THE VANISHED AVIATOR: Another Chapter in the Amelia Earhart Mystery

Deep Sea Explorers Say They’ve Found the Missing Plane — But Here’s Why We Should Be Cautious

A fresh sonar image from the floor of the Pacific Ocean has raised the possibility of finally solving aviation’s most enduring mystery, but a half-century of false leads has kept researchers from getting too excited.

The grainy sonar image appears to show an aircraft-shaped object lying 16,400 feet beneath the waves of the Pacific. Tony Romeo, a onetime Air Force intelligence officer who sold his real estate agency to finance the expedition (based on a 1963 map from a Scripps oceanographer), studied the image that his team’s underwater drone had recorded. The object is located a little less than 100 miles from Howland Island — precisely where Amelia Earhart’s fuel calculations put the plane down 87 years ago.

The Latest Discovery

Romeo’s company, Deep Sea Vision, splashed out $11 million scouring the ocean floor in a 5,200-square-mile swathe over 90 days up until late 2023. The team employed a Norwegian-built Hugin 6000 autonomous underwater vehicle, which was specifically adapted for deep-sea research. Their sonar had detected something unusual after weeks of empty ocean bottom.

They issued that photo, which shows the outline of what could be a twin-tailed plane similar to the recognizable shape of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E. “Romeo felt confident that the shape and location of that plane indicate that Earhart ran out of gas after the crash and nothing has moved it from there,” he explained. All around the world, people’s eyes were opened on the January 2024 morning that Deep Sea Vision released its findings.

But in November 2024, Romeo’s idealism had run headlong into disillusionment. A follow-up mission with the next generation of cameras showed the truth — the “plane” was simply a natural rock formation. Nature had played a prank on them, laying stones in a pattern that looked like the very aircraft searchers hoped to find.

The Pattern of False Hope

It wasn’t the first time that an expedition believed it had the answers to the Earhart mystery. The pattern of discovery and disavowal goes back decades, each hopeful announcement emerging with fanfare and then fading away, adding to a growing heap of disproved theories.

The Nikumaroro Hypothesis

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has mounted more than a dozen expeditions to Nikumaroro, a remote coral atoll 400 miles southeast of Howland Island, since 1989. Their theory has Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan landing on the atoll’s reef, and they would have survived there for days or weeks as castaways.

TIGHAR’s evidence, furthermore, already includes tantalizing clues: a jar of freckle cream from the 1930s (Earhart famously hated her freckles), pieces of a woman’s shoe, and aluminum material that could plausibly have come from an aircraft. Human bones, as well as these artifacts, were found on the island by British colonial officer Gerald Gallagher in 1940. The remains were examined by a doctor, who stated that they were those of a man, but the bones vanished before a modern-day analysis could confirm or deny his diagnosis.

In 2018, a University of Tennessee anthropologist named Richard Jantz re-evaluated the physician’s measurements using contemporary methods in forensic software. His analysis indicated that the bones were “more similar to Earhart than to 99 percent of individuals in a large reference sample.” However, in the absence of the actual bones to test, the findings are suggestive rather than definitive.

The Bevington Object

In 2012, TIGHAR announced what would turn out to be another potential breakthrough — this time revealing an enlarged version of a 1937 photograph taken by British officer Eric Bevington that appeared to show aircraft landing gear sticking out of Nikumaroro’s reef. The photo even persuaded skeptics like the oceanographer Robert Ballard to investigate.

Ballard, who is known for finding the Titanic, directed an expedition in 2019 with state-of-the-art sonar and remotely operated vehicles. His team discovered debris from a long-ago shipwreck, assorted hats, and even a soda can. They found no signs of Earhart’s plane. The Bevington Object, whatever it was, was gone — assuming it had ever been there in the first place.

The Marshall Islands Theory

A History Channel documentary in 2017 caused a stir by airing a photo purportedly taken by the Japanese military said to show Earhart and Noonan alive in the Marshall Islands. The photograph contained an image of a woman with short hair sitting on a dock, with her back to the camera, as well as a man who supposedly looked like Noonan.

Within a few days, a Japanese blogger found that the photo had been published in a travel book two years before Earhart vanished. The documentary’s main piece of evidence collapsed under rudimentary scrutiny.

