Researchers Thought They Found Amelia Earhart’s Missing Plane. It Turned Out to Be a Plane-Shaped Pile of Rocks

Earlier this year, researchers announced that they had captured an intriguing sonar image: a grainy object shaped roughly like a plane resting 16,400 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. The site was located about 100 miles from Howland Island, which was Amelia Earhart’s intended destination when her plane vanished in the summer of 1937.

Her disappearance is one of the most enduring mysteries in aviation history, and the researchers hoped they had solved it. But they knew they would need more information before drawing definitive conclusions.

On November 6, the exploration company Deep Sea Vision announced in an Instagram post that it had bad news: The mysterious object was a rock formation that just so happened to be shaped like Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra aircraft.

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“Talk about the cruelest formation ever created by nature,” Deep Sea Vision CEO Tony Romeo, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, tells CNN’s Taylor Nicioli. “It’s almost like somebody did set those rocks out in this nice little pattern of her plane, just to mess with somebody out there looking for her.”

Romeo and two of his brothers are also pilots, and they were hopeful about their chances, as he told the Wall Street Journal’s Nidhi Subbaraman in January. After all, they had always suspected that the mystery would be solved by pilots, rather than mariners. Several years ago, Romeo sold his real estate interests to fund the $11 million search.

Based on the facts of Earhart’s final voyage, the company was searching in the right place, as Dorothy Cochrane, an aeronautics curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, tells Smithsonian magazine. Today, most experts think that Earhart ran out of fuel near Howland Island.

That was the conclusion that Elgen Long, an American aviator and researcher, and his wife, Marie, came to after decades of exhaustive research, which they published in their 1999 book Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved. In recent years, exploration companies like Deep Sea Vision and Nauticos—which has staged three unsuccessful searches—have been building on their work.

“With each expedition, they compress the search area,” says Cochrane. “I remain hopeful that the Electra will be found.”

At the time of her disappearance, Earhart was a household name around the world. She had risen to fame after becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger in 1928. Four years later, she became the first woman (and second person) to make the same voyage as a solo pilot.

In June 1937, Earhart hoped to break a new barrier: becoming the first woman to fly around the world. After setting out from Florida, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, traveled for more than 20,000 miles, making stops in South America, Africa, India and New Guinea. The next leg of the journey was crossing the Pacific.

The duo planned to stop on Howland Island, a 13,200-foot-long strip of land in the middle of the ocean, where they would refuel. After taking off on July 2, the plane and its two passengers were never seen again.

The official search lasted for more than two weeks but proved fruitless. In the eight decades since, interested onlookers have felt compelled to keep looking. As Romeo told the Wall Street Journal, working on the mystery was “maybe the most exciting thing I’ll ever do in my life.”

Late last year, Romeo set out with his 16-person crew from Deep Sea Vision. The team used millions of dollars of advanced equipment—sonar technology attached to an autonomous underwater vehicle—to scan 5,200 square miles of the ocean floor.

A few months later, the researchers were reviewing sonar images when they noticed the plane-shaped object. Their discovery made headlines around the world. While many experts were intrigued by the news, they also urged caution.

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“It really requires further research,” Cochrane told Smithsonian magazine’s Sarah Kuta at the time. “Finding something that’s really worth investigating further is step one. Verifying it’s the actual craft is step two.”

The fuzzy sonar images had been taken from about 1,640 feet away. A few weeks ago, the team returned to the site and positioned their underwater vehicle directly above the area. After a 24-hour-long wait, the results were in: A high-resolution image showed nothing more than an “unfortunate rock formation,” as Romeo tells the Wall Street Journal.

“I’m super disappointed out here, but you know, I guess that’s life,” he adds.

Romeo isn’t giving up; in the recent Instagram post, Deep Sea Vision promised that it’s continuing to search. So is Nauticos, which recently completed an analysis of potential search areas using radio data, per CNN. David Jourdan, the company’s co-founder and president, thinks the remaining areas could potentially be investigated in one more mission.

Meanwhile, without new evidence, some onlookers have formed their own versions of the story. For many years, conspiracy theories about Earhart’s disappearance—that she was a spy, that she adopted a new identity—proliferated. Cochrane hopes that the plane will be found, finally putting some of these notions to rest.

“Besides solving one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century,” she says, “the discovery would end speculation and return focus to Amelia Earhart’s enduring contributions to aviation and her impact in women’s and American history.”

Ellen Wexler | | READ MORE

Ellen Wexler is Smithsonian magazine’s assistant digital editor, humanities.