Researches hope to find evidence that will put to rest one of modern history’s most enduring mysteries: what happened to legendary pilot Amelia Earhart?
On Wednesday, researchers at Purdue University announced a new expedition that hopes to find some material evidence of Earhart’s airplane.
Using satellite imagery, the researchers have identified a spot on the tiny, remote island of Nikumaroro in Kirabati which they believe may be the final resting place of Earhart’s plane, according to NBC News.
The expedition was announced on July 2, exactly 88 years after Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared during their famed attempt to circumnavigate the world in her airplane.
Earhart worked for Purdue University, and the institute helped to fund her historic, if tragic, final flight. Purdue said it plans to send a team in November to examine the site and, hopefully, find evidence of her Lockheed Electra 10E airplane.
“We believe we owe it to Amelia and her legacy at Purdue to fulfill her wishes, if possible, to bring the Electra back to Purdue,” Steve Schultz, Purdue’s general counsel, said in a statement.
The satellite photo fueling the new expedition was captured in 2015, just one year after a powerful tropical cyclone shifted the sands at the island, potentially revealing the plane, according to Richard Pettigrew, the executive director of the nonprofit Archaeological Legacy Institute in Oregon.
Pettigrew took the satellite imagery to Purdue, which kickstarted the upcoming expedition.
According to Pettigrew, the size and composition of the object matches parts of Earhart’s plane, and the island’s location is close to Earhart’s planned flight path, and almost exactly where four of her last radio calls for help originated.
“It satisfies all the criteria,” he said. “Everything fits.”
Earhart’s disappearance was a tragic final act after a decade of newspaper and radio stories documenting her record-setting flights.
On June 17, 1928, at the age of 30, she became the first woman to pilot a plane — a bright red Lockheed Vega 5B, which she called “old Bessie, the fire steed”— across the Atlantic. The endeavor made headlines across the nation.
Later, she became the first person to complete a solo flight across the Pacific, traveling from California to the Hawaiian islands in 1934.
Earhart was initially treated as an aviation oddity due to her gender; news reports at the time called her the first “girl” to fly across the Atlantic, and another referred to her as an “aviatrix.”
But as she continued to prove her prowess in the cockpit, she gained notoriety as a great pilot, rather than as a curious outlier. Even still, she used her growing prominence to push for equality in the skies; in an interview with the Evening Star in 1929, Earhart pleaded with the public to “give women a chance in the air.”
“Women can qualify in the air as in any other sport. Their influence and approval are vital to the success of commercial aviation,” she said at the time. “Women and girls write to me by the thousands to learn the truth about aviation and what women’s chances are. There is nothing in women’s make-up which would make her inferior to a man as an air pilot. The only barrier to her swift success is her lack of opportunity to receive proper training.”
After numerous successful and record-setting flights in the late ’20s and early ’30s, Earhart set her sights on a new goal: becoming the first woman to circumnavigate the planet in an aircraft.
Following her disappearance, the public remained somewhat hopeful that she would be found to fly again another day. But, after a two-month search that turned up no trace of her or Noonan, the pair were presumed dead.
Pettigrew has been trying to find the remains of Earhart’s flight for years. He has visited Nikumaroro, and said that a period-appropriate medical vial and American-made tool were found on the island, suggesting someone from the West — perhaps Earhart — had been on the island in some capacity around the time of her disappearance.
According to National Geographic, four forensic dogs and a team of archaeologists with the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery traveled to the island in 2017. During that trip, the dogs reportedly detected the scent of human remains, though none were actually found. No one lives on Nikumaroro, and there is scant evidence of there ever being continuous inhabitation on the island.
Two years later, famed ocean explorer Robert Ballard led an expedition to locate Earhart’s plane or evidence that it had landed on the island. After days of searching both the island’s cliffs and the surrounding waters, Ballard found no evidence of a wreck on the island.
“We felt like if her plane was there, we would have found it pretty early in the expedition,” Allison Fundis, Ballard’s chief operating officer for the expedition, told The New York Times.
The Executive Director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, Richard Gillespie said he doubts the Purdue expedition will turn up any evidence of Earhart’s plane on their upcoming expedition.
“We’ve looked there in that spot, and there’s nothing there,” he told NBC News.
Gillespie has launched a dozen expeditions over the last 35 years searching for Earhart, including searches of Nikumaroro. He said the satellite image guiding the Purdue expedition shows an overturned coconut palm tree with a root ball that had been washed up by a storm.
“I understand the desire to find a piece of Amelia Earhart’s airplane. God knows we’ve tried,” he said. “But the data, the facts, do not support the hypothesis. It’s as simple as that.”
Despite his skepticism, Purdue will undertake the expedition regardless. The Purdue Research Foundation has extended a credit line of $500,000 to the first phase of the expedition, according to Shultz.
The expedition members will depart in November and spend six days traveling to reach Nikumaroro. From there, they’ll have five days on the island to investigate the object from the satellite imagery and determine whether or not it is evidence of Earhart’s missing plane.
“If we hopefully solve the mystery and confirm that it is, then there will be further efforts to bring it back, hopefully to a permanent home,” Schultz said.
