What happened to Amelia Earhart?
That question has eluded countless researchers, biographers and devoted enthusiasts for almost 90 years.
Over the decades, researchers have scanned swaths of the ocean floor, traversed remote islands and scoured satellite images in costly attempts to locate the plane that Earhart piloted as she sought to become the first person to fly around the world.
Now, after a yearlong delay, an expedition that some believe represents the best chance at solving one of the most enduring mysteries of the 20th century is set to take place this fall.
“I am feeling very confident about this,” lead archeologist Richard Pettigrew told USA TODAY. “I’m pumped.”
The voyage will bring researchers to Nikumaroro, a remote Pacific island between Australia and Hawaii, where a popular theory suggests Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, landed after failing to complete their historic journey in 1937.
The expedition centers around the “Taraia object,” a visual anomaly in the island’s lagoon that was discovered through satellite imagery in 2020. The mission, which is a joint effort between the Purdue Research Foundation and the Archaeological Legacy Institute, will seek to determine whether the object at the water’s edge is Earhart’s long-lost plane.
Originally set to take place in October 2025, the mission was delayed because of weather conditions and clearance from the government of Kiribati, the island nation that maintains control over Nikumaroro. With new approvals from the government’s cabinet, a 16-person team in October will travel by sea to the island in hopes of finding proof of Earhart’s final voyage.
An unsolved disappearance
Earhart and Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937, as they flew from Lae, Papua New Guinea, toward Howland Island, where the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca was waiting with refueling supplies. The pair were near the end of their round-the-world journey that began on May 21, 1937, in Oakland, California.
Coast Guard authorities received voice messages from Earhart as her signal increased in which she warned that she was almost out of fuel. Neither Earhart nor Noonan knew Morse code, so there was no two-way contact, according to the Smithsonian Institute’s analysis of government records.
After their disappearance, the U.S. government conducted its largest ever search for a lost aircraft. After two weeks, the search ended with no trace of Earhart, Noonan, or their plane. On Jan. 5, 1939, they were declared legally dead.
In the decades since, millions of dollars have been poured into expeditions that have taken researchers from remote islands to the depths of the Pacific Ocean, including in recent years.
In 2024, an ocean exploration company conducted a deep-sea search within 100 miles of Howland Island, after spotting what they believed to be the wreckage of the Electra 10E. It turned out to be a rock formation.
Theories and debates
Earhart’s sudden disappearance immediately spurred a wide range of theories that sought to explain what happened to the world-famous aviator.
Some posit that the flight was part of a secret spy mission, that Earhart assumed another identity or that Earhart and Noonan were captured by the Japanese. The most widely supported explanation is that Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of Howland Island.
“I do believe that they were close to Howland Island based on the records,” said Dorothy Cochrane, a retired general aviation curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and a leading expert on Amelia Earhart.
The hypothesis that Earhart and Noonan landed on Nikumaroro and later perished there has gained steam in recent years.
The main piece of evidence supporting the theory is satellite imagery capturing an unknown item in the island’s lagoon. Pettigrew said the object came into view in April 2015 and resembles an anomaly seen in photographs taken in the months and years after Earhart’s disappearance.
Other supporting evidence includes radio bearings that converge on Nikumaroro, an analysis of human bones discovered on the island that are similar to Earhart’s bone lengths, and a number of artifacts, including a woman’s shoe, a freckle cream jar and a medicine vial that date to the 1930s, according to the Purdue Research Foundation.
Still, Cochrane and other researchers remain skeptical.
“It would be amazing if they do find something,” said Rachel Hartigan, an author who’s written a book about Earhart’s life and twice traveled to Nikumaroro as a journalist covering various expeditions. “But there’s just been a lot of promising things that haven’t come through.”
‘Something is there’
The upcoming expedition is set to take place over several days in October, beginning with a days-long journey by ship to Nikumaroro. From there, researchers will make their way to the lagoon where satellites spotted the Taraia object. Using a hydraulic dredge, a crew will gently remove layers of sediment to determine whether it’s the famous Electra 10E.
The team will focus on identifying what may be the largest parts of the aircraft, including the fuselage and the wing, Pettigrew said. They will also scour the surface for metal rivets unique to the Electra’s design.
“This is a hypothesis,” Pettigrew, 78, emphasized. “We won’t know until we go down there and identify it.”
If the team locates the aircraft, they will return the following year for a “full-scale excavation,” Pettigrew said. A future voyage will involve a recovery operation in which crews would remove the wreckage and transport the remnants back to the United States.
Steve Schultz, senior vice president of Purdue University, said the institution is in discussions with the government of Kiribati over a potential agreement that would entrust Purdue with custody of the wreckage. Earhart, once a visiting adviser and counselor at Purdue, intended to give the plane to the university after her historic flight so it could be used for scientific research in aeronautics, according to Purdue’s Research Foundation.
“That would be our vision – to fulfill Amelia’s wishes and bring it back to Purdue on permanent display for the world to see,” Schultz said, adding that the university would share the benefits of any exhibit with Kiribati in perpetuity.
Both Schultz and Pettigrew said that while they hope to solve the nearly century-old mystery, it won’t be a failure if they come up empty-handed.
“Something is there, and it’s either the Electra or it’s not,” Pettigrew said. “Somebody has to make that determination – and that’s going to be us.”
Christopher Cann is a national reporter for USA TODAY. Contact him via email at ccann@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Will a popular Amelia Earhart theory be proved? ‘Something is there.’
Reporting by Christopher Cann, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
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