Does This Satellite Photo Show Amelia Earhart’s Plane?
Ever since Amelia Earhart vanished while attempting to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe in 1937, people have been desperate to find out what happened to her.
And now a tantalizing satellite photo will spark yet another search to find the world’s most famous aviator, 88 years after the first one.
Researchers from Purdue University are preparing a new expedition to search for her missing aircraft. The upcoming mission will focus on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island in the Republic of Kiribati. Researchers plan to investigate what they call the “Taraia Object,” an anomaly detected in the island’s lagoon. The object was first identified in satellite images in 2020 and later found in aerial photographs dating back to 1938, according to Purdue.
Earhart, 39, and her navigator, Fred Noonan, 45, vanished over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 as they were attempting to reach Howland Island to refuel; Howland Island is approximately 400 miles north of Nikumaroro. Neither their remains nor the wreckage of her Lockheed Model 10E Electra have ever been recovered.
The Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI), which is leading the effort, believes the evidence points strongly to the site.
“Finding Amelia Earhart’s Electra aircraft would be the discovery of a lifetime,” says Richard Pettigrew, ALI’s executive director. “Other evidence already collected by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery establishes an extremely persuasive, multifaceted case that the final destination for Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, was on Nikumaroro. Confirming the plane wreckage there would be the smoking-gun proof.”
The mission will begin with photo and video surveys of the area. Remote sensing with magnetometers and sonar will follow before any excavation takes place.
Hope Against Hope
But despite the researchers’ optimism, there’s good reason Earhart has never been found. The area where she disappeared is unimaginably vast and bleak.
Last year, a crew searching for Earhart got excited when an underwater drone captured what looked like the outline of an airplane on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. But it turned out to be a rock formation that looked a bit like an aircraft.
Ric Gillespie, head of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, casts aspersions on the latest mission.
“We’ve looked there in that spot, and there’s nothing there,” Gillespie tells NBC News. He suggests the object may simply be a coconut palm tree carried into the lagoon during a storm.
