Earhart Expedition Finds No Evidence That Lagoon Object Was Her Plane

The Taraia Object is not Amelia Earhart's plane. An expedition to Nikumaroro, a remote coral atoll in the South Pacific, announced on Monday, Oct. 19, local time, that it found no conclusive evidence linking a shape in the island lagoon to Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10E, the aircraft that vanished in 1937.

The expedition was a joint effort by the Archaeological Legacy Institute, based in Eugene, Oregon, the Purdue Research Foundation and Purdue University. Its 17 team members reached Nikumaroro on Oct. 12 after sailing from Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati, on Oct. 6. The crossing took five days by sea. Weather extended the work, and the team spent seven days near the atoll, including four days onshore.

The object was trees, not metal

The team went to test one idea. A shape first seen in satellite imagery in 2020, in the lagoon off the Taraia Peninsula, looked enough like aircraft wreckage to draw a dedicated search. Researchers call it the Taraia Object.

On the ground, the answer was plain. The shape was likely a collection of large trees carried onto the peninsula sandspit, Purdue said in its release. Much of it had broken apart and washed away before the team arrived, leaving a single Y-shaped segment. The shine that had looked like metal in images came from a carbonate coating on the surface, not from aircraft skin. Other items nearby carried the same coating of coral sand.

The team still brought back finds to study. They include a steel tube about 30 inches long, found in the lagoon near the Taraia Peninsula. Purdue said the finds may show how objects that enter the lagoon through the Tatiman Passage, the channel on the atoll's west side, travel across the water and collect at Taraia.

The wider theory stays alive

Ruling out this object does not settle where Earhart came down. Rick Pettigrew, executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute, said the team met its goal of finding out what the Taraia Object was. Steve Schultz, Purdue general counsel and a member of the expedition, said the team set out to test a hypothesis and followed the evidence to the end.

Both men pointed to the castaway theory, the idea that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, landed on the reef at Nikumaroro and died there as castaways. The team said the evidence behind that broader theory remains strong, and Purdue said it will keep searching.

A flight that never finished

Earhart and Noonan left Lae, in Papua New Guinea, on Jul. 2, 1937, on one of the last legs of a flight around the world. They were heading for Howland Island, about 400 miles northwest of Nikumaroro, and never arrived. The United States searched for two weeks over an area of ocean about the size of Texas and found nothing.

Earhart had already flown 22,000 miles, with 7,000 miles left to go. Purdue Research Foundation money had bought the Electra, which she called her Flying Laboratory, and she planned to return the plane to Purdue after the flight. That long link is why a university in Indiana keeps sailing to a small atoll in Kiribati, and why this empty result will not be the last word.