Researchers scouring a Pacific lagoon say they could settle whether a decades-old anomaly is Amelia Earhart’s missing Lockheed Electra within a matter of days.
A 17-member expedition led by Purdue University’s Steve Schultz and Richard Pettigrew of the Archaeological Legacy Institute began inspecting the Taraia Object off Nikumaroro this week, hunting for what may remain of the legendary aviator’s aircraft.
The team is working a lagoon on the Kiribati atoll in the South Pacific, roughly 400 miles southeast of Howland Island, the destination Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan never reached after vanishing on July 2, 1937, some 22,000 miles into their attempt to fly around the equator.
CBS News reported that stormy weather slowed Wednesday’s work, but the leaders still expect a clear yes-or-no answer on the object in the coming days.
Schultz kept the tone careful.
"We're still very much in the data-gathering phase,"
Pettigrew framed the fieldwork in plain terms.
"We're looking at the land, we're looking for artifacts that might relate to Amelia Earhart,"
The Taraia Object first drew fresh attention in satellite imagery in 2020. Researchers note the same visual anomaly appears in aerial photos dating to 1938, a year after Earhart disappeared.
That imagery helped drive the new push under the long-running Nikumaroro Hypothesis: that Earhart and Noonan missed Howland Island, landed at the atoll, and died as castaways. Fox News reported the mission left in early October after Kiribati’s cabinet approved a plan that had been delayed, with a full excavation possible later if the object checks out and wreckage potentially headed back to Purdue.
Pettigrew told CBS the next moves are already mapped.
"Our next step is complete analysis of the data that we gathered and then to begin using a hydraulic dredge to remove sediment from the bottom,"
He also stressed how unusual the approach is.
"We're the only people who have put together a plan to do something like that,"
And added: "So it's entirely new."
Getting there was no short hop. The team spent five days at sea to reach the search area. Nikumaroro sits about halfway between Australia and Hawaii, remote enough that every hour of work has to count.
The New York Post reported the group arrived at the atoll on Oct. 12 to examine a submerged shape believed to be the Electra’s tail and fuselage, in a lagoon thick with coconut crabs. The paper noted this is the 20th organized search, and that earlier efforts were thrown off by rock formations that looked like wreckage from the air.
Prior finds cited in that coverage include 1940 human bones said to match Earhart’s build, a 1930s woman’s shoe, a freckle cream jar, and post-landing radio signals that pointed toward the island. Coconut crabs, the reporting notes, may have scattered remains over the decades, one more reason a clean aircraft signature in the lagoon would matter.
None of that history is a substitute for what the dredge and the data can show now. The leaders are not claiming a trophy photo yet. They are claiming a process: gather evidence, strip sediment, and decide whether the Taraia Object is metal from 1937 or another false lead.
Earhart’s final flight plan aimed at Howland Island. She and Noonan never arrived. Nearly nine decades later, the argument still splits between open-ocean crash theories and the castaway case centered on Nikumaroro.
What is different this time is the focus on one named feature, the Taraia Object, and a stated plan to put divers, sensors, and a hydraulic dredge on it instead of another flyover guess. Purdue’s tie to the project also carries a practical endgame: if the wreck is real, wreckage could return to the university that has long been linked to Earhart’s story.
The team’s own standard is blunt. In a matter of days, they say, they should know whether they have found the plane or whether the anomaly is something else. That is a higher bar than another round of hopeful headlines. It is also the only bar that ends the argument.
American history still has unfinished business in that lagoon, and this crew is choosing hard evidence over another year of speculation.
