Museum releases historic photos of island where Amelia Earhart may have crashed | Amélie Earhart

A New Zealand museum has released nearly 50 photos from a 1938 aerial survey of the island where Amelia Earhart is believed to have crashed, giving amateur sleuths new evidence to search for traces of the pioneering aviator and her plane.

The black and white images were released by the Air Force Museum of New Zealand after a renewed interest in one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century, spurred by a US expedition to the Nikumaroro atoll in the Pacific in search of new clues.

Although some low-resolution copies have been uploaded to blogs, the New Zealand Air Force Museum said it had received several requests for photos and had published the full set of 47 images in high-resolution digital format on its website.

The negatives were found more than a decade ago by archivist Matthew O’Sullivan, curator of photographs at the Christchurch Museum.

Earhart’s most prominent investigator, Ric Gillespie, described the images as a “gold mine” on his blog, saying they were a comprehensive set of aerial photos taken on Dec. 1, 1938, by an amphibious biplane during a New Zealand survey of the Pacific islands for suitable air base locations.

What happened to Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan when they disappeared on July 2, 1937, during an attempt to circumnavigate the world by the equator was a search that was on-and-off for eight decades and filled with false leads.

A leading theory is that the aviator who broke several records, including becoming the first woman to make a solo non-stop voyage across the Atlantic, ran out of fuel and found herself abandoned at Nikumaroro, then known as Gardner Island.

The hypothesis is that she survived for a time, drinking rainwater and eating fish and turtles, based on signs of a castaway encampment and objects including glass from a jar believed to have contained cosmetic cream.

This week, archaeologists and scientists from Earhart’s former benefactor, Purdue University in Indianapolis, are searching part of the island for the “Taraia Object,” an elongated shape in a lagoon, named after the part of the island where it was first noticed in a 2020 satellite image. Other longtime Earhart explorers, including Gillespie, are not convinced, saying that it was probably a fallen tree and not the wreckage of his Lockheed Model 10-E Electra. The small atoll had been visited dozens of times.

In its latest update on Nikumaroro, part of the Kiribati archipelago, the expedition said “extreme weather conditions” had hampered their metal detecting, but that it would issue an update within 48 hours.

“Despite Thursday’s weather delay, the expedition remains on schedule, with two additional days of field operations planned – and an update on the identification of the Taraia object is expected,” Purdue University said.

“We understand the tremendous interest in what we are doing at Nikumaroro and we appreciate everyone’s patience,” said Rick Pettigrew, expedition leader and executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute. “This is a complex scientific process. It’s not enough to arrive at a site and immediately identify what’s there. We need to carefully collect the data, analyze it and draw solid conclusions.”

New Zealand military images are among the earliest photographic evidence of the island. There are no immediate signs of any objects in the Taraia area.