For 89 years, nobody knew what they were looking at.

A Flight That Never Landed

Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan vanished on July 2, 1937, while attempting to fly around the world in her Lockheed Electra 10E. Earhart had worked at Purdue University from 1935 to 1937, and the Purdue Research Foundation helped fund her Electra through the Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research. She planned to give the plane back to the university once the flight was done.

A Shape in the Water

In 2020, Earhart researcher Michael Ashmore was looking through satellite imagery of Nikumaroro, a remote, uninhabited atoll in Kiribati long suspected as Earhart's final landing spot, when he noticed a long, reflective shape sitting in the island's lagoon. Investigators later named it the Taraia Object. According to the research team, its size and outline resemble the tail, fuselage, and part of the starboard wing of a Lockheed Electra 10E.

The Same Shape, Decades of Photos

The twist came when investigators went digging through old archives. They say the same shape shows up in an aerial survey photographed by a New Zealand team in 1938, just months after Earhart disappeared, and keeps turning up in photos and footage on and off ever since. According to the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI), footage from as early as 1938 through 2024 appears to show "the same object in the same spot, buried and occasionally re-exposed."

One Veteran Researcher Says It Is Just a Tree

Not everyone is convinced. Ric Gillespie, head of TIGHAR, has led a dozen expeditions to the area over 35 years and believes the object is a coconut palm tree with its root ball still attached, washed into the lagoon by a storm. "We've looked there in that spot, and there's nothing there," he has said. Gillespie still believes Nikumaroro is where Earhart spent her final days, but thinks her plane was swept into the ocean not long after she landed and was destroyed against the reef.

The Dig Begins

A field team backed by Purdue and ALI is set to depart Majuro, in the Marshall Islands, on July 28, 2026, sailing roughly 1,200 nautical miles to Nikumaroro. Researchers plan to spend five days on site using sonar, magnetometers, divers, and a hydraulic dredge to examine the object before returning to Majuro by mid-August. If the Taraia Object is confirmed as Earhart's Electra, organizers say a full archaeological excavation would follow in 2027, with recovery of the wreckage for permanent display at Purdue possibly coming in 2027 or 2028.

Nobody knows yet what the divers will find beneath the water. But for the first time in 89 years, a team is heading straight for the spot with a name already attached to it.

Related Tags