Foundation financed the very plane she flew around the world. Steve Schultz, a senior vice president at Purdue who will join the expedition, said a discovery would bring that story full circle. “A successful identification would be the first step toward fulfilling Amelia’s original plan to return the Electra to West Lafayette after her historic flight,” Schultz said.
For Now, Earhart’s Final Resting Place Is A Mystery
Still, not everyone is convinced. Ric Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, which has led multiple searches on Nikumaroro, says his team has already examined the same site. “We’ve looked there in that spot, and there’s nothing there,” he told NBC News earlier this year. For now, the mystery endures. But soon, for the first time in nearly 90 years, researchers might know whether that glint beneath the Pacific’s blue surface is just coral — or the final resting place of Amelia Earhart’s dream.
