Amelia Earhart

Summary

On 2 July 1937, six weeks and twenty thousand miles into an attempt to fly around the world, Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan failed to arrive at Howland Island. It is a flat coral speck two and a half square miles in area, in an ocean that offers nothing else, and they could not find it.

Eighty-nine years and an enormous amount of money later, no confirmed trace of the aircraft, or of either of them, has ever been recovered.

The registry keeps this record for a reason that has as much to do with the searching as with the disappearance. In January 2024 a sonar image was announced worldwide as very probably her aircraft. In November 2024 it was announced to be a rock. Almost everybody saw the first announcement. Very few saw the second.

What is documented

The flight. Earhart, aged 39, and Noonan, aged 44, left Lae in New Guinea on 2 July 1937 in a Lockheed Model 10-E Electra. Their destination was Howland Island, roughly 2,500 miles away, where the US Coast Guard cutter Itasca was waiting to help them find it and to provide fuel.

The radio traffic. Itasca received transmissions from Earhart. She reported that they must be on the aircraft but could not see the ship, and gave a line of position. Two-way communication was never properly established. The transmissions grew stronger, which suggested she was close. Then they stopped.

The search. The United States Navy and Coast Guard mounted what was at the time the largest and most expensive search and rescue operation in American history. It found nothing. The two were declared dead in 1939.

Nikumaroro, and what has been found there. Nikumaroro, then Gardner Island, lies roughly four hundred miles southeast of Howland, on the line of position Earhart reported. It is the focus of the leading alternative to a crash at sea.

Documented material from the island includes: a partial human skeleton found in 1940, examined in Fiji at the time and described as belonging to a short, stocky male; a sextant box found with it; and, from later expeditions, artefacts of 1930s date including a woman's shoe, a compact case, a jar of freckle cream, and a medicine vial.

In 2018 the forensic anthropologist Richard Jantz re-examined the recorded bone measurements using modern methods and concluded that they matched Earhart's known proportions more closely than they matched more than ninety-nine per cent of a reference sample.

The bones are gone. The original skeletal material was lost. DNA testing is not possible, and Jantz's reanalysis therefore rests on a set of measurements recorded in 1940 rather than on the bones themselves.

Deep Sea Vision, January 2024. A private company announced that its sonar had located an aircraft-shaped object on the sea floor about a hundred miles from Howland Island, at a depth of roughly fifteen thousand feet, and that it was believed to be the Electra. The founder said one would be hard-pressed to convince him it was not an aeroplane. The story ran worldwide.

Deep Sea Vision, November 2024. After returning with a remotely operated vehicle, the company announced that the target was not the Electra. It was a natural rock formation. They put it on Instagram, and printed a T-shirt reading "We find rocks", which is more grace than the situation required.

The correction received a small fraction of the coverage of the claim.

The Taraia Object. In 2020 an independent researcher, Michael Ashmore, noticed an aircraft-like shape in the lagoon of Nikumaroro in Apple Maps satellite imagery. The Archaeological Legacy Institute acquired further satellite images spanning 2009 to 2024 and reports that the object first becomes visible in April 2015, shortly after Tropical Cyclone Pam, and appears in the same place in aerial photographs taken by the New Zealand military in 1938. It measures roughly twelve to fourteen metres. The Electra's fuselage was 12.2 metres.

The 2026 expedition. A field team from the Archaeological Legacy Institute and the Purdue Research Foundation is due to depart Kiribati on 29 July 2026 for Nikumaroro, to determine what the Taraia Object is, using drones, sonar, magnetometers and, if warranted, excavation. Purdue funded Earhart's Electra in the 1930s, and she intended to return it to the university after the flight.

The scepticism, from a source that matters. Ric Gillespie of TIGHAR, who has spent nearly forty years arguing that Earhart died on Nikumaroro, does not believe the Taraia Object is her aircraft. He has suggested it is a tree. He maintains that the Electra was destroyed in the surf shortly after landing, and that it is gone.

Leading explanations

Crashed and sank (the simplest). They ran out of fuel while searching for Howland and went into the sea. This accounts for the radio traffic, the absence of any confirmed wreckage, and the total absence of survivors, and it requires nothing beyond a small target and a large ocean. Its weakness is that decades of deep-water searching near Howland have found nothing.

Nikumaroro castaway. They failed to find Howland, followed the line of position Earhart reported, reached Nikumaroro, landed on the reef, transmitted distress calls for several days as the tide destroyed the aircraft, and died on the island. This accounts for the post-loss radio signals reported at the time, the 1930s artefacts, the 1940 bones, and Jantz's reanalysis. It is a serious hypothesis with a substantial evidentiary base, and it has never produced a piece of aircraft.

Captured by the Japanese; survived and returned under a new name; secretly a spy. These have circulated for decades. None has any documentary support, and the most-cited photographic evidence for the Japanese capture theory has been shown to predate the disappearance.

Current status

Unsolved. No confirmed wreckage. No confirmed remains. No DNA. A serious hypothesis with a substantial circumstantial base, a substantial body of counter-argument, and one expedition currently at sea.

The registry will revise this record if the Taraia Object is identified. It will also revise it if the object is shown not to be the Electra, because a negative result is a result, and the team conducting the expedition has said as much in advance, which is more than most people who go looking for Amelia Earhart have been willing to say.

Last reviewed: July 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.