Is it a plane or a tree? Amelia Earhart expedition aims to solve mystery of disappearance | Amélie Earhart

A team of American researchers approaches a remote Pacific atoll where they suspect famous aviator Amelia Earhart crashed in 1937, as part of her final attempt to unravel one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century.

The 17-person expedition was inspired by satellite images taken over several years showing a submerged object in the uninhabited island’s sandy lagoon — evidence dismissed by other longtime Earhart detectives who say it is likely a fallen tree.

These researchers – led by archaeologists who raised funds from Earhart’s former benefactor, Purdue University. – I hope it will instead be revealed as the wreck of his Lockheed Model 10-E Electra. Separate aerial images of the area suggest the submerged object has a metallic sheen, according to the team.

“Finding Amelia Earhart’s Electra plane would be the discovery of a lifetime,” expedition leader Richard Pettigrew said before setting sail this month. “Confirming the plane wreck would be irrefutable evidence.”

Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared during their attempt to circumnavigate the world at the equator. By this time, Earhart, 39, was already a celebrity and aviation pioneer, having broken several records, including being the first woman to complete a solo, non-stop transatlantic flight.

Locating the twin-engine wreckage would confirm a long-held – but unproven – hypothesis that Earhart and Noonan ditched on Nikumaroro Atoll, part of the Kiribati archipelago and halfway between Australia and Hawaii.

They were en route to Howland Island, about 400 miles north of Nikumaroro, when their plane ran out of fuel and disappeared.

After a six-day sea voyage from Kiribati’s capital Tarawa, the search group is expected to arrive at the uninhabited atoll Tuesday local time and will spend several days searching for the “Taraia Object,” an elongated shape named after the part of the island where it was first noticed in a 2020 satellite image.

The expedition claims it has been there for several years and is even visible in aerial photographs dating back to 1938.

Pettigrew, who directs the nonprofit Archaeological Legacy Institute, raised money for the mission from Purdue University in Indiana, where Earhart once taught and which financed her ill-fated final flight on the modified plane she called her “flying laboratory.” The university operates an airport and opened an Amelia Earhart terminal last year.

The expedition builds on an already large body of evidence pointing to the atoll as where the aviators crashed. Much of it was collected during dozens of visits between 1989 and 2019 by teams from the American explorer group Tigher (The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery).

Tighar co-founder – and perhaps Earhart’s best-known explorer – Ric Gillespie, said the Taraia object was likely a dead pandanus, native to the area, that washed up in the lagoon.

Gillespie, author of One More Good Flight: The Amelia Earhart Tragedy, said he and other teams visited the exact site where the object was located in 2001 and 2007 with metal detectors.

“There’s nothing there, otherwise we would have found it,” he said in an interview this year. “If they suddenly find out that Amelia Earhart’s wreckage is there, I will be very surprised, but I will be the first to congratulate them. But I don’t think they will find anything.”

Although Tighar acknowledges that the Electra made an emergency landing on the atoll, they believe it was swept away by the waters of a reef and is likely now lying unnoticed and in pieces in the deep waters off the western end of the island.

Tighar’s version of the mystery was that Earhart, and perhaps Noonan, were abandoned at Nikumaroro but survived for a time, drinking rainwater and eating small fish and turtles. This theory is based on signs of a castaway encampment and artifacts from the 1930s, such as a jar of what is believed to be cosmetic freckle cream.

The disappearance of the two men led to an extensive search by the U.S. government, including a flyover of Nikumaroro, then known as Gardner Island.

The Purdue mission says the object may not have been found in previous expeditions because it could have been covered in sand.