Image of ‘Amelia Earhart’s Plane’ Turns Out to be a Big Rock

Last January, a crew trying to find Amelia Earhart’s plane wreckage captured an intriguing image that, they speculated, could show the 1937 crash site. It turns out they were wrong.

Deep Sea Vision took to Instagram to regretfully confirm that “after 11 months the waiting has finally ended and unfortunately our target was not Amelia’s Electra 10-E”.

Instead, the vaguely airplane-shaped outline was a natural rock formation. But Deep Sea Vision, spearheaded by commercial real estate investor Tony Romeo, is not giving up.

“As we speak Deep Sea Vision continues to search — now clearing almost 7,700 square miles,” Deep Sea Vision writes. “The plot thickens with still no evidence of her disappearance ever found.”

The image was captured within 100 miles of Howland Island where Earhart was headed to when she disappeared. It showed an object estimated to be about the size and shape of an airplane resting 16,000 feet underwater.

The image was made by an underwater Hugin drone made by Kongsberg, which provides “high-resolution high-speed seabed mapping and imaging.”

Deep Sea Vision Project Manager Lloyd Yomeo told NewsNation in July that they had spent months scanning the ocean floor with the Hugin drone at a depth of 16,000 feet.

“We’ll go down even closer and of course it’s really dark down there, as dark as it gets, so you laser, a very powerful laser, of course, you laser the plane and then you have the camera scan the area around it,” Romeo said.

What Happened to Amelia Earhart?

It’s a question people have been asking since the 1930s. Arguably the most famous woman in the world when she disappeared, Earhart was attempting to become the first female to complete a circumnavigational flight of the globe.

On July 2, 1937, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan were nearing the end of their historic trip. After taking off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, the pair planned to refuel on the uninhabited Howland Island where a runway and fuel rig had been built especially for them.

There was a strong headwind, but operators listened to Earhart’s radio messages as she flew toward Howland. The last message was so strong that a radio operator looked to the skies, expecting to see her plane.

But she was never seen or heard from again and was declared dead on January 5, 1939.

Image credits: Deep Sea Vision.