‘No conclusive evidence’ of Amelia Earhart’s missing plane found in South Pacific expedition

An expedition to find evidence of Amelia Earhart’s missing plane near a remote island in the South Pacific has come up empty, researchers said Sunday.

Researchers from the Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University embarked this month on the Taraia Object expedition in Nikumaroro, an uninhabited coral atoll in the Phoenix Islands belonging to the Republic of Kiribati.

The team sought to identify an anomaly first seen in satellite images in 2020. Experts have long suspected Nikumaroro as the landing site of Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, who disappeared in July 1937.

However, the expedition “found no conclusive evidence to confirm a hypothesis that wreckage” from Earhart’s plane was “in a lagoon on a remote atoll in the South Pacific,” the university said in a news release.

“We think it’s most likely that the object was a collection of debris that accumulated here,” Rick Pettigrew, ALI’s executive director, said in a video message.

The expedition determined that the anomaly was most “likely a collection of large trees deposited along the peninsula’s sandpit.” When the team arrived, much of the “debris had fragmented and washed away.” What was left was a Y-shaped segment that was just a small fraction of…

Original source: https://www.nbcnews.com/health