Expedition to a remote Pacific island fails to find fresh clues in hunt for Amelia Earhart’s plane

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A recent expedition to a remote South Pacific island to search for wreckage from Amelia Earhart’s lost plane has come up empty.

Researchers said Monday they found “no conclusive evidence” that the famed aviator landed her Lockheed 10E Electra aircraft on or near the small atoll south of the original pit stop of her ill-fated flight nearly 90 years ago.

The trek to the suspected site, Nikumaroro Island, was a joint effort led by the Eugene, Oregon-based Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, with the 17-person team of researchers and technicians arriving on the island on October 12.

The main goal was to examine a blurry object known as the Taraia Object in a lagoon first detected in satellite imagery in 2020. Team leader and archaeologist Rick Pettigrew, believed the plane-shaped figure was wreckage from Earhart’s craft.

However, the expedition “found no conclusive evidence to confirm a hypothesis that wreckage” from Earhart’s plane was “in a lagoon on a remote atoll in the South Pacific,” Purdue University said in a news release .

Finding Amelia: The enduring quest to solve Amelia Earhart’s disappearance

Evidence gathered on Nikumaroro confirmed that the visual anomaly first seen in the satellite imagery six years ago was likely a collection of large trees deposited along the peninsula’s sandspit. “By the time the team arrived at the site, a good portion of the debris had fragmented and washed away,” the statement said.

“The evidence for the castaway hypothesis, which brought us here, remained very, very strong,” Pettigrew, ALI’s executive director, said in a video statement . “We think that it’s very likely that Amelia and her navigator, Fred Noonan, did in fact end up here on Nikumaroro Island.”

Steve Schultz, Purdue general counsel and field assistant, said while researchers could rule out the hypothesis, it “doesn’t detract from the existing, very strong, compelling case for the castaway hypothesis.”

Earhart and Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937, during a bold attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world. The pair were last seen taking off from Lae, New Guinea, on what was expected to be a grueling 18-hour journey to Howland Island, a tiny speck of land in the Pacific Ocean.

Earhart’s disappearance is perhaps the most captivating mystery in aviation history, and for decades historians and researchers have debated how and where she went missing.

The main school of thought — and the official determination of the massive US government-led search held immediately after her disappearance — suggests that Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and their Electra crashed into the Pacific near their intended destination.

Others, such as the leaders of the latest expedition, suspect that Earhart and Noonan landed their plane 400 miles (644 kilometers) to the south of Howland — on or near Nikumaroro Island — and became castaways until they likely perished from thirst or hunger.

Repeated efforts to find Earhart’s plane, including other searches around Nikumaroro, haven’t been able to turn up anything new.

“Nikumaroro Island has been searched more than 15 times, to no avail,” said Dorothy Cochrane, an Earhart expert and retired curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. “They are one of many who have not found bona fide evidence of the Electra or Amelia or Noonan at Nikumaroro,” she said, referring to the most recent expedition.

In 2024, ocean exploration company Deep Sea Vision detected on sonar imagery a plane-like shape in the ocean about 100 miles (160 kilometers) away from Howland, but the figure turned out to be rocks. A 2019 expedition to Nikumaroro led by oceanographer Bob Ballard, who found the Titanic in 1985, also ended in disappointment .

The American researchers of this latest search said they surveyed Nikumaroro’s lagoon with a magnetometer, which detects iron, and used sonar technology to search for objects under the sediment on the lagoon bed.

“We accomplished our main goal, which was to come here and test that hypothesis,” Pettigrew said in the video statement.

Nikumaroro, which is today part of the Republic of Kiribati, is an uninhabited coral reef-fringed island in the South Pacific that is home to huge coconut crabs. The island is so remote it took the team five days to reach it by sea from Tarawa, Kiribati’s capital.

The Purdue Research Foundation originally funded Earhart’s Lockheed Electra, and Earhart intended for the plane to be returned to Purdue upon completion of her historic flight, the university, said in a news release.

Earhart was close to achieving her goal when she went missing. She had already flown 22,000 miles (35,405 kilometers) when she was last seen, and she had 7,000 miles (11,265 kilometers) left to travel.

The Purdue search for Earhart’s plane is unlikely to be the last.

Deep sea exploration company Nauticos is trying to raise the $8 million to $10 million necessary to fund what they hope will be a final expedition to the ocean around Howland Island, exploring a search area narrowed by new information from experiments using a replica of Earhart’s radio system. The company has already completed three searches near the island since 2002.

