Expedition to find Amelia Earhart's missing plane comes up empty

A mysterious object discovered near a remote Pacific island is not the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's missing plane, researchers said after an expedition to the site, dealing another setback to efforts to solve one of aviation's greatest mysteries nearly 90 years after the pilot disappeared.

"Evidence gathered at the Taraia Peninsula on Nikumaroro confirmed that the visual anomaly first seen in satellite imagery in 2020 was likely a collection of large trees deposited along the peninsula's sandspit," the researchers said. "By the time the team arrived at the site, a good portion of the debris had fragmented and washed away, leaving only a single Y-shaped segment," which they said is what they had initially hoped was the plane.

On Oct. 14, a 17-member expedition team led by Purdue University's Steve Schultz and the Archaeological Legacy Institute's Richard Pettigrew launched an expedition to investigate a mysterious object that in aerial photos appeared to resemble possible wreckage of Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10-E plane.

Severe weather kept the research team aboard their ship for three of the five days allotted for the search, while limited fuel and supplies prevented them from extending the expedition. The search area was so remote, it took the team five days at sea to reach it.

The expedition focused on a lagoon off Nikumaroro, where researchers examined the Taraia Object, an anomaly spotted by a Navy veteran in satellite imagery during the COVID pandemic. Although visible in aerial photos dating back to 1938, the object went unnoticed until 2020. Pettigrew said before reaching it that they believed it could be metal rather than a tree, but further investigation was needed to confirm its identity.

The team had developed plans to photograph and film the lagoon and Taraia Object before using magnetometers and sonar equipment to survey the area. Researchers then planned to retrieve the object for identification. The Archaeology Channel documented the expedition through short video updates on its Heritage Broadcasting Service streaming platform.

The research team previously said in a news release that there was "very strong" evidence that the object is Earhart's lost plane.

Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared on July 2, 1937, roughly 22,000 miles into their trip. Earhart was attempting to become the first female pilot to circle the world, and the first pilot to do so around the equator, Earth's widest point. 

Recently, President Trump ordered the declassification of records related to Earhart.

Nikumaroro is part of the archipelago country of Kiribati, located roughly halfway between Australia and Hawaii. The island lies about 400 miles southeast of Howland Island, where Earhart and Noonan were headed when they disappeared during their attempted flight around the world.

Pettigrew believes Earhart and Noonan landed on Nikumaroro and survived there for some time. He points to relics dating to the 1930s and to human remains discovered on the island, which were later lost as possible evidence. However, several competing theories about the aviator's disappearance have emerged over the decades, many of which lack conclusive evidence.

Researchers have spent decades searching for Earhart's plane, hoping its discovery could shed light on her disappearance. In 2024, an expedition team captured a sonar image of what appeared to be an aircraft on the ocean floor, but the object was later identified as a rock formation.