New Expedition to Search Remote Sea for Earhart Plane

Nearly nine decades after Amelia Earhart vanished, a new hunt for her plane is finally getting underway. A team led by the Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University will head in October to Nikumaroro, a remote island in the Pacific's Kiribati that sits between Hawaii and Australia, NBC News announced on Wednesday—what would have been Earhart's 129th birthday. The 16-person crew will sail six days from Tarawa to inspect the so-called "Taraia Object," a shape spotted in 2020 satellite images of the island's lagoon that might be wreckage from Earhart's Lockheed Electra aircraft.

Skeptics say, however, that the image shows a fallen coconut tree, not a plane. "We've looked there in that spot, and there's nothing there," says Earhart expert and aviation accident investigator Ric Gillespie. The mission builds on the long-debated "Nikumaroro Hypothesis," which cites radio signals, 1930s-era artifacts found on the island, and contested bone analyses as signs that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan landed and died there after their July 1937 disappearance.

"The only way to answer this question is to go to Nikumaroro, inspect the Taraia Object firsthand, and follow the evidence wherever it leads," ALI's Richard Pettigrew says in a release. BBC Wildlife has a grim theory about what may have happened to Earhart's body if she did indeed die there.