贝特曼/盖蒂图片社

最近，一支前往南太平洋偏远岛屿搜寻阿梅莉亚·埃尔哈特失踪飞机残骸的探险队一无所获。

研究人员周一表示，他们没有发现“确凿证据”表明这位著名飞行员在近 90 年前驾驶她的洛克希德 10E Electra 飞机降落在她那次不幸飞行最初的中途停留点以南的小环礁上或附近。

前往疑似遗址尼库马罗罗岛的考察是由位于俄勒冈州尤金市的考古遗产研究所和位于印第安纳州西拉法叶市的普渡大学共同牵头的，由 17 名研究人员和技术人员组成的团队于 10 月 12 日抵达该岛。

主要目标是研究一个被称为“塔拉亚物体”的模糊物体，该物体于 2020 年首次在卫星图像中被发现。团队负责人兼考古学家里克·佩蒂格鲁认为，这个飞机形状的物体是埃尔哈特的飞行器残骸。

然而，普渡大学在一份新闻稿中表示，探险队“没有找到确凿的证据来证实埃尔哈特飞机残骸位于南太平洋一个偏远环礁的泻湖中的假设”。

寻找阿梅莉亚：解开阿梅莉亚·埃尔哈特失踪之谜的漫长征程

在尼库马罗罗岛上收集到的证据证实，六年前卫星图像中首次出现的视觉异常很可能是堆积在半岛沙嘴上的大量树木。“当考察队到达现场时，大部分碎片已经破碎并被冲走，”声明中写道。

“支持遇难者假说的证据依然非常有力，正是这些证据将我们引向了这里，”美国土地学会（ALI）执行主任佩蒂格鲁在一段视频声明中说。“我们认为，阿米莉亚和她的领航员弗雷德·努南很可能最终确实来到了尼库马罗罗岛。”

普渡大学总法律顾问兼现场助理史蒂夫·舒尔茨表示，虽然研究人员可以排除这种假设，但这“并不会削弱现有的、非常有力的、令人信服的荒岛求生假设的证据”。

1937年7月2日，埃尔哈特和努南在一次大胆的环球飞行尝试中失踪，她们试图成为首位完成环球飞行的女性。两人最后一次被人看到是从新几内亚的莱城起飞，预计这将是一段长达18小时的艰苦旅程，目的地是太平洋上一个不起眼的小岛——豪兰岛。

埃尔哈特的失踪或许是航空史上最引人入胜的谜团，几十年来，历史学家和研究人员一直在争论她是如何以及在哪里失踪的。

主流观点——以及美国政府在她失踪后立即开展的大规模搜寻行动的官方结论——认为埃尔哈特和努南的飞机燃料耗尽，他们的伊莱克特拉号飞机在目的地附近的太平洋坠毁。

另一些人，例如最近一次探险的领导者，则怀疑埃尔哈特和努南将飞机降落在豪兰岛以南 400 英里（644 公里）处——尼库马罗罗岛附近——并成为遇难者，最终可能因口渴或饥饿而死。

多次寻找埃尔哈特飞机的努力，包括在尼库马罗罗岛周围的其他搜索，都未能发现任何新的线索。

“尼库马罗罗岛已被搜寻超过15次，但一无所获，”多萝西·科克伦说道。她是埃尔哈特专家，也是华盛顿特区史密森国家航空航天博物馆的退休馆长。“他们是众多未能在尼库马罗罗岛找到‘伊莱克特拉号’、‘阿米莉亚号’或‘努南号’确凿证据的探险者之一，”她指的是最近一次探险。

2024年，海洋勘探公司“深海视觉”（Deep Sea Vision）利用声呐图像在距离豪兰岛约160公里（100英里）的海面上探测到一个类似飞机的物体，但后来证实那只是岩石。2019年，由1985年发现泰坦尼克号的海洋学家鲍勃·巴拉德率领的尼库马罗罗岛探险队也以失望告终。

参与此次最新搜寻的美国研究人员表示，他们使用磁力仪（可探测铁）勘测了尼库马罗罗泻湖，并使用声纳技术搜索泻湖底部沉积物下的物体。

佩蒂格鲁在视频声明中说：“我们实现了主要目标，那就是来到这里验证这个假设。”

尼库马罗罗岛（Nikumaroro）如今是基里巴斯共和国的一部分，它是南太平洋一座无人居住的珊瑚礁环绕的小岛，也是巨型椰子蟹的栖息地。这座岛屿位置偏远，探险队从基里巴斯首都塔拉瓦（Tarawa）乘船抵达那里花了五天时间。

普渡大学在一份新闻稿中表示，普渡研究基金会最初资助了埃尔哈特的洛克希德伊莱克特拉飞机，埃尔哈特原本打算在完成历史性飞行后将这架飞机归还给普渡大学。

埃尔哈特失踪时，距离实现她的目标已经很近了。她最后一次被人看到时，已经飞行了22000英里（35405公里），还剩下7000英里（11265公里）的路程要走。

普渡大学对埃尔哈特飞机的搜寻不太可能是最后一次。

深海勘探公司Nauticos正努力筹集800万至1000万美元，用于开展他们希望是最后一次前往豪兰岛附近海域的探险。此次探险将根据使用埃尔哈特无线电系统复制品进行的实验所获得的新信息，缩小搜索范围。自2002年以来，该公司已在豪兰岛附近海域完成了三次搜索。