A trailblazing aviator went missing while attempting to fly around the world. Could an unusual object in a satellite image finally unlock the mystery?
Published October 7, 2026
Amelia Earhart disappeared decades ago on July 2, 1937, during a daring attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world, but researchers are still searching for answers. Her Lockheed 10E Electra aircraft had already covered 22,000 miles (35,405 kilometers) when she was 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 Ocean. She had 7,000 miles (11,265 kilometers) left to travel before achieving her goal.
There are conflicting theories about what happened to Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, and despite dozens of searches, the location of her lost plane remains unknown. An expedition led by Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, that’s launching this week marks the latest attempt to solve what might be the world’s greatest aviation mystery.
A timeline of Earhart’s last flight holds clues to her final moments:
That’s where opinions about Earhart’s and Noonan’s ultimate fate diverge — though few would contest that the odds were stacked against them.
At 2,556 miles (4,113 kilometers) in length, this leg of her journey — 31 of 34 total — was always going to be the most daunting. This stage involved more time in the air than Earhart’s solo crossing of the Atlantic five years earlier and required her to locate and land on the tiny Pacific island of Howland, which is just 2 miles (3 kilometers) long and less than 2 miles (3 kilometers) across. Her Electra aircraft was loaded up with the maximum 1,150 gallons of fuel, the extra tanks accommodated by removing the passenger seats.
“They were flying all night and then trying to pick out this tiny island. We know that there were some clouds in the area, and the sun’s in her face as she’s talking. It’s just really, really difficult,” said Dorothy Cochrane, an Earhart expert and retired curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.
The disaster and presumed death of the 39-year-old aviator dominated news headlines and gripped the public imagination.
The United States staged an unprecedented attempt to find the crew and the plane. The efforts covered an area around the size of Texas, according to the Smithsonian, but came to nothing.
Divergent theories
For decades, historians have debated how and where Earhart went missing. Some of the more controversial theories seem implausible: A 2017 documentary alleged she was taken prisoner by the Japanese and executed.
The main school of thought — and the official determination made following the massive US government-led search — suggests that Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and their Electra crashed into the Pacific Ocean near their intended destination.
Others believe that Earhart and Noonan landed their plane 400 miles (644 kilometers) to the south of Howland — on or near Nikumaroro Island, then known as Gardner Island — and became, at least for a while, castaways.
There, proponents of this hypothesis suggest, the duo made repeated distress calls for help using the radio on the plane, but subsequently died of thirst or hunger, their bodies perhaps eaten by the coral-fringed island’s huge coconut crabs.
Aircraft did fly over the uninhabited island during the initial search following Earhart’s disappearance, but “no one was seen,” according to the US Coast Guard’s report. Several expeditions have since made their way to Nikumaroro to explore the castaway hypothesis, which draws on the work of Ric Gillespie, author of 2024 book “One More Good Flight: The Amelia Earhart Tragedy” and the cofounder of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR.
He has visited Nikumaroro a dozen times, turning up artifacts he says might have belonged to Earhart. These pieces of potential evidence include a freckle ointment jar and a sextant, a navigating tool like the one Earhart’s copilot used. Gillespie also points to human bones found on Nikumaroro Island in 1940 that subsequently went missing. An analysis of the recorded proportions of the remains appears to suggest a match to a woman of Earhart’s build.
Artifacts found on Nikumaroro that TIGHAR believes may have been connected to Earhart. (From top left) A jar similar in style to that of Dr. C.H. Berry’s Freckle Ointment. Earhart was known to have been concerned about her freckles; fragments of red material chemically consistent with an early 20th century cosmetic; a broken knife, similar to a knife listed in the Electra’s inventory; a shattered glass bottle. The bottle design was patented on May 30, 1933, according to TIGHAR research. (TIGHAR.org)
A team from Purdue University led by archaeologist Rick Pettigrew is the latest to set course for Nikumaroro, which is today part of Republic of Kiribati, in the hope of discovering Earhart’s plane. The researchers plan to investigate a blurry object first spotted in satellite imagery in 2020, known as the Taraia Object, which they believe could be wreckage from the plane. “We have a singular focus, which is to examine the object and make that identification. That’s a critical piece of information upon which everything else depends,” said Pettigrew, founder and executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute in Eugene, Oregon.
