A crack search team is checking a hidden underwater shape in the Pacific to see if they’ve finally found missing aviator Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane
The nearly 90-year-old mystery of what happened to legendary aviator Amelia Earhart could finally be blown wide open in just a matter of days. A crack team of researchers are racing to a speck of land in the Pacific Ocean after satellite photos spotted a mysterious underwater shape that looks similar to a downed aircraft.
From blurry space images, experts have traced the faint outline of what they believe to be a plane’s body and tail buried in the white sand of Nikumaroro, a remote island 3,000 miles north-east of Sydney, Australia.
While sceptics suggest the object is just a pile of dead trees, a 17-strong search crew is set to examine the waters to see if it’s the long-lost wreck.
Earhart became famous as the first woman to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic. But on July 2, 1937, she vanished into thin air over the Pacific alongside her navigator Fred Noonan while trying to become the first female pilot to fly around the globe.
A $900,000 (£680,000) mission led by the US-based Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University is now homing in on the so-called “Taraia Object” sitting in the shallows.
Explorers believe Earhart and Noonan missed their target of Howland Island, ran low on fuel and flew south before crash-landing on Nikumaroro’s reef. It is feared they died as desperate castaways stranded in the middle of nowhere.
“Finding Amelia Earhart’s [Lockheed] Electra aircraft would be the discovery of a lifetime,” mission leader Richard Pettigrew said.
Team member Steve Schultz, senior vice-president and general counsel at Purdue University, added: “This would be solving one of the great mysteries in aviation history, certainly one of the great mysteries of the 20th century.”
The team set sail from Tarawa, capital of island nation Kiribati, for an 830-mile boat journey to the island.
They plan to spend five days scouring the reef for clues. If they strike gold, it could finally reveal details of the pioneer’s last hours or even locate her remains.
The US government maintains that Earhart ran out of fuel and plummeted into the sea near Howland Island. Her last radio calls confirmed fuel was dangerously low, but years of searching failed to turn up any clues.
The disappearance has fuelled wild conspiracy theories ever since. Some claim the pair flew to Japanese-controlled Saipan and were executed as US spies.
Another rumour suggests Earharty survived, moved to New York under the fake name Irene Bolam and lived out her life in secret, though the real Ms Bolam responded with a multi-million-dollar lawsuit.
Not everyone is convinced the new hunt will yield answers, with critics branding the mission a wild goose chase.
Biographer Mary Lovell told the Telegraph: “This is not the first such expedition to find Amelia, by any means. They are an annual feature.”
Author Laurie Gwen Shapiro was just as scathing, insisting the craft is sitting at the bottom of the ocean near Howland Island and labelling the new voyage “nonsense”.
She said: “There’s no way that she ran out of fuel, frantic and then flew hundreds of miles back. This is just a way to get people’s names in the news and raise money.”