A team of researchers is travelling to a remote Pacific island to examine what it believes could be the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s plane. The group, from the US-based Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI) and Purdue University, left the capital of Kiribati on Wednesday and expects to reach Nikumaroro Island by Monday.
Earhart vanished while attempting to fly around the globe in 1937, and her fate has fuelled decades of speculation. The team is looking for an object known as the Taraia Object, which was first seen in satellite imagery in 2020 sitting on the edge of a lagoon off Nikumaroro. Purdue University said the object has since been confirmed as visible in aerial photography of the area dating back to 1938.
Expedition sets out for Nikumaroro on a shipping vessel
The researchers are roughly halfway through their journey aboard the Marin Mainiku, a vessel operated by the Kiribati National Shipping Line. They left the capital on Wednesday to cover the 830-mile trip to Nikumaroro, which is also part of the multi-island nation.
Once they arrive, the team will have to pass through a narrow gap in the atoll’s reef. According to the source, that gap was created by the British in 1963, the last time the island was inhabited.
Richard Pettigrew, head of the ALI and the expedition lead, said that locating the aircraft would be a remarkable achievement. “Finding Amelia Earhart’s Electra aircraft would be the discovery of a lifetime,” he said.
Earhart’s final flight and the official explanation
Earhart had already flown her Electra twin-engine plane from California across South America, Africa and Asia when she reached Lae, in Papua New Guinea, on 2 July 1937. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, planned to continue towards Hawaii and then back to California.
The plane vanished without a trace while she was trying to reach Howland Island, a remote, uninhabited coral island near Nikumaroro, where she intended to refuel. Her disappearance has since given rise to numerous theories, ranging from a simple crash caused by fuel exhaustion to more elaborate claims of interference.
The official explanation is that the plane experienced communication problems while the two struggled to locate the island, and that Earhart eventually crashed into the ocean after running out of fuel. Although this version of events is largely accepted, no physical evidence has ever been recovered. One theory holds that she unintentionally navigated to Nikumaroro, where she landed the plane and died as a castaway.
Doubts over the Taraia Object and earlier searches
Images of the Taraia Object appear to show what could be the remnants of a small aircraft in shallow water. However, some people, including rival explorers, have questioned whether it is a plane at all, let alone Earhart’s.
Ric Gillespie, who specialises in recovering historic aircraft wrecks, told a news agency that the object looked like a tree that had fallen from the atoll into the nearby water. “I’d love to find that airplane. It ain’t gonna happen,” he said.
The researchers credit Gillespie with previously finding evidence of a human presence on the atoll in the 1930s. They also point to forensic analysis of skeletal remains found there in the 1940s, which they say lends weight to their theory. Gillespie, however, suspects the plane had likely broken apart and its fragments were carried into the depths of the Pacific long ago.
Earlier attempts to find the Electra have also come up short. In 2024, a group of researchers said it may have been lying about 4,877 metres (16,000 feet) below the surface near Howland Island, based on sonar imaging, but this was later confirmed to be a rock formation. An expedition in 2019, led by the marine archaeologist who discovered the Titanic wreck, investigated a photograph that may have shown landing gear protruding from the water near Nikumaroro, but it also failed to find anything.