Gillespie, who said he has been to the spot in question during visits prior to 2020, believes the Taraia Object is a partially submerged tree. In his telling of the story, the plane was destroyed long ago, ground up by the power of the ocean surf against the coral reef.
“He’s not going to find anything,” Gillespie said. “I’ve been back and forth with Rick about this. We’ve known each other many years. We’ve just agreed to disagree.”
The Taraia Object, first spotted in 2020, is visible in recent satellite imagery. (Archaeological Legacy Institute)
But regardless of whether the Taraia Object is another dead end, the idea that Earhart ended up an island castaway is far from widely accepted, Cochrane said. Most likely, the plane crashed and fell to the ocean floor not far from their intended destination.
“You have to follow the facts and the facts are that she says she’s coming into Howland Island after all this time and starting to run low on fuel,” Cochrane added. “Then an hour later, the fuel’s getting less and less and by the end, they can feel the fear in her voice.”
However, repeated efforts to locate Earhart’s plane near Howland have come up empty.
A 2024 search by ocean exploration company Deep Sea Vision sparked hope when sonar imagery seemed to reveal something that looked like a submerged aircraft. The effort ultimately turned up some rocks formed in the shape of a plane.
Before
After
The shape of a plane revealed in sonar imagery by Deep Sea Vision in January 2024 turned out to be a rock formation when a team revisited the site in November the same year. (Deep Sea Vision, an Eco Minerals Company)
Deep sea exploration company Nauticos has completed three expeditions since 2002, which along with ground covered by a 2009 expedition led by the Waitt Institute for Discovery, have, in total, covered 3,610 square miles (9,350 square kilometers) — an area roughly the size of Connecticut. As of summer 2026, the Nauticos researchers were still trying to raise the $8 million to $10 million necessary to embark on what they hope will be a final expedition to explore a search area narrowed by new information from experiments using a replica of Earhart’s radio system.
High-stakes endeavor
Earhart was no stranger to high-stakes endeavors. She set many aviation records. Her most impressive, according to Cochrane, was completing the first solo transatlantic flight by a woman in May 1932. She was the second human to do so — just five years after aviator Charles Lindbergh pioneered the feat.
That journey of Earhart’s included a heart-stopping moment that she recounted with casual aplomb in a speech she made in London not long after she arrived. Archivists at the US Library of Congress just this year digitized long-lost audio of the speech discovered in their collection.
“Something happened which had never happened before in my 12 years of flying, that is, the altimeter, the instrument required to register altitude — height above ground — failed,” Earhart said of her 15-hour flight across the Atlantic. “The hand swung around the dial in such a manner that I knew it was out of commission for the rest of the night.” A snippet of the speech was preserved on a tiny 78-rpm record and included as a promotional giveaway in the cover of her memoir “The Fun of It,” which published later that year.
Cochrane believes that Earhart was an accomplished aviator who forged her own path at a time when aviation had no place for women. It’s easy to forget now that women didn’t begin to pilot commercial flights until the 1970s.
Earhart’s radio communications skills let her down that fateful day in 1937, Cochrane said. Originally, she had planned to have radio operator Harry Manning on the journey, but he dropped out after a delay following the first leg of the trip. What’s more, neither Earhart, nor Noonan, knew Morse code, which could have made it easier to establish two-way communication with the Itasca, Cochrane added.
“Those were the two big failure points, because you know she got around the rest of the world pretty well. She was making her landings and takeoffs, and they were getting where they needed to go,” Cochrane said.
“She’s a pioneering woman in aviation. She’s doing things that no woman has ever done, and she made mistakes, too. She wasn’t perfect.”