The Science of Searching

Each of these unsuccessful finds informs researchers more about where Earhart’s plane isn’t, bringing them closer to having a more tightly bound search area. But the challenges remain staggering. There are 63 million square miles of ocean in the Pacific, and even assuming that any search be concentrated on those within fuel range of Howland still leaves thousands of square miles to be covered.

Ocean conditions complicate matters further. Pacific atolls shoot up abruptly from the seafloor, forming underwater cliffs where debris might come to rest at any depth. Powerful currents could have spread debris widely across miles of ocean floor. Movement of coral, silt, and marine creatures may have obscured or buried parts of the plane such that their identity could not be discerned.

Technology now can assist, up to a point. Sonar can identify odd shapes on the ocean floor, but it can’t determine whether something is man-made or a natural formation without visual confirmation. And besides, 87 years’ worth of exposure to saltwater may have reduced Earhart’s aluminum aircraft to unidentifiable pieces.

The Enduring Search

Another expedition, led by Purdue University — where Earhart once taught — is scheduled for November 2025. The team intends to search for the so-called “Taraia Object” on Nikumaroro — a shape in the lagoon that has not moved since 1938. Radio bearings taken in 1937, findings on the island, and bone measurements all indicate Nikumaroro in their analysis.

Richard Gillespie, who has led TIGHAR’s search for more than 30 years, has a dim view of the Purdue effort. He says his teams have already scoured that precise spot numerous times and found nothing. The bottom of Elbow Cay lagoon is always on the move, he contends — objects become buried in sand, then resurface, then are buried once more.

At the same time, firms such as Nauticos continue to comb the deep ocean some 200 miles northwest of Howland Island, believing that Earhart merely ran out of gas and crashed at sea. By narrowing the area of their search based on fuel consumption, weather patterns, and radio signals, they have also succeeded in compressing the area in which they are looking — but they are looking for an object involved in an accident in the vast wilderness of the world’s oceans.

Dorothy Cochrane, curator of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, remains cautiously optimistic that the plane will be found one day. Each search is facilitated by more advanced technology and draws on data from preceding expeditions. It feels more like detective work than treasure hunting — methodically ruling out possibilities and pursuing fragmentary leads.

Waiting for Proof

The pattern has been predictable: researchers announce an exciting find; media outlets splash the possible answer to the mystery; and months later, a “quiet admission” that the “plane” was actually coral, rocks, or shipwreck debris. Deep Sea Vision’s rock formation has joined a long roster of broken aluminum parts that were later identified as coming from other aircraft, sonar artifacts that proved to be sea-bottom features, and photographs that predated Earhart’s flight.

And Tony Romeo is not yet disillusioned by his costly setback. Deep Sea Vision presses on with its search of the Pacific, and Romeo is still certain that somewhere in the search box the plane is located. The Purdue team proceeds with its Nikumaroro inquiry. Other teams design their own searches based on alternate theories and readings of the evidence.

Each team is convinced that it has the crucial piece of evidence that everyone else has overlooked — the insight that will finally unlock the mystery of what transpired on July 2, 1937. If history is an indicator, most will come back empty-handed and with bruised bank accounts. But history also proves that at some point, somebody might actually find what they are looking for. The ocean doesn’t give up its secrets easily, but it does give them up — the Titanic, scores of World War II ships, and other previously thought “unfindable” wrecks attest to that.

Until someone brings forward a serial number, part of an aluminum panel that can scientifically be proved to be from a Lockheed Electra, or DNA evidence that can be matched with and proved to have come from Earhart or Noonan, the mystery persists. The claims are the latest to be added to a mounting pile of past declarations — each of which appeared to be a sure thing, until it wasn’t. Maybe the Purdue team will be successful where others have failed. There may be another sonar image that will turn out to be more than just funny-shaped rocks. Maybe next time, a search will write the final chapter in aviation’s greatest mystery.

Or maybe future generations will continue to seek, to say they’ve found her, then to learn that they actually haven’t.

SOURCES: NPR, NY Times, Knox News, BBC, Smithsonian Magazine, How Stuff Works, How Stuff Works (2), Plane and Pilot, Business Jet Traveler, The Guardian, Popular Mechanics, NBC News
COVER PHOTO: Amelia Earhart standing in front of the Lockheed Electra in which she disappeared in July 1937 | Credit: Wikipedia

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.