Purdue researchers hope to finally solve Earhart mystery

Purdue University announced it is sponsoring a mission to locate Amelia Earhart’s lost aircraft.

The Purdue Research Foundation and the Archaeological Legacy Institute will join forces to travel to Nikumaroro Island in the south Pacific in November 2025. Earhart and her navigator are speculated to have been marooned on the island after their plane ran out of fuel.

The announcement came on the 88th anniversary of Earhart’s disappearance.

“What we have here is maybe the greatest opportunity ever to finally close the case,” said Richard Pettigrew, ALI’s executive director, in a news release. “With such a great amount of very strong evidence, we feel we have no choice but to move forward and hopefully return with proof.”

Nikumaroro is a small island in the Pacific Ocean about halfway between Australia and Hawaii. Previously, it was believed Earhart’s plane crashed into the ocean, but researchers said there is a “vast amount of circumstantial evidence” suggesting she landed on Nikumaroro after her disappearance in July 1937, including satellite imagery, radio transmissions and artifacts recovered from the island.

Earhart was hired as a visiting aeronautical engineering faculty member and women’s career counselor at Purdue in 1935. The university then established the Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research, which sponsored her mission to fly around the world and funded her Lockheed Electra 10E airplane.

“About nine decades ago, Amelia Earhart was recruited to Purdue, and the university president later worked with her to prepare an aircraft for her historic flight around the world,” said Purdue President Mung Chiang. “Today, as a team of experts try again to locate the plane, the Boilermaker spirit of exploration lives on.”

While previous expeditions to Nikumaroro have come up empty, researchers believe they have uncovered new evidence to help them find the aircraft. In 2020, satellite imagery identified what is now known as the Taraia Object, a “visual anomaly” that is believed to be the remains of the Electra. Aerial images going back to 1938 appear to confirm the object has been in the same place in the lagoon off the island since shortly after Earhart’s disappearance.

If researchers identify the Taraia Object as remnants of the Electra, PRF and ALI said they will return to the island in 2026 for a larger excavation effort.

“Based on the evidence, we agree with ALI that this expedition offers the best chance not only to solve perhaps the greatest mystery of the 20th century, but also to fulfill Amelia’s wishes and bring the Electra home,” said Steven Schultz, senior vice president and general counsel of Purdue University.