A Purdue-led team has set out for a remote Pacific island, hoping a mysterious object in a lagoon is Amelia Earhart’s lost plane nearly 90 years later.
Researchers left Purdue University on Oct. 2 to begin the Taraia Object expedition, a 17-person mission aimed at finding the Lockheed Electra 10-E flown by Amelia Earhart when she vanished in 1937. Three team members later traveled from Los Angeles to join the rest of the group before the full party moved on toward Fiji and Kiribati, with travel to Nikumaroro set for Oct. 7.
USA TODAY reported the joint effort links Purdue University, the university’s Archaeological Legacy Institute, and the Purdue Research Foundation. Lead archaeologist Richard Pettigrew is directing the fieldwork on the remote island between Australia and Hawaii.
The target is a visual anomaly in Nikumaroro’s lagoon, first noticed in satellite imagery in 2015. The team plans video and still images first, then remote magnetometer and sonar work, followed by an underwater hydraulic dredge to expose whatever sits below and a walk-over survey of nearby land for debris.
Pettigrew has not hidden his outlook. He previously told USA TODAY he felt strong about the plan.
"I am feeling very confident about this," "I'm pumped."
In a news release a few weeks before departure, he kept the focus on the work itself while acknowledging the scale of the mystery.
"My conscious focus is on the execution of our fieldwork plan,” “...I feel truly lucky to be in a position to possibly solve one of the greatest mysteries of all time, whether or not that happens.”
He has also called a positive identification “the discovery of a lifetime” and said confirming wreckage would be “the smoking-gun proof” for theories that place Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan on Nikumaroro after they failed to reach Howland Island.
Earhart and Noonan left Oakland, California, on May 21, 1937, on an around-the-world flight. On July 2, 1937, after taking off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, toward Howland Island, they disappeared. Earhart radioed the U.S. Coast Guard that she was nearly out of fuel. A Coast Guard cutter waited at Howland to refuel them. Neither Earhart nor Noonan knew Morse code, so there was no two-way contact, according to a Smithsonian Institution analysis of government records cited in the coverage.
The U.S. government then ran what was, at the time, its largest search for a lost aircraft. After two weeks it ended with no trace. Both were declared legally dead on Jan. 5, 1939.
Nikumaroro sits about 400 miles southeast of Howland. The Purdue Research Foundation’s case for looking there rests on several strands already public in the expedition materials: radio bearings that converge on the island, human bones found there that resemble Earhart’s measurements, and artifacts from the 1930s, including a woman’s shoe, a jar of freckle cream, and a medicine vial. None of that is presented as final proof. It is the basis for the theory the team is testing in the lagoon.
The mission was first set for October 2025. Weather and permission from Kiribati pushed it back. The island nation controls Nikumaroro and has now allowed the work to proceed.
Mikarite Temari, head of Kiribati’s Ministry of Line and Phoenix Islands Development, framed the island as more than a search site.
“For Kiribati, Nikumaroro is much more than the possible setting for one of the world’s great historical mysteries,”
Temari also said the nation is glad to work with Purdue and cast the project as a longer partnership.
"We also see this expedition as an opportunity to build a lasting partnership that can help support important priorities such as regenerative tourism, cultural preservation, education, advances in aviation technology and economic development for our people.”
Officials there have described Nikumaroro as “part of our heritage” and stressed a duty to protect and better understand it.
The institutional tie runs deep. The Purdue Research Foundation originally funded the Lockheed Electra “Flying Laboratory” through the Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research. Purdue says Earhart intended to return the aircraft to the university. If wreckage turns up, the Archaeological Legacy Institute says more work and further talks with Kiribati would still be required, but the group feels it owes her legacy an effort to bring the plane or its remnants home.
That is a clean American through-line: a university that backed a pioneering pilot still wants the machine, and the record, returned rather than left as another Pacific rumor. Whether the Taraia object is the Electra remains unproven. The team is now in position to test the claim with dredges, sonar, and ground survey instead of another round of satellite guesswork.
History’s open files deserve hard evidence, not endless theory. If the lagoon holds Earhart’s plane, the country that built it and the school that funded it should be first in line to bring the truth home.
