Earlier this year, a former US Air Force pilot and intelligence officer raised hopes that Amelia Earhart’s plane may have been discovered after scanning the Pacific Ocean floor using sonar. Unfortunately, after further investigation, the plane-like object appears to be a rock.
On July 2, 1937, while attempting to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, Amelia Earhart’s plane disappeared somewhere between Lae, New Guinea, her last known location, and Howland Island where she was headed next. And thus started a mystery that has never properly been answered.
Despite an initial 16-day search involving 66 aircraft and four boats, as well as plenty of unofficial searches since, the experienced pilot and her navigator, Fred Noonan, have never been found. Theories on her disappearance range from the obvious (her plane crashed and sank) to the not-so-obvious (she was eaten by giant crabs), and even suggest she survived on a nearby island. One such conspiracy claims that she became captured by Japanese forces, before being freed and taken home to the US where she became one “Irene Bolam”, despite Bolam already existing long before Earhart’s disappearance.
After 87 years, an explanation seems unlikely. But former pilot Tony Romeo funded an $11 million search for Earhart by selling off his real estate business and began scanning the ocean floor using sonar back in September 2023. In January, it briefly looked like that search had paid off, with Romeo claiming to have found sonar evidence of “what appears to be Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra” plane.
The image, captured by a submersible, was found 4,900 meters (16,000 feet) below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, 160 kilometers (100 miles) off the coast of Howland Island, her next scheduled stop. The team planned to return to the site to investigate further.
“This is maybe the most exciting thing I’ll ever do in my life,” Romeo told the Wall Street Journal at the time. “I feel like a 10-year-old going on a treasure hunt.”
And just like a 10-year-old on a treasure hunt, the treasure turned out to be some rocks.
“After 11 months the waiting has finally ended and unfortunately our target was not Amelia’s Electra 10E (just a natural rock formation),” the team explained in an update on Instagram, adding they were determined to continue the search. “As we speak [Deep Sea Vision] continues to search – now clearing almost 7,700 square miles [19,900 square kilometers]… the plot thickens with still no evidence of her disappearance ever found”.
Fingers crossed the next find isn’t a natural formation that happens to look like a plane.
Source Link: Potential Sonar Discovery Of "Amelia Earhart's Plane" Turns Out To Be Plane-Shaped Rock
