A United States-based team of marine archaeologists has set sail for a tiny island in the far western Pacific to examine the latest tantalising clue to one of the 20th century’s great unsolved mysteries: the 1937 disappearance of famed aviator Amelia Earhart. Backed by Purdue University, the group aims to learn whether a submerged object detected by satellite imagery in the island’s lagoon six years ago is the wreckage of Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10-E airplane.

The 17-person team is expected to arrive on Tuesday, October 13, at Nikumaroro, an uninhabited speck of land in the remote Phoenix Islands, part of the island nation of Kiribati. The mission is jointly run by Purdue and the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI), a non-profit organisation. If the object proves to be the Electra, it would support the hypothesis that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, crash-landed on or near the coral-ringed atoll and perished as castaways, hundreds of miles from their intended refuelling stop at Howland Island.

The Taraia Object

The expedition is built around the “Taraia Object” – a visual anomaly in the lagoon that expedition leader Richard Pettigrew, ALI’s executive director, has described as clearly human-made rather than natural. He said its appearance and location make it very possible, even likely, that it is wreckage from the Electra flown there by Earhart and Noonan. The team builds on the work of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has led or been associated with 14 expeditions to the atoll over three decades without a definitive find, though they uncovered suggestive evidence including signs of a castaway’s campsite and 1930s-era artefacts.

A long wait, high stakes

Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937, while attempting to circumnavigate the globe; the search now comes 89 years later. The expedition was first announced in 2025 but postponed while approvals were sought from Kiribati’s government, which has since given its cabinet approval. The mission was formally announced on July 24, 2026 – Earhart’s 129th birthday – by Purdue’s Kelly Hiller on a livestream, with the Purdue Research Foundation partnering ALI. Purdue general counsel Steve Schultz conducted advance work in Fiji last week. “Finding Amelia Earhart’s Electra aircraft would be the discovery of a lifetime,” Pettigrew said in mission materials. The mission has its sceptics, chief among them rival Earhart explorer Ric Gillespie, co-founder of TIGHAR and author of a 2024 book on the tragedy, who disputes the group’s reading of the evidence.