By Katie Hunt, Alex Stambaugh, CNN
(CNN) — A recent expedition to a remote South Pacific island to search for wreckage from Amelia Earhart’s lost plane has come up empty.
Researchers said Monday they found “no conclusive evidence” that the famed aviator landed her Lockheed 10E Electra aircraft on or near the small atoll south of the original pit stop of her ill-fated flight nearly 90 years ago.
The trek to the suspected site, Nikumaroro Island, was a joint effort led by the Eugene, Oregon-based Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, with the 17-person team of researchers and technicians arriving on the island on October 12.
The main goal was to examine a blurry object known as the Taraia Object in a lagoon first detected in satellite imagery in 2020. Team leader and archaeologist Rick Pettigrew, believed the plane-shaped figure was wreckage from Earhart’s craft.
However, the expedition “found no conclusive evidence to confirm a hypothesis that wreckage” from Earhart’s plane was “in a lagoon on a remote atoll in the South Pacific,” Purdue University said in a news release.
Evidence gathered on Nikumaroro confirmed that the visual anomaly first seen in the satellite imagery six years ago was likely a collection of large trees deposited along the peninsula’s sandspit. “By the time the team arrived at the site, a good portion of the debris had fragmented and washed away,” the statement said.
“The evidence for the castaway hypothesis, which brought us here, remained very, very strong,” Pettigrew, ALI’s executive director, said in a video statement. “We think that it’s very likely that Amelia and her navigator, Fred Noonan, did in fact end up here on Nikumaroro Island.”
Steve Schultz, Purdue general counsel and field assistant, said while researchers could rule out the hypothesis, it “doesn’t detract from the existing, very strong, compelling case for the castaway hypothesis.”
The mystery of Amelia Earhart
Earhart and Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937, during a bold attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world. The pair were last seen taking off from Lae, New Guinea, on what was expected to be a grueling 18-hour journey to Howland Island, a tiny speck of land in the Pacific Ocean.
Earhart’s disappearance is perhaps the most captivating mystery in aviation history, and for decades historians and researchers have debated how and where she went missing.
The main school of thought — and the official determination of the massive US government-led search held immediately after her disappearance — suggests that Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and their Electra crashed into the Pacific near their intended destination.
Others, such as the leaders of the latest expedition, suspect that Earhart and Noonan landed their plane 400 miles (644 kilometers) to the south of Howland — on or near Nikumaroro Island — and became castaways until they likely perished from thirst or hunger.
A focus on Nikumaroro Island
Repeated efforts to find Earhart’s plane, including other searches around Nikumaroro, haven’t been able to turn up anything new.
“Nikumaroro Island has been searched more than 15 times, to no avail,” said Dorothy Cochrane, an Earhart expert and retired curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. “They are one of many who have not found bona fide evidence of the Electra or Amelia or Noonan at Nikumaroro,” she said, referring to the most recent expedition.
In 2024, ocean exploration company Deep Sea Vision detected on sonar imagery a plane-like shape in the ocean about 100 miles (160 kilometers) away from Howland, but the figure turned out to be rocks. A 2019 expedition to Nikumaroro led by oceanographer Bob Ballard, who found the Titanic in 1985, also ended in disappointment.
The American researchers of this latest search said they surveyed Nikumaroro’s lagoon with a magnetometer, which detects iron, and used sonar technology to search for objects under the sediment on the lagoon bed.
“We accomplished our main goal, which was to come here and test that hypothesis,” Pettigrew said in the video statement.
Nikumaroro, which is today part of the Republic of Kiribati, is an uninhabited coral reef-fringed island in the South Pacific that is home to huge coconut crabs. The island is so remote it took the team five days to reach it by sea from Tarawa, Kiribati’s capital.
The Purdue Research Foundation originally funded Earhart’s Lockheed Electra, and Earhart intended for the plane to be returned to Purdue upon completion of her historic flight, the university, said in a news release.
Earhart was close to achieving her goal when she went missing. She had already flown 22,000 miles (35,405 kilometers) when she was last seen, and she had 7,000 miles (11,265 kilometers) left to travel.
The Purdue search for Earhart’s plane is unlikely to be the last.
Deep sea exploration company Nauticos is trying to raise the $8 million to $10 million necessary to fund what they hope will be a final expedition to the ocean around Howland Island, exploring a search area narrowed by new information from experiments using a replica of Earhart’s radio system. The company has already completed three searches near the island since 2002.
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