Once again, a seemingly promising lead in the search for traces of missing aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart and her plane has fizzled out.
Hopes of solving the 87-year-old mystery were raised in January when Deep Sea Vision, a team of underwater archaeologists and robotics experts led by former Air Force intelligence officer Tony Romeo, said they captured a fuzzy sonar image that looked like an airplane.
Deep Sea Vision said the find was notable because the shape was detected about 100 miles from Howland Island, in an area of the Pacific Ocean where the team suspected Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, may have gone down during their attempt to fly around the globe in 1937.
“You’d be hard-pressed to convince me that’s anything but an aircraft, for one; and two, that it’s not Amelia’s aircraft,” Romeo said on NBC’s “Today” show when the discovery was announced.
Unfortunately for Romeo and his team, higher-resolution sonar imagery revealed that the shape was merely a natural rock formation lying more than 16,000 feet beneath the ocean surface. The new sonar view was captured this month by an autonomous underwater vehicle.
“Talk about the cruelest formation ever created by nature,” Romeo told CNN. “It’s almost like somebody did set those rocks in this nice little pattern of her plane, just to mess with somebody out there looking for her.”
This isn’t the first time hopes of solving the Amelia Earhart mystery have been dashed. The only thing that’s known for sure is that Earhart and Noonan went out of radio contact in July 1937 as their plane was heading from Papua New Guinea to Howland Island, their next destination in the round-the-world trip.
After a 16-day search, the pair was declared lost at sea. Investigators assumed that the plane ran out of fuel and plunged into the ocean. Ever since, experts and amateurs have been speculating about the fate of the fliers and searching for clues.
In recent years, the search has gone through a succession of ups and downs. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, also known as TIGHAR — has been looking for evidence to support a scenario in which Earhart and Noonan lost their way and ditched their plane near Nikumaroro Island, 400 miles southeast of Howland Island.
In 2018, a forensic anthropologist associated with TIGHAR reported that the measurements of bones found on the island in 1940 seem to be consistent with the estimated size of Earhart’s bones. But neither that analysis, nor other long-debated bits of evidence gathered by TIGHAR, have led historians to declare the case closed.
Another team of searchers, led by a marine exploration company called Nauticos, has been looking for clues in the waters around Howland Island for more than 20 years without solving the mystery.
Yet another hypothesis suggests that Earhart and Noonan were somehow captured by the Japanese during their journey. In 2017, some proponents of the hypothesis claimed that a picture dredged up from the vaults of the National Archives showed Earhart sitting on a dock in the Marshall Islands during Japanese occupation. But online sleuths pointed out that the same picture appears in a travel book published almost two years before Earhart’s disappearance.
In postings to Instagram and Facebook, Romeo and his teammates at Deep Sea Vision made clear that they weren’t giving up.
“As we speak DSV continues to search — now clearing almost 7,700 square miles … the plot thickens with still no evidence of her disappearance ever found,” Deep Sea Vision said.
