An expedition to one of the most remote islands in the South Pacific has come up empty in the hunt for Amelia Earhart's lost plane — again. Researchers announced on Monday that a 17-person team that traveled to Nikumaroro Island found “no conclusive evidence” that the famed aviator landed her Lockheed 10E Electra on or near the small atoll, and no conclusive evidence to confirm the hypothesis that wreckage from the plane lies in the island's lagoon, according to a Purdue University news release reported by CNN.
The trek was a joint effort led by the Eugene, Oregon-based Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI) and Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. The team of researchers and technicians arrived on Nikumaroro on October 12, after a sea voyage of about five days from Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati, the Pacific nation the uninhabited, coral reef-fringed island belongs to. Their main goal was narrow and testable: examine the Taraia Object, a blurry, plane-shaped figure in the island's lagoon first detected in satellite imagery in 2020, which team leader and archaeologist Rick Pettigrew believed could be wreckage from Earhart's aircraft.
What the Taraia Object turned out to be
It was, in all likelihood, trees. Evidence gathered on Nikumaroro confirmed that the visual anomaly was likely a collection of large trees deposited along the peninsula's sandspit, Purdue said. “By the time the team arrived at the site, a good portion of the debris had fragmented and washed away,” the university's statement said, leaving, as USA Today reported in its account of the findings, only a single Y-shaped segment — a fraction of the anomaly's original size in the imagery that produced the hypothesis. The remaining fragment's reflective surface, which had helped the object look metallic from orbit, was caused by a carbonate coating rather than metal.
The team surveyed the lagoon with a magnetometer, which detects iron, and used sonar technology to search for objects buried beneath sediment on the lagoon floor. That work did turn up smaller finds: USA Today reported that expedition members discovered several artifacts during their work, including a steel tube about 30 inches long found in a lagoon near the Taraia Peninsula, which will undergo further analysis, along with other period items recovered on the island. Researchers said such discoveries can help them understand how debris travels through the lagoon and where it eventually accumulates — useful knowledge for any future search, even though none of it is the smoking gun.
“We accomplished our main goal, which was to come here and test that hypothesis,” Pettigrew said in a video statement. “Unfortunately, we weren't able to find that smoking gun,” Purdue's Steve Schultz, the university's general counsel and a field assistant on the expedition, put it in a separate account of the team's return.
The mystery that will not close
Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared on July 2, 1937, during an attempt to fly around the world. They were last seen taking off from Lae, New Guinea, on what was expected to be a grueling 18-hour journey to Howland Island, a tiny speck of land in the Pacific. Earhart was close to her goal: she had already flown 22,000 miles when she was last seen, with about 7,000 miles left to travel. The Purdue connection is not incidental — the Purdue Research Foundation originally funded Earhart's Lockheed Electra, and Earhart intended for the plane to be returned to Purdue upon completion of her historic flight.
Two broad explanations have competed for nearly 90 years. The official determination of the massive U.S. government-led search mounted immediately after her disappearance was that Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and the Electra crashed into the Pacific near Howland. The rival castaway hypothesis holds that they landed the plane some 400 miles south of Howland, on or near Nikumaroro — then called Gardner Island — and survived as castaways until they likely perished from thirst or hunger.
It is that second theory the expedition still backs, even after its own test failed. “The evidence for the castaway hypothesis, which brought us here, remained very, very strong,” Pettigrew said. “We think that it's very likely that Amelia and her navigator, Fred Noonan, did in fact end up here on Nikumaroro Island.” Schultz, while acknowledging the team could rule out the Taraia hypothesis, said the result “doesn't detract from the existing, very strong, compelling case for the castaway hypothesis.”
Fifteen searches and counting
Skeptics note how often this ground has been covered. “Nikumaroro Island has been searched more than 15 times, to no avail,” said Dorothy Cochrane, an Earhart expert and retired curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. “They are one of many who have not found bona fide evidence of the Electra or Amelia or Noonan at Nikumaroro.” The recent history of the search is a history of tantalizing images dissolving on inspection: in 2024, ocean exploration company Deep Sea Vision detected a plane-like shape on sonar about 100 miles from Howland that turned out to be rocks, and a 2019 expedition to Nikumaroro led by oceanographer Bob Ballard, who found the Titanic in 1985, also ended in disappointment. USA Today counted this latest effort as the 20th organized expedition to search for the plane.
It is unlikely to be the last. Deep-sea exploration company Nauticos is trying to raise the $8 million to $10 million needed to fund what it hopes will be a final expedition to the ocean around Howland Island, exploring a search area narrowed by new information from experiments using a replica of Earhart's radio system; the company has already completed three searches near the island since 2002. Schultz, channeling his subject, framed the Purdue team's own position the same way: Earhart never gave up, and neither, he said, will the searchers. For now, though, the most famous disappearance in aviation history remains exactly where it has been since 1937 — unresolved, with its newest lead ruled out and its oldest questions intact. Follow our news coverage for any further findings from the artifacts the team brought back for analysis.
