Oregon archeologist to embark on expedition to find Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane

An Oregon-based archeologist is the latest scientist attempting to find Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane and solve the baffling 88-year mystery surrounding her and flight navigator Fred Noonan’s disappearances.

Dr. Richard Pettigrew, executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute in Eugene, has assembled a team that will launch an expedition this summer to the remote island of Nikumaroro in the western Pacific Ocean to find Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra. 

After years of acquiring and analyzing satellite, video and drone imagery, Pettigrew believes a metallic and reflective visual anomaly, called the Taraia Object, on the north shore of the Nikumaroro lagoon alongside the Taraia Peninsula is the main body and tail of the missing aircraft.

“I’m well aware of the frustrating history of the decades-long search for Earhart and Noonan,” said Pettigrew, who participated in previous expeditions to Nikumaroro, where some believe Earhart crash landed and died.

“As a professional archaeologist, I’m quite cautious when I consider evidence for or against any important hypothesis such as this.”

The pioneering female aviator, a household name at the time, disappeared with Noonan, her flight navigator, on what was to be a record-setting trip around the world in 1937.

The pair set off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, with plans to refuel on Howland Island before continuing their journey to Honolulu and their final destination of Oakland, Calif, but faced a strong headwind in Lae when Earhart’s radio transmissions eventually went silent. 

The US Navy and Coast Guard conducted a 16-day search for the missing duo without success, and Earhart was officially declared dead on Jan. 5, 1939. 

Despite many attempts and millions of dollars spent over nine decades, neither Earhart’s remains nor the wreckage of her plane have ever been located – with the latest million-dollar expedition by Tony Romeo and his Deep Sea Vision team debunked in November.

Romero, a South Carolina-based deep-sea explorer, captured a sonar image of an aircraft-shaped object he believed was Earhart’s plane in the Pacific Ocean, which was later confirmed to be a rock formation. 

One well-publicized theory about her disappearance is that Earhart died a castaway after landing her plane on the remote coral atoll in the western Pacific Ocean – a hypothesis Pettigrew hopes to disprove with his “strong and multifaceted” evidence. 

Pettigrew theorizes Earhart landed on the Nikumororo northwestern reef flat – with her aircraft sinking alongside the Taraia Peninsula, where it eventually became embedded in and covered by water-deposited sediment. 

His team didn’t offer an explanation about Earhart and Noonan’s deaths. 

Pettigrew said the suspected aircraft was effectively invisible until storm currents uncovered it in 2015 – and has since grown progressively less defined and unrecognizable over the years but remains in very shallow water. 

The archaeologist cited subsequent research that identified what could be the same object near the same location in aerial photos shot by the New Zealand military in 1938.  

“After following TIGHAR’s Nikumaroro research for decades and then going there with them in 2017, I developed great respect for the Nikumaroro Hypothesis, even in the absence of absolute confirmation in the form of DNA or clear evidence of the missing Electra,” Pettigrew added. 

“Now, by inspecting the Taraia Object, we may finally get that absolute confirmation. Someone has to go there and look, which is exactly what we plan to do once we have the necessary financial backing.”

His archaeological team hopes to travel to the island in August.