A sonar image thought to show the remains of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra, lost during her 1937 round-the-world flight, has been confirmed to be nothing more than a natural rock formation.
South Carolina-based Deep Sea Vision (DSV), which captured the blurry image in January 2023 using an unmanned submersible, announced the disappointing update this month on Instagram.
“After 11 months, the waiting has ended, and unfortunately, our target was not Amelia’s Electra 10E just a natural rock formation,” DSV stated. Despite the setback, the company emphasized that the search continues.
The Search Zone: Remote Pacific Waters
The sonar image was taken during an extensive search near Howland Island, the remote Pacific atoll that was Earhart’s planned refueling stop. The area has long been the focal point of theories suggesting that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, ran out of fuel and ditched their aircraft into the ocean.
Aviation’s Greatest Mystery
Amelia Earhart, then 39, was attempting to become the first woman to fly around the world when she disappeared on July 2, 1937, along with Noonan, 44. The pair had taken off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on a grueling 2,500-mile flight to Howland Island.
Earhart had already cemented her place in history five years earlier, in 1932, as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Her disappearance, however, remains one of aviation’s most captivating mysteries, inspiring countless books, documentaries, and theories ranging from crash-and-sink scenarios to survival on a distant island.
The discovery that the sonar target was a rock formation adds another layer of frustration to decades of fruitless searches. The mystery of what happened to Earhart, her navigator, and the twin-engine Lockheed Electra remains unsolved.
DSV expressed its commitment to pursuing the search: “The plot thickens, with still no evidence of her disappearance ever found.”
For now, the Pacific keeps its secrets, holding tight to one of the 20th century’s most enduring enigmas.
