In search for Amelia Earhart's plane, tantalising clue turns out to be tree debris

LOS ANGELES: US-based explorers who travelled to a tiny South Pacific island seeking to conclusively solve the 1937 disappearance of famed aviator Amelia Earhart have determined that an object they suspected was wreckage from her plane was a cluster of washed-up trees.

The mission leaders made the announcement on Monday. The team set out this month from Los Angeles for the archipelago nation of Kiribati on a US$900,000 expedition backed by private donors and Indiana's Purdue University, which has long been associated with Earhart and her legacy.

The objective was to determine whether an elongated, multi-pronged object detected in 2020 satellite imagery in the island's lagoon was a remnant of Earhart's long-missing twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10-E aeroplane.

Such a finding would have decisively supported the hypothesis held by some scholars that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, crash-landed on or near the coral-ringed atoll and died as castaways there, hundreds of miles from their intended refuelling stop.

'Adventure is worthwhile'

"Unfortunately, we weren't able to find that smoking gun," Purdue general counsel and team member Steve Schultz said in a video message recorded on the island of Nikumaroro, part of the Phoenix Islands in Kiribati.

Quoting Earhart, he added: "You know, Amelia herself said, 'Adventure is worthwhile in itself.'"

After a week on the island, the team ultimately concluded that the "visual anomaly" detected by satellite "was likely a collection of large trees" wedged in the lagoon's sand, the expedition said in a statement.

Much of the debris had fragmented and washed away since it was first spotted, leaving a smaller Y-shaped segment whose reflective surface — suggestive of metal — turned out to come from "its carbonate veneer", the team said.

Two previous attempts to locate the aircraft's wreckage in the ocean around Nikumaroro also proved fruitless, while a plane-shaped sonar image captured elsewhere on the sea floor turned out to be a pile of rocks.

Earhart and Noonan were last seen taking off in the Electra on July 2, 1937, from Papua New Guinea, during Earhart's multi-stage attempt to become the first woman to pilot an aeroplane around the world and the first aviator to circumnavigate the equator.

Radio contact with the flight was lost the next day after Earhart, 39, reported that "gas is running low", followed by her final known transmission giving her navigational line of position.

Castaway hypothesis 'remains very strong'

The disappearance prompted one of the largest air-sea searches ever undertaken and remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the 20th century and aviation history.

The expedition's leader, Richard Pettigrew, head of the Archaeological Legacy Institute in Eugene, Oregon, said evidence supporting the "castaway hypothesis" — that Earhart and Noonan died while marooned on Nikumaroro — "remains very strong".

He cited evidence collected over more than 30 years by veteran Earhart explorer Ric Gillespie, co-founder of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery and author of the 2024 book One More Good Flight: The Amelia Earhart Tragedy.

Gillespie's case includes multiple radio distress calls picked up in the days immediately after Earhart vanished, with bearings converging on Nikumaroro, and a 2018 forensic analysis of human bones recovered on the island in 1940 that found they belonged to a woman of Earhart's build and stature.

Gillespie's investigation also encompassed artefacts found on the island, including a woman's shoe, a compact case, a freckle cream jar and a medicine vial, all dating to the 1930s, as well as remnants of a jackknife similar to one Earhart carried on the plane.

Another piece of evidence is a photograph taken of the island's shoreline months after Earhart vanished, showing an object that appears to be the Electra's landing gear.

The Purdue expedition said this month that it had uncovered several other artefacts, including a 30-inch-long steel tube found in the lagoon, that could yield further evidence when studied.

According to Gillespie, the plane has been lost to history, eventually swept by tides off the coral flat where it had landed and carried into the sea, where it sank and broke apart in the surf.

The official US government view of Earhart's fate has long been that her plane ran out of fuel and crashed at sea near its intended refuelling destination of Howland Island, another small island about 640km northwest of Nikumaroro.