The figure spotted at the bottom of the Pacific is not the remains of Amelia Earhart’s lost plane

Amelia Earhart is, without a doubt, one of the most famous aviators in the world. She was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, doing so in 1932.

In 1937, Earhart and her co-pilot and navigator Frederick Noonan were attempting to circumnavigate the world; They crashed in the Pacific Ocean and neither their bodies nor their plane were found.

Let’s move on to last January. A company from California, USA, called Deep Sea Vision (DSV) declared to the world that it had possibly found Earhart’s aircraft. Now, it turns out that the sonar profile spotted by a submersible drone 5,000 meters deep in the Pacific would not really be that of Amelia Earhart’s missing plane.

Earhart’s Big (Failed) Adventure

It was May 20, 1937 when Amelia Earhart, even then famous for having been the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean alonebegan his last journey. Her goal was, even more ambitious than the previous one: to make history again as the first woman to fly around the world in a plane. To achieve his wish, he set out in his twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra along with navigator Fred Noonan, but the mission was never completed. The two airmen were declared missing after taking off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on July 2, 1937, without ever reaching the next stage of their journey, Howland Island, 4,000 kilometers away. To date, no trace of the bodies or the plane has been found.

The possible (failed) discovery

Earhart and Noonan’s fate remains a big mysteryalthough several hypotheses have been formulated about what could have happened. Following one of the most accepted, Noonan may have forgotten to turn the calendar back one day while flying over the international date line, thus making a navigation error.

Deep Sea Vision had focused its search on a wide area of ​​the Pacific west of Howland. The unmanned submersible sent to explore had thus captured, thanks to a side-scan sonar, an image whose contours seemed to coincide with those of Earhart’s historic plane.

Not everything that it seems is

Eleven months after that announcement, however, the Deep Sea Vision company has been forced to rectify what it previously stated: the checks do not confirm the presence of the aircraft, and that profile appears to be only a specific rock formation. So the search continues.

Article originally published in WIRED Italy. Adapted by Mauricio Serfatty Godoy.