A Mysterious Image Was Supposed to Be Amelia Earhart’s Plane. Searchers Found Only an Illusion.

Early in 2024, ocean exploration company Deep Sea Vision claimed to have located what could be Amelia Earhart's lost plane.

New research into the site, however, showed that the team had simply discovered a rock formation.

The response from the company leader? "I guess that's life."

South Carolina-based ocean exploration company Deep Sea Vision made plenty of waves in January, announcing with all sorts of certainty that they had located Amelia Earhart 's lost and fabled Lockheed 10-E Electra airplane deep in the Pacific Ocean.

But after closer examination, Deep Sea Vision has admitted that it did not, in fact, find the legendary plane lost for 86 years. Instead, they had found... a rock formation.

"I'm super disappointed out here, but you know, I guess that's life," Tony Romeo, leader of the Deep Sea Vision search, told The Wall Street Journal.

The initial excitement stemmed from results produced by an unmanned underwater drone scanning more than 5,200 square miles of the floor of the Pacific Ocean in search of the famous plane. Operated by Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, the plane hasn't been seen since—but not for a lack of searching.

"You'd be hard-pressed to convince me that this is not an airplane and not Amelia's plane," Romeo told NPR in January. He led the 16-member team that used the advanced Kongsberg Discovery HUGIN 6000 unmanned underwater drone to meticulously search the ocean west of Earhart's anticipated landing site over the course of 90 days.

Each sonar dive spanned nearly 48 hours, and the team amassed several terabytes of data. One image in particular piqued Romeo's fascination with the search, and at the time, he believed that the image revealed "contours that mirror the unique dual tails and scale" of Earhart's plane.

Upon a more recent closer examination, however, Deep Sea Vision was able to get high-resolution photographs and new sonar images of this mystery object that was supposedly a dead-ringer for the Lockheed 10-E Electra. Romeo said the object was instead an "unfortunate rock formation" that was shaped like a plane, and declined to share the new photos with the Wall Street Journal.

While Romeo may be surprised by yet another dead end in the fascinating search, he is in the minority. So far, every search for Earhart, Noonan, or the plane has turned up virtually zero evidence. And while plenty of folks remain hopeful that each new wave of excitement will yield fruitful data, the wait-and-see mentality has taken hold for most experts.

"If they had found it, I would have been very surprised," Andrew Pietruszka, Scripps Institution of Oceanography underwater archaeologist, told the Wall Street Journal. "It's very hard to find things on the sea floor even with all the modern technology that we have."

While the original grainy image didn't impress many sonar experts, it was enough to send Romeo on his confirmation search—especially as he latched onto the fact that the discovery's location coincided with the Date Line Theory of the plane's disappearance.

This theory—crafted by Liz Smith, a former NASA staffer and hobbyist pilot—posits that after a 17-hour flight, Noonan failed to account for crossing the International Date Line. This would have required adjusting the date from July 3 back to July 2, leading to a 60-mile navigational mistake and causing himself and Earhart to miss Howland Island. This oversight would have resulted in Earhart's plane crashing into the ocean. Until Deep Sea Vision took on the hunt, the region and scenario outlined by Smith's theory had remained unexplored.

"We always felt that [Earhart] would have made every attempt to land the aircraft gently on the water, and the aircraft signature that we see in the sonar image suggests that may be the case," Romeo said in a statement at the time. "We plan to bring closure to a great American story."

That closure will have to wait.

How Did Amelia Earhart Disappear? As Biography highlights, the mysterious final flight of Amelia Earhart first captured the world's imagination in 1937. Earhart and Noonan were six weeks and 20,000 miles into their global journey when they failed to make their scheduled landing at Howland Island, located approximately 1,700 miles southwest of Honolulu.

The 2.5-square-mile island proved difficult for Earhart's plane to find amidst the vast ocean. There's no concrete evidence that points to why the plane never made it to the island, or where it went instead. Now, that absence of definitive proof has given rise to a multitude of theories about the fate of Earhart, Noonan, and their plane.

The most widely accepted theory suggests that Earhart and Noonan simply crashed into the ocean and sank after running out of fuel. Another credible theory posits that the duo landed on a coral reef around Gardner Island (now called Nikumaroro Island), located 350 nautical miles southeast of Howland. Supporting this theory are distress radio signals traced to that island shortly after the disappearance. Yet another chilling, albeit less plausible, theory is that Earhart met her end at the claws of the island's predatory giant crabs .

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery also contends that a 2009 underwater photo captures Earhart's plane's engine cowling lying in the ocean. However, without precise information on the photo's location, pinpointing and verifying this claim proves challenging.

The enduring fascination with Amelia Earhart's disappearance is as much about the unsolved end to her historic journey as it is about her pioneering spirit. Earhart wasn't just a pilot—she represented adventure , courage, and all the incredible things that women could achieve in the field of aviation.

Who Was Amelia Earhart? Amelia Earhart , a Kansas native, began her ascent to fame in 1922 when she piloted her bright yellow Kinner Airster biplane—endearingly called "The Canary"—to a then-record height of 14,000 feet for female aviators. By 1923, Earhart had earned her pilot's license, becoming the 16th woman to do so from the Federation Aeronautique. Financial struggles temporarily forced her out of flying, she returned to aviation in 1927.

Residing in Massachusetts at the time, Earhart jumped at the opportunity to be the first woman to partake in a transatlantic flight. Although just a passenger on the 1928 adventure, led by pilot Wilmer "Bill" Stultz, her subsequent book chronicling the experience catapulted her into the spotlight .

Following her initial fame, Earhart embarked on her own pioneering flights. In 1932, she made history as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic—navigating a nearly 15-hour journey from Newfoundland to Northern Ireland. She continued to add a series of impressive flights to her global résumé, all culminating in what was to be her most monumental flight of all : an ambitious bid to be the first person of any gender to circumnavigate the globe along the equator.

After an initial mishap that resulted in damage to her Lockheed on the Oakland to Hawaii leg, the aircraft required shipping back to California for repairs. This setback forced a change in plans due to evolving weather patterns and global winds, leading to a revised route starting eastward from Oakland. This placed the Pacific Ocean at the end of the journey rather than at the beginning.

Earhart and Noonan then embarked on a route that took them through Miami, across Central and South America, over the Atlantic to Africa, and over the Indian Ocean. they eventually reached New Guinea after flying 22,000 out of the approximately 29,000 miles of their intended route.

The 2,556-mile flight to Howland Island was always going to be tricky. A flat sliver of land roughly 6,500 feet long, 1,600 feet wide, and no more than 20 feet above the ocean waves, the island often looked like a cloud. With a variety of contingency plans—including help from the U.S. Coast Guard vessel Itasca, stationed off Howland Island—Earhart and Noonan were confident.

But their plan wasn't foolproof. They had swapped out essential radio equipment to accommodate additional fuel, and the unavailability of high-octane fuel in particular further limited the plane's range. Plus, overcast skies hindered reliable celestial navigation, and Earhart and Noonan were relying on outdated maps that incorrectly placed Howland Island. It's also possible that the plane's radio antenna sustained damage.

Due to a misunderstanding between Earhart and the Itasca crew, the two never connected in real time. When it became clear that Earhart was unreachable, an extensive search operation commenced. Despite employing 66 aircraft and nine ships in a search that cost $4 million, they found virtually nothing .

Most leading aviation and navigation experts believe that the plane probably crashed due to fuel depletion while seeking a landing spot, leading to Earhart and Noonan's demise at sea—a consequence attributed to "poor planning and even poorer execution."

But we still don't know anything for certain, and Earhart's last adventure—despite brief hope to the contrary—remains unresolved.

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