Amelia Earhart researchers leave remote atoll empty-handed after ‘plane debris’ turns out to be clump of trees | Amélie Earhart

A US expedition that traveled to a remote Pacific island hoping to solve the mystery of what happened to pioneer pilot Amelia Earhart said the object it suspected was her plane was a clump of stranded trees.

“Unfortunately, we couldn’t find this smoking gun,” said Steve Schultz of Purdue University, standing on the sand in front of a blue lagoon on Nikumaroro Atoll, halfway between Australia and Hawaii.

Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared in 1937 while attempting to circumnavigate the world by the equator, leading to one of the largest air and sea searches in history. Nearly 90 years later, people are still searching, with Nikumaroro in the Kiribati archipelago becoming a leading candidate for where they might have crashed.

Previous visits to this uninhabited atoll have uncovered traces of a shipwreck camp, a woman’s shoe from the 1930s and other tantalizing evidence attributed to the famous aviator, including glass from a jar of cosmetic freckle cream.

The latest mission stems from 2020 satellite images showing an elongated, white object lying in the island’s shallows, near a sandy outcropping called the Taraia Peninsula.

Other longtime Earhart explorers quickly identified it as a fallen tree, but Richard Pettigrew, who runs the nonprofit Archaeological Legacy Institute, found other images, including aerial video showing what he suspected was a metallic reflection in the water.

After a multi-day boat trip and delays due to bad weather, the 17-person expedition managed to cross the coral-surrounded atoll and set up tents to conduct four days of research, including metal detecting. The crew was forced to sleep offshore, in part because of the enormous coconut crabs living on land, known as “robber crabs” for their curiosity when searching for food.

On Monday, Purdue University confirmed in a statement that the “visual anomaly” was “likely a collection of large trees deposited along the peninsula’s sand spit.”

He said the reflection was part of a natural process. “The fragment’s reflective surface, long associated with the idea that the object was a metallic substance, was due to its carbonate veneer. Other objects found by the team were also covered in a shiny concretized amalgam of coral sand.”

The trip was partially sponsored by Indiana University, where Earhart once taught and mentored young female pilots, and which helped fund her modified Lockheed Electra 10-E, known as the “flying lab.”

“While we know this is disappointing to many, including us, this mission adds a new chapter in the quest for the ultimate answer to the mystery of what happened to Earhart during her attempt to circumnavigate the globe nearly nine decades ago,” the university’s statement said.

The trip adds to a growing list of rejected hypotheses, including that Earhart — who was the first woman to take a solo, nonstop transatlantic flight — was captured by Japanese forces or that she survived and lived under an alias.