The tragic and mysterious disappearance of aviator Amelia Earhart while flying over the Pacific Ocean has intrigued the world for 86 years, stimulating countless investigations and expeditions in search of answers about what happened to the explorer.
The latest group to join the search, a team of underwater archaeologists and marine robotics experts from ocean exploration company Deep Sea Vision, says they may have found a clue that could put an end to the Earhart mystery.
Using sonar imaging, an ocean floor mapping tool that uses sound waves to measure the distance from the sea floor to the surface, the group detected an anomaly in the Pacific Ocean, more than 4,800 meters underwater, that resembles a small aircraft.
Researchers believe the anomaly could be a Lockheed 10-E Electra, the 10-passenger plane Earhart was flying when she disappeared while trying to fly around the world.
Deep Sea Vision announced the discovery through an Instagram post on January 27.
“Some people consider it one of the greatest mysteries of all time. I think it’s actually the biggest mystery of all time,” said company CEO Tony Romeo, a pilot and former United States Air Force intelligence officer.
“We have the opportunity to close one of the greatest American stories of all time,” he highlighted.
Solving an underwater mystery
The images were taken about 161 kilometers away from Howland Island, according to Romeo, the next place where Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan were scheduled to land after their last takeoff from Lae, Papua New Guinea.
The pair were declared lost at sea after an extensive 16-day search conducted by the US government.
Deep Sea Vision scanned more than 13,468 square kilometers of the ocean floor using an advanced autonomous underwater vehicle known as the Hugin 6000, which maps the seafloor using sonar technology.
The company’s shipment began in early September 2023 and ended in December, Romeo told CNN.
Romeo hopes to return to the site within a year to confirm that the anomaly is a plane, which would likely involve the use of an ROV (remotely operated vehicle) with a camera that would allow him to investigate the object more closely.
Aviadora Amelia Earhart / Reuters /Deep Sea Vision
The team would also study the possibility of bringing the discovery to the surface, Romeo highlighted.
“While it is possible that this is a plane and perhaps even Amelia’s plane, it is too premature to say definitively. It could also be noise in the sonar data, something geological or some other plane,” said Andrew Pietruszka, an underwater archaeologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and chief archaeologist at Project Recover, an organization dedicated to finding soldiers and aircraft that went missing in World War II.
“That being said, if I were looking for Amelia’s plane and had this target in the dataset, I would want to analyze it in more detail,” Pietruszka pointed out.
More theories about Earhart’s disappearance
A 2017 History Channel documentary proposed the theory that Earhart and Noonan had crash-landed in the Marshall Islands, about 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) away from Howland Island, where they were captured and taken to Saipan Island, held hostage and eventually died.
The theory was based on a photo from the US National Archives that featured several blurred figures. Investigators said the aviator and her plane were in the image.
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR, theorized in 2016 that Earhart and Noonan survived a rough landing on a reef in the Pacific Ocean but later died as castaways after failing to radio for help.
The TIGHAR team stated that the skeleton of a castaway found on the island of Nikumaroro, Kiribati, in 1940 matched Earhart’s “height and ethnic origin.”
However, the most widely accepted theory, advocated by the United States government and the Smithsonian Institution, is that Earhart and Noonan crashed into the Pacific Ocean near Howland Island when the plane ran out of fuel.
The new sonar image of the presumed missing aircraft is of particular interest because of the anomaly’s proximity to Howland Island, said Dorothy Cochrane, curator of general aviation in the aeronautics department at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
In Earhart’s last communications, her radio transmissions became progressively stronger as she approached Howland Island, indicating that she was approaching the island before disappearing, Cochrane said.
Analysis is necessary
However, the plane-shaped object found by Deep Sea Vision lacks certain features of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra, such as the dual engines, according to David Jourdan, co-founder and president of Nauticos, a deep-ocean exploration company that has conducted operations. search for the lost aircraft.
“It is impossible to identify anything from a sonar image alone, as the sound can be complicated, and the artifact can be damaged in unpredictable ways, changing its shape. For this reason, you can never tell what something is (or isn’t) just from a sonar image,” Jourdan pointed out.
Confirming that the newly discovered anomaly is Earhart’s plane would require returning to the site to further investigate the plane and, more definitively, locating the “NR16020” certification that was printed on the underside of the Lockheed’s wing, the expert continued.
If the plane were discovered at such depth in the ocean, where temperatures are very cold and low in oxygen, the plane could be very well preserved, he concluded.
“(Earhart) was kind of the rock star of the time, the Taylor Swift of the time. Everyone is rooting for her, they wanted her to go around the world, and she disappeared without a trace. It’s the mystery of the 20th century, and now the 21st century,” Cochrane said.
This content was originally created in English.
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