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Researchers believe they have uncovered “very strong” evidence that they have located the long-missing plane of famous aviatrix Amelia Earhart. Now, they are planning to embark on an expedition to a remote island in the South Pacific to find out if they are correct.
According to the researchers from Purdue University, “the expedition will include three weeks of travel to determine if a visual anomaly in a lagoon of Nikumaroro Island is Earhart’s missing Lockheed Electra 10E.”
On October 30, members of the expedition will fly out of the Amelia Earhart Terminal at the Purdue University Airport (Earhart worked at Purdue for two years in the 1930s) to Majuro, the capital and largest city of the Marshall Islands. They and rest of the 15-person crew will then sail approximately 1,200 nautical miles to Nikumaroro in the western Pacific Ocean. Once there, they will spend several days conducting their search for Amelia Earhart’s missing plane. The timing of the search coincidentally comes just as President Donald Trump ordered records related to Earhart be declassified.
“Finding Amelia Earhart’s Electra aircraft would be the discovery of a lifetime,” said Richard Pettigrew, the executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute, who will also participate in the expedition. “Other evidence already collected by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery establishes an extremely persuasive, multifaceted case that the final destination for Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, was on Nikumaroro. Confirming the plane wreckage there would be the smoking-gun proof.”
Why are they searching Nikumaroro for Amelia Earhart’s plane?
For years, Nikumaroro has been considered as a potential location where Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan may have landed in July 1937 while she attempted to become the first female pilot to circle the world.
The researchers believe that a “visual anomaly” known as the Taraia Object in a lagoon on Nikumaroro that was identified in 2020 using satellite imagery may be the key to finally putting an end to the mystery of the missing pilot. The “anomaly” has been confirmed to have been visible on aerial photos taken of the island’s lagoon as far back as 1938.
While on the island, the researchers will take videos and still images of the site prior to any disturbance. They will then do remote sensing with magnetometers and sonar devices, followed by underwater excavation using a hydraulic dredge to expose the object for identification. There will also be a walk-over survey of the land to search for debris.
“We gathered up many more satellite images, did historical research, found other imagery that relates to it,” Pettigrew told CBS News. “We’re going to go look and identify it. And if we’re right, we’ll in fact identify the lost Electra. We could be wrong but I think the evidence is very, very strong that this is, in fact what it is.”
Many don’t believe Amelia Earhart’s plane is there
Unfortunately, some people, like Ric Gillespie, executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, don’t believe the researchers will find Earhart’s plane on Nikumaroro. His team has conducted a dozen expeditions and recovered some physical evidence they believe shows Nikumaroro is where Amelia Earhart landed and died. He told NBC News in July, “We’ve looked there in that spot, and there’s nothing there.”
This past August, British pilot Justin Myers made news when he claimed he had found the exact location of where Amelia Earhart’s plane crashed 88 years ago. He said he found photographic evidence of fragments of the missing plane in enlarged images taken by Google Earth on the island of Nikumaroro. The images he revealed were different from those of the Purdue University expedition.
In 2012, a half-million-dollar search of the deep waters near Nikumaroro – the same site as a 2010 search – yielded no evidence of Earhart’s missing plane. Then in 2019, another multi-million dollar search did not find was a single piece of the missing Lockheed Electra airplane.