Researchers Claimed a Blurry Object on Apple Maps Was 'Very Likely' Amelia Earhart's Missing Plane. It Turned Out to Be a 'Collection of Large Trees'

Researchers Claimed a Blurry Object on Apple Maps Was ‘Very Likely’ Amelia Earhart’s Missing Plane. It Turned Out to Be a ‘Collection of Large Trees’

A 17-person crew traveled to a remote atoll in the South Pacific to investigate the so-called Taraia Object. After surveying the site, the team announced that the anomaly was not a fragment of the long-lost Lockheed Electra aircraft

Ellen Wexler | Writer and Special Projects Editor

October 22, 2026 12:20 p.m.

The expedition began with a blurry satellite image on Apple Maps. Just off Nikumaroro, a remote atoll in the South Pacific, a mysterious object lurked below the surface. Didn’t it look suspiciously like the wing of an airplane?

The atoll in question is located near the region where aviator Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared in 1937. The location of their Lockheed Electra has been a longstanding mystery, but that hasn’t stopped new generations of sleuths from trying to solve it. The strange shape near Nikumaroro sparked the latest attempt to crack the case.

Earlier this month, a team of 17 traveled to the South Pacific to investigate the so-called Taraia Object, named for the atoll’s Taraia Peninsula. They surveyed the site with a magnetometer (to detect ferrous metals) and side-scan sonar (to identify objects buried in the sediment). As they worked, onlookers eagerly anticipated success, with some headlines claiming that the 89-year-old mystery “could be solved in days.”

On October 18, the researchers announced the results: They had found “no conclusive evidence” of Earhart’s plane on Nikumaroro. That tantalizing shape in the satellite imagery had likely been “a collection of large trees.” Many of the trees and other debris had already washed away by the time the team arrived at the site.

“The name ‘Taraia’ itself in the Gilbertese language, the Kiribati language, can mean ‘see if you can find it,’” Steve Schultz, Purdue University’s general counsel and a member of the expedition, says in a video. “We came to see what we could find here, to see if it could add a final concluding chapter to the mystery of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan’s disappearance. And unfortunately, we weren’t able to find that smoking gun.”

When her plane disappeared, Earhart was trying to become the first woman in history to fly around the world. She’d already broken a number of other records, becoming the first woman (and second person) to fly solo and nonstop across the Atlantic in 1932 and the first person to fly solo and nonstop from Hawaii to the United States mainland in 1935. Two years later, she plotted out a round-the-world journey divided into 34 legs. She selected a route near the equator to avoid harsh northern weather. In exchange, however, she would need to navigate long stretches of open water in the South Pacific.

Earhart and Noonan took off from Lae, New Guinea, on July 2, 1937. Their plan was to land on Howland Island, an isolated speck of earth thousands of miles from the mainland, where a Coast Guard cutter waited with fuel. “We must be on you, but we cannot see you,” the aviator radioed as she approached her destination. “Fuel is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet.” About an hour later, she made her final transmission to the vessel: “We are running north and south.” Earhart and Noonan disappeared after completing nearly 31 of their 34 legs. They had flown 22,000 of their planned 29,000 miles.

Numerous far-fetched theories have attempted to explain the pair’s disappearance. Some conspiracy theorists believe that Earhart landed in the Marshall Islands, where she was captured by the Japanese. One of them published a 2016 book claiming that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had sent the aviator on a secret spy mission, with Earhart later returning to America under a new identity.

Most experts think that the plane went down in the ocean near Howland Island. But some argue that Earhart and Noonan landed on Nikumaroro, some 400 miles away, and died there as castaways. Researchers with the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) have made numerous trips to the island, where they identified several 1930s-era cosmetic items and fragments of a shoe. These discoveries are titillating, but none of them are definitively linked to the Electra. The shoe, for example, likely wasn’t Earhart’s size.

The castaway theory “doesn’t follow the facts,” Dorothy Cochrane, then a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, told Smithsonian magazine’s Brigit Katz in 2019. The Coast Guard cutter waiting near Howland Island reported that her radio transmissions had gotten progressively louder, suggesting that she was getting closer. Rescuers flew over Nikumaroro within a week of the disappearance; if she were there, “it’s just inconceivable that they would not have seen her,” said Cochrane, who retired last year.

Several other big-budget expeditions have come up empty in recent years. In 2019, Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who discovered the wreck of the Titanic, conducted an unsuccessful search. In 2024, the exploration company Deep Sea Vision identified an intriguing shape on a sonar image some 100 miles from Howland Island; it later found that this shape was a natural rock formation.

The recent investigation began with Michael Ashmore, the amateur researcher who found the blurry Apple Maps image in 2020. He contacted Richard Gillespie, TIGHAR’s executive director, who wasn’t convinced. After all, TIGHAR’s researchers had previously investigated that section of the island.

But the satellite image intrigued Richard Pettigrew, executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute, who asked Ashmore to present his discovery at a conference. “I was sufficiently impressed,” Pettigrew told National Geographic’s Rachel Hartigan earlier this month. “Within a few days after that, I was already looking for ways to get back to Nikumaroro.”

Pettigrew created a video about the theory, which caught the attention of Schultz at Purdue. As it happens, Earhart had worked as a consultant and career counselor at the university. She even purchased the Electra with money from the Purdue Research Foundation—and, according to the university’s announcement, she had planned to return the plane to Purdue after her record-breaking flight.

Purdue University and the Purdue Research Foundation partnered with the Archaeological Legacy Institute to plan the Taraia Object expedition. Ahead of the trip, the researchers were bullish. “We believe it is very likely that the Taraia Object in Nikumaroro Lagoon is actually the remains of the Lockheed Model 10-E Electra flown to the island by Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan,” they wrote. They described the expedition as “Phase 1 of a potential three-phase project,” which could eventually include “full-scale archaeological excavation (Phase 2) and recovery (Phase 3) of the aircraft remains.”

Despite the disappointing results, the researchers are eager to continue the search. They say their confidence in the castaway theory hasn’t faltered. “There’s a long list of evidence that supports that conclusion,” Pettigrew says in the video. “I think eventually someone will find conclusive evidence here to finally put a cap on the mystery.”

Other experts, however, doubt that any evidence will surface on Nikumaroro. Nauticos, the deep-sea exploration company, is raising money for its fourth attempt to locate Earhart’s plane, which will investigate an area near Howland Island. “I’m very excited about their work,” Cochrane tells CTV’s Anne-Marie Mediwake. “They’re following the facts of the flight.”