It Wasn't Earhart's Plane, Just a Clump of Trees

The Amelia Earhart mystery will live on. A research team that traveled to a remote Pacific atoll to investigate an anomaly in satellite images said Monday that it wasn't Earhart's plane after all, reports USA Today. Instead, the anomaly first spotted in 2020 was "likely a collection of large trees deposited along the peninsula's sandspit," the team out of Purdue University said in a release. In fact, by the time researchers arrived at Nikumaroro last week, most of the debris had washed away, "leaving only a single Y-shaped segment." The researchers also chalked up what appeared to be a metallic glint to something more natural.

"The fragment's reflective surface, long associated with the idea that the object was a metallic substance, was due to its carbonate veneer," they wrote. "Other items found by the team were similarly coated with a shiny concretized amalgam of coral sand." The $500,000 search, done in conjunction with the Archaeological Legacy Institute, brings an end to what was known as the Taraia Object hypothesis, though it does not end speculation that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan crashed on the island and died there. "Unfortunately, we weren't able to find that smoking gun," Steve Schultz of Purdue tells the Guardian.