Winter Park’s Marc Hagle joins expedition to find Amelia Earhart’s plane
ORLANDO, Fla. —
Winter Park’s Marc Hagle joined WESH 2 News to discuss his participation in an upcoming expedition to search for Amelia Earhart’s plane.
The Purdue University and Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI) expedition, led by ALI executive director Richard Pettigrew and dubbed the Taraia Object Expedition, will venture out to inspect the Taraia Object, a visual anomaly located in a Pacific lagoon on Nikumaroro.
“Expedition members hope to determine whether the object is the remains of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10-E aircraft, which disappeared on July 2, 1937, while Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan attempted to circumnavigate the globe,” Purdue’s website states. “The expedition is based on the Nikumaroro Hypothesis, which holds that Earhart and Noonan landed and were marooned on the remote island located between Hawaii and Australia after failing to reach their intended stop on Howland Island.”
During a live interview on Friday with WESH 2 News anchor Michelle Imperato, Hagle expressed his excitement and detailed the task at hand.
“You know, it’s amazing how opportunities in life present themselves. I was in Naples on a retreat with Purdue University and I was speaking with Steve Schultz who’s head legal counsel, and he had just been contacted by the archeologist, Rick Pettigrew, a couple days prior, asking Purdue if they would sponsor the trip because Purdue owned the airplane that she flew, the Electra,” he said.
Hagle recounted asking more and more questions about the expedition until, about a week later, he got a letter from the university inviting him to be Purdue’s envoy in the investigation.
“There’s about 15 of us going and there’s different classifications for everybody, but I’m going to be one of the scuba divers,” he said. “I’m actually going down in the water. I may touch the thing. I may be one of the first people to touch it.”
The expedition is set to embark in October.
Learn more at Purdue’s website and watch the full interview in the video player at the top of this story.