The Taraia Object: Could this be Amelia Earhart's missing plane?

One of America’s great unsolved mysteries is the disappearance of aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, who vanished somewhere over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe in 1937.

The wreckage of her plane and her remains have not been found.

Now, a team of researchers from Purdue University is launching a new expedition in an effort to solve the mystery, focusing their efforts on a tiny, uninhabited island in the western Pacific.

The new search was announced on July 2, 88 years to the day that Earhart, 39, and her navigator, Fred Noonan, 45, vanished. It gets underway early next month.

Researchers will examine the Taraia Object, a anomaly located in a lagoon on Nikumaroro Island. Nikumaroro is part of the Republic of Kiribati, situated north of Samoa and Fiji, and southeast of the Marshall Islands.

The object was first noticed in satellite imagery in 2020 and later confirmed to be in aerial photographs of the lagoon as far back as 1938, Purdue University said in a statement.

The Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI), which is leading the expedition, said its research “strongly suggests” the Taraia Object is Earhart’s Lockheed Model 10E Electra aircraft.

“Finding Amelia Earhart’s Electra aircraft would be the discovery of a lifetime,” said Richard Pettigrew, ALI’s executive director.

“Other evidence already collected … establishes an extremely persuasive, multifaceted case that the final destination for Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, was on Nikumaroro,” he said. “Confirming the plane wreckage there would be the smoking-gun proof.”

The project will begin with video and still images of the site, documenting it before anyone steps foot on the island or disrupts the lagoon. The team will then conduct remote sensing using magnetometers and sonar. Only then will underwater excavation begin.

Earhart was the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1935, she joined Purdue University as a visiting faculty member, two years before her ill-fated attempt to circle the earth.

“A successful identification would be the first step toward fulfilling Amelia’s original plan to return the Electra to West Lafayette after her historic flight,” said Steve Schultz, senior vice president and general counsel for the Purdue team. “Additional work would still be needed to accomplish that objective, but we feel we owe it to her legacy, which remains so strong at Purdue, to try to find a way to bring it home.”