Amelia Earhart mystery could finally be solved after 90 years as experts investigate ocean object

Researchers believe they have a chance to bring ‘closure’ to the decades-old mystery of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

Aviation pioneer Earhart set numerous records across her lifetime, including becoming the first female aviator to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean.

In summer of 1937, Earhart, then 39, was embarking on another record-breaking attempt as the first female pilot to circumnavigate the world in her Lockheed Electra 10e.

However, on 2 July 1937, tragedy struck as she and her navigator Fred Noonan suddenly lost contact with air traffic control somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

Neither Earhart nor Noonan have been heard from since and the plane they were flying in has never been recovered.

Now, almost 90 years on, researchers from Purdue University have set off a new expedition - dubbed the Taraia Object expedition - to search the ocean floor and, hopefully, find the remains of the missing aircraft.

Amelia Earhart vanished without a trace in July 1937 (Purdue University)

The university has joined forces with the Archaeological Legacy Institute and is gearing up to send out a 17-person crew out to the remote island of Nikumaroro, in the Pacific nation of Kiribati.

In an update shared this week, the team confirmed that the crew had safely arrived at Tarawa, Kiribati, and will be preparing to head off on a six-day voyage via boat to Nikumaroro, which is around halfway between Australia and Hawaii.

Once they've arrived, the team plans to begin searching beneath the island’s lagoon, where they believe the remains of the missing Electra 10e could have ended up.

Expedition member and Purdue alumna Sirisha Bandla said the new exploration could bring closure to the mystery at last.

“Even today, given its sheer vastness, there’s something significant to flying over the Pacific Ocean,” she said.

“As we finally arrived at our point of departure here in Tarawa, it struck home that we’d flown over a majority of the portion that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were attempting to traverse when they were lost. Now we hope to have a chance to bring closure to their story.”

The team has previously said it has ‘very, very strong’ evidence that the fallen plane is in the lagoon.

“We gathered up many more satellite images, did historical research, found other imagery that relates to it,” executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute Pettrigrew told CBS.

“We’re going to go look and identify it and if we’re right, we’ll in fact identify the lost Electra. We could be wrong but I think the evidence is very, very strong that this is, in fact what it is.”

And after being missing for nine decades, the crew understands just how significant a find it would be.

“Finding Amelia Earhart’s Electra aircraft would be the discovery of a lifetime,” Pettigrew said in a statement.

“Other evidence already collected by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery establishes an extremely persuasive, multifaceted case that the final destination for Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, was on Nikumaroro.

“Confirming the plane wreckage there would be the smoking-gun proof.”

What is the Taraia Object?

The team is going to take a closer look at the Taraia Object (Purdue University)

The team are heading out to take a closer look at a visual anomaly which appears in the lagoon and has been coined the ‘Taraia Object’.

The shape was first spotted using satellite imagery in 2020, but experts say that the object can actually be seen in photos taken as far back as 1938.

Of course, this points to it showing up not too long after Earhart’s disappearance.

Alongside this, the mysterious shape is also said to resemble an aircraft fuselage and tail.

Photos and videos will be taken first, before the longer process of underwater excavation begins, with the object set to be brought to the surface to come to conclusions.