A team of U.S.-based marine archaeologists has set sail for a remote island in the western Pacific in hopes of uncovering new evidence in one of the 20th century’s most enduring mysteries: the 1937 disappearance of famed aviator Amelia Earhart.
Supported by Purdue University, which has long been associated with Earhart and her legacy, the team aims to determine whether an object detected beneath the waters of the island’s lagoon in satellite imagery six years ago is the wreckage of her twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10-E aircraft.
If confirmed, the discovery would lend decisive support to a longstanding theory that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, crash-landed on or near the coral-ringed atoll and died as castaways, hundreds of miles from their intended refueling stop.
The expedition departed Los Angeles earlier this month and was expected to reach Nikumaroro on Tuesday, Oct. 13, local time. The uninhabited island lies in the remote Phoenix Islands, part of the Pacific nation of Kiribati.
“Finding Amelia Earhart’s Electra aircraft would be the discovery of a lifetime,” Richard Pettigrew, head of the Archaeological Legacy Institute in Eugene, Oregon, who is leading the effort in conjunction with Purdue, said in press materials for the mission.
Purdue general counsel and expedition member Steve Schultz, who was in Fiji conducting advance work for the expedition last week, said in an interview: “This would be solving one of the great mysteries in aviation history, certainly one of the great mysteries of the 20th century.”
The mission has its skeptics. Chief among them is rival Earhart explorer Ric Gillespie, co-founder of TIGHAR, short for The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, and author of the 2024 book “One More Good Flight: The Amelia Earhart Tragedy.”
Gillespie has led a dozen expeditions of his own to the atoll over three decades and is the leading proponent of the Nikumaroro castaway theory. But he predicted the Pettigrew-Purdue team would find no airplane wreckage or anything else of consequence left on the island.
The Purdue team credits Gillespie with laying the foundation for the theory it hopes to prove. It also cites a compelling body of evidence he has amassed over the years, including human artifacts recovered on the island, such as a 1930s-era glass cosmetic jar for freckle cream and remnants of a jackknife like one Earhart carried on the plane.
Gillespie’s investigation also encompassed modern forensic analysis of records documenting measurements of skeletal remains found on the island in the 1940s; logs of radio transmission bearings from distress calls picked up by wireless operators in the days immediately after Earhart vanished; and a photograph taken of the island’s shoreline months later showing an object that Gillespie said appears to be the Electra’s landing gear.
In a Reuters interview last week, Gillespie said he believes the plane has since been lost to history, eventually swept by tides off the coral flat where it had landed largely intact and carried into the sea, where it sank and broke apart in the surf.
Two previous attempts to locate the plane’s wreckage in the surrounding ocean, including a 2019 operation conducted by marine archaeologist Robert Ballard, known for discovering the wreck of the Titanic, proved fruitless, Gillespie said.
A plane-shaped sonar image from elsewhere on the seafloor turned out to be a pile of rocks.
“I’d love to find that airplane. It ain’t gonna happen,” Gillespie said.
Pettigrew and his team are betting otherwise. To them, the multibranched shape first noticed in a 2020 satellite image resembles an aircraft fuselage and wings. They assert that the object, or part of it, has since been spotted in earlier aerial images of the island’s lagoon dating to 1938.
Gillespie said he is certain the object in question was actually a fallen pandanus tree, a palm-like evergreen native to the region, that washed into the lagoon.
“You can see the root ball. You can see the branches,” Gillespie said in the interview. “It’s a tree. People see what they want to see.”
The official U.S. government view has long been that the Electra ran out of fuel and crashed at sea near its intended destination, Howland Island, another small island about 400 miles northwest of Nikumaroro, then known as Gardner Island.
Earhart was last seen taking off in her Electra on July 2, 1937, from Papua New Guinea, en route to Gardner, about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) to the east, during a multistage attempt to become the first woman to pilot a plane around the world.
Definitive radio contact with the plane was lost the next day after Earhart, 39, reported that “gas is running low,” followed by her final known transmission giving her geographical line of position.
The disappearance prompted the largest U.S. government search ever undertaken for a missing aircraft, including a flyover of Gardner, but no trace of the Electra or its crew was found at the time.
The $900,000 Purdue mission, consisting of 17 people, plans to remain on Nikumaroro for five days before making the six-day return boat trip to the Kiribati capital, Tarawa, according to Schultz.
Purdue, based in West Lafayette, Indiana, would ultimately seek to bring back any pieces of the Lockheed Electra that might be recovered.
Earhart was essentially a visiting faculty member at Purdue for two years, serving as a women’s career counselor and adviser to the school’s aeronautics department. A Purdue research grant paid for development of the Electra, which she called her “flying laboratory.”
Purdue lawyer Schultz said that if the plane were found, no artifacts would be removed from it on this trip. Any effort to extract the aircraft wreckage would require further permission from the Kiribati government, he said.
