WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — A 17-person team that spent five days at sea to reach a Pacific lagoon says it will know within days whether a shape visible in photographs since 1938 is Amelia Earhart’s lost Lockheed Electra. Its confidence is also its risk: the last time anyone thought a sonar image showed her plane, it turned out to be a rock.
The underwater survey of the lagoon off Nikumaroro, an island in Kiribati, began Wednesday, with stormy weather slowing the first day, according to the team’s account to CBS News. Purdue University and the Oregon-based Archaeological Legacy Institute are running the expedition, led by Purdue’s Steve Schultz and the institute’s Richard Pettigrew.
The target is what they call the Taraia Object, a visual anomaly first noticed in 2020 satellite imagery and later found in aerial photographs from 1938, a year after Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan vanished on July 2, 1937, during an attempt to fly around the world. Nikumaroro sits about halfway between Australia and Hawaii, roughly 400 miles southeast of Howland Island, where the two were headed. The team has said the evidence is “very strong” that the object is her plane. That is the team’s claim, not a finding.
Schultz was more restrained about where the work stands. “We’re still very much in the data-gathering phase,” he told CBS News. The plan is to finish analysing what the survey has collected, then use a hydraulic dredge to remove sediment from the lagoon floor. Pettigrew described Wednesday’s work as looking at the land and “looking for artifacts that might relate to Amelia Earhart,” and said no one else has put together a plan like this one.
Skeptics have a record to point to. Ric Gillespie, executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, told NBC News in 2025 that he did not think the object was related to Earhart. “We’ve looked there in that spot, and there’s nothing there,” he said, as CBS News recounted. A 2024 sonar image that appeared to show an aircraft was later determined to be a rock formation.
Pettigrew’s theory is that Earhart and Noonan landed on Nikumaroro and survived there for some time, citing 1930s relics and human skeletal remains found on the island but lost over the decades.
What the survey has actually detected is the open question. Nothing the team has said publicly, as CBS reported it, states what the object is made of or whether the instruments found metal. Wendy Rover of The Ninety-Nines, the organization of women pilots, said she hoped the mystery could someday be solved. “I would love to know,” she said.
