The mystery of what happened to Amelia Earhart, the world famous aviation superstar of the 1930s, is a mainstay in pop culture. Earhart is known for her incredible career as an aviator, being the second person to fly a nonstop, solo transatlantic flight, and the first to do so across the United States. 

All of this ended in tragedy, however, when she attempted to be the first female pilot to accomplish an ambitious global circumnavigation. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, left Oakland on May 21, 1937 in Earhart’s twin engine Lockheed Electra – a state-of-the-art aircraft she had bought a year before. At 7:42 am on July 2, the duo radioed their position as being over the Pacific, between Lae, Papua New Guinea, and the tiny Howland Island, a mostly abandoned United States possession previously used to mine guano. At 8:55 the duo made what many believe to be their last transmission. There are others, however, (namely The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR) who believe the two were castaways on Nikumaroro (formerly Gardner Island), and previous transmissions calling for help the following days, which were dismissed at the time, may have actually been real. Based on this new theory, multiple expeditions were conducted between 2010 and 2019, yielding a size 9 women’s shoe and several other “artifacts,” including improvised tools, and a sextant box, according to TIGHAR. In the years since no other investigations have found any leads, until now. 

On Jan. 26, a marine robotics company named Deep Sea Robotics released a photo that seemingly shows the famous pilot’s aircraft. Using a state-of-the-art autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), the Kongsberg Discovery HUGIN 6000 employed advanced sonar to attempt to locate the object. After more than 100 days of searching, the team finally located a strange object, looking very similar to Earhart’s plane, more than 3 miles underwater – deeper than the Titanic, and almost half as deep as the famous Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench. 

This finding has its fair share of detractors, with many experts citing the lack of other angles and the seemingly pristine condition of the craft as points of contention. Though the team is currently planning another expedition to hopefully alleviate these concerns with new images and angles, there is currently no date set for this voyage. If these findings do pan out as true, the discovery would open innumerable doors for future discoveries, as well as answer this 87-year-old mystery.

Article by Gabriel Glenn-Shaffer