A private ocean exploration company claims to have made a compelling discovery regarding one of the most enduring mysteries from the past century. After a 90-day Pacific Ocean expedition late last year, Deep Sea Vision spotted a plane-shaped object thought to belong to Amelia Earhart, the aviator who famously went missing on July 2, 1937. Newly released sonar images of the object have sparked controversy about what went wrong that day and where Earhart's aircraft would have landed.
The expedition began in September 2023 and ended in December. Using an unmanned drone called the HUGIN 6000—reportedly the world’s most advanced autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) commercially available—Deep Sea Vision scoured 5,200 square miles of the Pacific Ocean floor. Just before the company’s mission was set to end, the HUGIN 6000 located a potential bombshell roughly 100 miles off the coast of Howland Island, where Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were supposed to refuel.
Captured using the HUGIN 6000’s synthetic aperture sonar instrument, the below image appears to depict the rough outline of an airplane sitting 16,000 feet under the ocean's surface. Deep Sea Vision claims it’s Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra.
“Captured westward of Earhart's projected landing point, in a swath of the Pacific untouched by known wrecks, the image reveals contours that mirror the unique dual tails and scale of her storied aircraft,” Deep Sea Vision’s statement reads. The document goes on to explain that the discovery aligns with the “date line theory” of Earhart’s disappearance: If Earhart had forgotten to turn the calendar back one day as she flew over the International Date Line, her navigator would have made a westward celestial navigation error of 60 miles. The pair’s crash, therefore, would have placed them roughly where Deep Sea Vision found the potential plane.
Not everyone is ready to assume Deep Sea Vision’s claims are correct. Nauticos, a deep sea exploration company based in Maine, says some of the features in the above image are “inconsistent” with what it expects to see from Earhart’s Electra. “The size is not right, and it has swept wings—Amelia’s Electra had straight wings,” a representative for Nauticos told ExtremeTech in an email. “Most importantly, it’s not in a likely location…Amelia Earhart’s plane was within the radio range of the S5 signal recorded by the Coast Guard Cutter Itasca. That would put her plane within 80 nautical miles of the cutter while it was anchored a couple hundred yards off the west side of Howland Island.”
Deep Sea Vision founder Tony Romeo told NPR on Monday that his company will investigate the area where the HUGIN 6000’s images were taken later this year. Until a more thorough probe is performed, we won’t know whether Deep Sea Vision’s grand discovery is legitimate.
Earhart and her navigator might have gone missing nearly 87 years ago, but as this week’s hullabaloo indicates, the investigation into their disappearance is still very much alive. In 2019, Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who found the Titanic in 1985, kicked off a search for Earhart’s remains. He wanted to find out once and for all whether Earhart had crash-landed on Nikumaroro, a tiny island with a coral reef thought to have been exposed by a low tide when Earhart disappeared. (Nikumaroro is just one island at the center of countless Earhart hypotheses.) Less than two weeks later, Ballard’s expedition ended without definitive answers.
