Expedition fails to find Amelia Earhart’s plane on remote island in Western Pacific

(KTLA) – The whereabouts of Amelia Earhart’s plane remain a mystery after a team of archaeologists and filmmakers failed to locate the pilot’s Model 10E Electra aircraft on a remote, uninhabited atoll in the Western Pacific earlier this month.

The highly publicized voyage, known as the “Taraia Object” expedition, was envisioned after a plane-shaped object was spotted in a lagoon off Nikumaroro atoll using satellite imagery in 2020. A team from Purdue University planned the voyage in hopes of discovering Earhart’s plane and solving the 89-year-old mystery.

Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished somewhere over the Pacific Ocean while she attempted to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe in 1937. She was 39 years old at the time of her disappearance.

The 17-person team — led by Steve Schultz of Purdue and executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute, Richard Pettigrew — began the expedition on Oct. 6, after years of planning. The team launched from Tarawa in the Republic of Kiribati and traveled by sea for five days to reach Nikumaroro. The expedition was extended due to bouts of bad weather and involved four days of onshore fieldwork related to the investigation.

After a week of scouring the coral atoll, the team determined that the plane-shaped object was likely a group of trees. The university said that the team “found no conclusive evidence to confirm a hypothesis that wreckage from Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10-E was in a lagoon on a remote atoll in the South Pacific.”

“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 school announced on Oct. 18. “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 — a fraction of the anomaly’s original size observed in imagery when the Taraia Object hypothesis was developed.”

The object’s shiny, metallic-looking appearance, which helped spark the hypothesis that it could be Earhart’s long-lost plane, was caused by a “carbonate veneer” of coral sand, the university said.

“Other items found by the team were similarly coated with a shiny concretized amalgam of coral sand,” the researchers continued.

Although the expedition failed to solve the mystery of Earhart’s missing plane, the team’s leaders praised its efforts to rule out the Taraia Object as a possible conclusion.

“Amelia Earhart’s spirit of courage and curiosity drove every step of the search,” Pettigrew said. “We accomplished our goal to determine what the Taraia Object was, and we’re deeply grateful to the private donors who shared our vision and made this journey possible. Our team remains in great spirits and proud of what was accomplished.”

“Perhaps no words better capture this expedition than Amelia Earhart’s own: ‘Adventure is worthwhile in itself,’” Schultz said. “We set out to test a hypothesis, not to guarantee a particular result, and we followed the evidence to the end. While the Taraia Object did not prove to be what we hoped, the journey produced new discoveries, added to the world’s knowledge of Nikumaroro, and wrote another extraordinary chapter in a story of discovery and exploration.”

Though no known plane wreckage was found during the Taraia Object expedition, the team did recover artifacts from the atoll, including a 30-inch-long steel tube found in the lagoon near the Taraia Peninsula. The university will study the objects to test the broader castaway hypothesis, which theorizes that Earhart and Noonan landed on the remote atoll and were marooned there instead of crashing into the Pacific.

“Those discoveries will continue to be studied as they may provide additional evidence for a core premise behind the Taraia Object hypothesis: Objects entering the lagoon through the Tatiman Passage, the atoll’s natural channel to the Pacific on its western side, can travel across the lagoon and become deposited along the Taraia Peninsula, which functions as a catchment area directly opposite the passage,” the university said.

Earhart’s Lockheed Electra, which was known as her “flying laboratory,” was funded by the Purdue Research Foundation. Earhart intended to return the plane to Purdue upon completion of her flight, the university said.

The search for the plane continues.