A new image could provide a crucial clue in the decades-long hunt for answers about the fate of famed U.S. aviator Amelia Earhart, nearly 90 years after she disappeared.
Former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer and pilot, Tony Romeo, captured a sonar image of an aircraft-shaped object resting on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean last month, he told The Wall Street Journal.
Romeo believes the image to show the remains of the Lockheed 10-E Electra piloted by Earhart when she vanished without a trace. “This is maybe the most exciting thing I’ll ever do in my life,” he told the outlet, adding: “I feel like a 10-year-old going on a treasure hunt.”
The location glimpsed in the sonar image could be accurate, Dorothy Cochrane, from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, told the WSJ.
“I’m not saying we definitely found her,” Romeo added to South Carolina-based outlet The Post and Courier. The image could show a collection of rocks more than 16,500 feet under the surface, forming the shape of an aircraft, he said.
One of the most well-known aviators of all time, Earhart collected a string of achievements before attempting to become the first woman to fly around the globe. Setting off in June 1937, she disappeared a month later near Howland Island, southwest of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean, along with her navigator, Fred Noonan.
Romeo will lead another expedition later in 2024 to scour for additional evidence, such as the tail number on the missing plane, he told the newspaper.
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She was last spotted in Papua New Guinea, and was declared dead in early January 1939. Her unsolved disappearance has spurred decades of investigations, none of which have succeeded in figuring out exactly what happened to the woman labelled “easily the world’s No. 1 airwoman” by Time magazine.
“It was one of the great mysteries of the 20th century and still now into the 21st century,” Cochrane told the WSJ. “We’re all hopeful that the mystery will be solved.”
The theories, nurtured by nearly 90 years without answers, are wide-ranging. One suggests Earhart ran out of fuel, careening into the Pacific Ocean. Others claim she may have been captured by Japanese forces, or that Earhart and Noonan managed to safely land on a remote island. Another argued Earhart was a spy, who then assumed a new identity.
“The world was following her. So[…]naturally everyone wants to know what happens,” Cochrane told CNN in 2017.
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