Giada Amendolara '25
In the case of one of the greatest mysteries in history—the disappearance of famed American aviator Amelia Earhart—new evidence has recently come to light. The South Carolina-based ocean exploration company, Deep Sea Vision, revealed that it had obtained remarkable sonar images of what seems to be Amelia Earhart's aircraft at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
According to NPR, “The team spotted the plane-shaped object between Australia and Hawaii, about 100 miles off Howland Island, which is where Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were supposed to refuel but never arrived.”
The team thinks that the plane-shaped object could possibly be Amelia Earhart's Lockheed 10-E Electra that disappeared almost 87 years ago. In order to find more proof, such as the airplane's tail number, NR16020, the company intends to embark on another excursion this year with a camera.
Amelia Earhart was very popular. She wrote books, broke airborne records, supported women's rights, and lectured and acted as a career advisor at Purdue University. Earhart became the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932, when she was 34 years old.
In an effort to become the first woman to fly around the world, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished while flying from New Guinea to Howland Island. Earhart and Noonan started their round-the-world flight On May 21, 1937. She had communicated by radio that her gasoline supply was low.
After the plane's disappearance, over one hundred reports from all across the world claimed to have received messages from her. The two were never located, even after a 17-day search that covered more than 250,000 square miles of ocean. Earhardt and Noonan were officially declared dead on January 5, 1939.
They disappeared almost a century ago, and neither their remains nor their plane have been found. This has left the world with a great deal of unanswered questions and one of the biggest mysteries in history, leaving many theories as to what may have happened. Some of the theories include drowning in the Pacific, abduction by aliens, living in New Jersey under an alias, execution by the Japanese, or that they died as castaways on an island.
Amelia Earhardt’s disappearance spawned so many different theories and conspiracies over the years that it'd be good to finally bring some closure as to what happened.
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