US Expedition Searches Remote Pacific Atoll for Amelia Earhart's Plane

The expedition was inspired by satellite images taken over several years that showed a submerged object in the uninhabited island’s sandy lagoon. Other longtime Earhart investigators have dismissed the evidence, saying it is probably a fallen tree. The researchers, led by archaeologists who raised funding from Earhart’s former benefactor, Purdue University, hope it will instead prove to be the wreckage of her Electra. Separate aerial footage of the area suggested the submerged object has a metallic glint, the team says.

“Finding Amelia Earhart’s Electra aircraft would be the discovery of a lifetime,” expedition leader Richard Pettigrew said before he set sail this month, according to the Guardian. “Confirming the plane wreckage there would be the smoking-gun proof.” Pettigrew heads the Archaeological Legacy Institute, a nonprofit organization. The mission was funded with Purdue University in Indiana, where Earhart once taught and which funded her final flight on the modified plane she called her “flying laboratory.” The university runs an airport and opened an Amelia Earhart Terminal last year.

Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished during their attempt to circumnavigate the globe at the equator. Earhart was 39 and already a celebrity and aviation pioneer, having broken several records, including being the first woman to make a nonstop solo transatlantic flight. Locating the wreck of the twin-engine plane would confirm a long-held but unproven hypothesis that Earhart and Noonan ditched at Nikumaroro, part of Kiribati and about halfway between Australia and Hawaii. They were en route to Howland Island, about 400 miles north of Nikumaroro, when their plane ran low on fuel and disappeared.

After a six-day sea voyage from Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati, the research group is expected to arrive on the uninhabited atoll on Tuesday local time, the Guardian reported. It will spend several days searching for the “Taraia Object,” an elongated shape named after the part of the island where it was first noticed in a 2020 satellite image. The expedition says the object has been lying there for several years and is even visible in aerial photography dating back to 1938. The Purdue mission says the object may not have been found by previous expeditions because it could have been covered with sand.

The expedition builds on a large body of evidence pointing to the atoll as the location where the aviators went down. Much of it was gathered during dozens of visits between 1989 and 2019 by teams from the US explorers group Tighar, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. Tighar’s co-founder, Ric Gillespie, said the Taraia Object was likely a dead pandanus tree, which is native to the area, that washed into the lagoon. Gillespie, author of One More Good Flight: The Amelia Earhart Tragedy, said he and other teams had visited the exact site where the object was located in 2001 and 2007 with metal detectors. “There’s nothing there, or we would have found it,” he said in an interview this year. “If they suddenly discover that Amelia Earhart’s wreckage is there, I’ll be very surprised, but I’d be the first one to congratulate them. But I don’t think they are going to find anything.”

Tighar agrees the Electra made an emergency landing on the atoll, but believes it was washed off a reef and now probably lies undiscovered and in pieces in deep water off the island’s western end. Tighar’s version of the mystery is that Earhart, and possibly Noonan, were marooned on Nikumaroro but survived for a while, drinking rainwater and eating small fish and turtles. This theory is based on signs of a castaway’s campsite and 1930s-era artifacts, such as a jar of what is believed to be cosmetics freckle cream. The pair’s disappearance led to a large US government search, including a flyover of Nikumaroro, then known as Gardner Island.