New Search for Amelia Earhart’s Plane Comes Up Empty
An expedition led by Purdue University had hoped that an object seen on satellite images was the missing aviator's plane. The reality was more quotidian.
In satellite imagery of the remote Pacific island of Nikumaroro, a mysterious object lies submerged in its lagoon—the outline of something vaguely plane-shaped. Dubbed the “Taraia Object” after a nearby peninsula, it has tantalized researchers who believe Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan could have ended up on the remote atoll and survived as castaways. But it’s not a plane. It’s not even metal. The strange shape is “a collection of debris,” according to the leader of the most recent attempt to discover Earhart's fate, who shared the update in a video announcement from the island
A team from the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI) and Purdue University—which in the 1930s had provided Earhart with funds for what was then a cutting-edge plane—broke the disappointing news after a seven-day expedition to Nikumaroro, which belongs to the nation of Kiribati and is most famously home to a population of enormous, omnivorous coconut crabs.
Earlier this year, expedition members had pointed to their own research, as well as evidence collected by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR)—including Earhart’s last message and radio signals after she disappeared—to announce that the Taraia Object was “very likely” the famous aviator’s Lockheed Electra 10-E. Their theory went something like this: Earhart and Noonan were never supposed to end up on Nikumaroro, which lies roughly 400 miles from their original destination of Howland Island on the third-to-last leg of a round-the-world flight attempt in July 1937. But the pair couldn’t find Howland, radioing in distress to the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca that awaited their arrival, “We must be on you but cannot see you … gas is running low.” In Earhart’s last confirmed message, she noted they were flying “on the line 157-337 … We are running north and south.” Earhart could have followed that navigational line to the southeast and spotted Nikumaroro, then called Gardner Island, landing on the reef there.
There were a few clues scattered about Nikumaroro, too. Former residents of a British colony that existed on the island between 1938-1963 remembered seeing airplane wreckage in the lagoon and on the reef, and handicrafts made from aircraft materials were found in the colony’s now-abandoned village. Then, in 1940, bones were found in a clearing on the island and taken to Fiji to be examined. Though the bones have since gone missing, a modern analysis based on a colonial doctor’s measurements indicates they belonged to a woman of European descent. Later excavations at the site unearthed the remains of campfires, a jackknife, shards of 1930s-era cosmetic bottles, and the remnants of a compact mirror that still had bits of rouge on it. Acting on these tantalizing hints, TIGHAR brought forensic dogs to the island in 2017. The border collies indicated that human remains had been present at the site, even though a dig turned up empty.
Then, in 2020, an amateur researcher spotted the Taraia Object in satellite imagery taken from 2015. Though later obscured, the indistinct shape looked kind of like an aircraft. (Naysayers countered that it looked more like a palm or a pandanus tree and its root ball.) Although TIGHAR leadership wasn’t convinced the image merited a voyage to investigate, Rick Pettigrew, ALI’s executive director, managed to persuade Purdue to join a new search.
On October 7, a 17-member team—which included Purdue’s general counsel, two astronaut alumni, two maritime archaeologists from RECON Offshore, specialists from the Archaeological Legacy Institute, representatives from Kiribati, and a filmmaking crew—set sail from Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati, on the Marin Mainiku. They arrived on the island on October 13 to blustery weather but managed to come ashore via small transport boats and clear a path through the jungle to the inner lagoon. There, they set up equipment to monitor the island’s weather and tides. At night, they retired to the Marin Mainiku off Nikumaroro’s coast, partly to avoid the coconut crabs, “whose size and overnight activity make staying on the island impractical,” as an update from Purdue noted.
On the second day, the group surveyed the area where the object had been sighted. The underwater archaeologists deployed a magnetometer to identify ferrous metals such as the steel in the Electra’s cables (the body of the plane itself was made of aluminum) and side-scan sonar to locate the object under the lagoon’s sediment. To the team’s relief, there was an object to find: as time had passed, the Taraia Object had become barely visible.
But on the third day, rough seas prevented the team from going ashore. They were stuck aboard the ship through October 17, the day they’d pegged as their last on the island. They decided to extend the expedition, and on October 18, they were able to go ashore.
They did not return in triumph. The earlier remote sensing had not revealed any metal. Further investigation confirmed that the object “does not represent the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s aircraft,” said Pettigrew, his somber expression a stark contrast to the sunny tropical scene behind him. The metallic reflection that the team thought they’d spotted in photographs dating back to 1938 was due to “a shiny concretized amalgam of coral sand,” explained an update on Purdue’s website.
The Purdue/ALI team now joins a crowded group of explorers and researchers who have had to walk back predictions about solving the Earhart mystery. In 2024, a company called Deep Sea Vision announced the discovery of “what appears to be Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra”; it turned out to be a rock formation. In 2017, a History Channel documentary claimed that an archival image proved that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan had been captured by the Japanese. In fact, the photograph had been published in a Japanese travel guide nearly two years before Earhart and Noonan had ever met. Earhart has even eluded National Geographic—a 2019 expedition by Explorer-at-Large Robert Ballard, the man who found the Titanic, also could not locate the plane.
Nevertheless, the Purdue/ALI team says they are satisfied with figuring out the Taraia Object once and for all. “I think we accomplished our goal completely. The hypothesis has been tested, and the results are in,” said Pettigrew. And Steve Schultz, Purdue’s general counsel and chief architect of the school’s involvement in the expedition, proudly noted in an earlier interview that the university received its largest share of “earned media”—publicity Purdue didn’t have to pay for—on the day they announced the expedition. Pettigrew, on the other hand, is on the hook: He funded the $900,000 expedition with a line of credit from Purdue, which will have to be paid back.
Even so, few, if any, Earhart researchers are likely to be deterred by this latest red herring. In fact, Nauticos, a deep-ocean exploration company, is currently raising funds for its fourth expedition in search of Earhart’s Electra. Its team of engineers and archaeologists believe the plane ran out of gas and crashed into the ocean—and that they know roughly where it could be based on their experiments with radio signals. And so the search goes on…
