Key takeaways:
• Archaeological Legacy Institute is leading a 2026 expedition to Nikumaroro Island to search for Amelia Earhart's lost plane.
• Researchers believe the Taraia Object, a mysterious anomaly discovered in the island’s lagoon in 2020, could be part of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra, supported by radio bearings, bone analysis, and historical artifacts from the 1930s.
• The search effort faces significant skepticism from aviation historians who question whether the evidence supports the Nikumaroro theory.
This story is a collaboration with Popular Mechanics.
Nearly nine decades after Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific Ocean, Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI) is leading a new effort to find her lost plane and solve aviation’s greatest mystery, inviting Purdue University—which helped fund her historic attempt to fly around the world—to join in the effort. The target is Nikumaroro, a remote Pacific island tied to a long-running theory that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan did not crash straight into the sea on July 2, 1937, but reached the reef and died there after being stranded.
The original plan called for a field team from ALI and the Purdue Research Foundation to head to Nikumaroro in November 2025 to examine the Taraia Object, a long-debated anomaly in the island’s lagoon. Organizers believe it could be part of the Lockheed Electra 10E once piloted by Earhart.
However, on October 27, 2025, Purdue announced that the expedition had been pushed into 2026 while organizers worked through additional clearance stages with the government of Kiribati. Waiting much longer, Purdue said, would have put the team up against the South Pacific cyclone season.
Now, ALI says the team will depart from Majuro in the Marshall Islands on July 28, spend five days at Nikumaroro, return to Majuro by August 14, and travel home on August 15. If the object is identified as Earhart’s Electra, ALI says another field season would follow in 2027, with possible recovery in 2027 or 2028.
When the expedition was announced, Richard Pettigrew, ALI’s executive director, made the case in unusually confident terms. “With such a great amount of very strong evidence, we feel we have no choice but to move forward and hopefully return with proof,” he said in a statement. “I look forward to collaborating with Purdue Research Foundation in writing the final chapter in Amelia Earhart’s remarkable life story.”
This latest effort joins a long list of attempts to finally solve the Earhart mystery. According to Pettigrew, the Taraia Object hypothesis draws on a mix of documentary records, photographs, satellite imagery, physical evidence, and eyewitness accounts.
Several pieces of evidence are driving the search. They include:
- Radio bearings recorded from transmissions at the time by the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Coast Guard, and Pan American World Airways, which organizers say converge on Nikumaroro
- A 2017 analysis of human bones discovered on the island in 1940, which determined Earhart’s bone lengths were more similar to the discovered bones than 99 percent of individuals
- Artifacts including a women’s shoe, a compact case, a freckle cream jar, and a medicine vial, all dating to the 1930s
- A photographic anomaly—called the Bevington Object—captured three months after the plane’s disappearance that has been interpreted as resembling Electra landing gear on the Nikumaroro reef
- The Taraia Object itself, located in 2020, which organizers say has been in the same place in the lagoon since 1938
The theory holds that Earhart did not disappear into open ocean immediately after missing Howland Island. Instead, she and Noonan may have reached the reef at Nikumaroro, then died after being stranded there.
For now, no recovered wreckage has been identified as Earhart’s plane, and the Taraia Object remains an object of interest rather than evidence that has been inspected and confirmed on site.
For now, no recovered wreckage has been identified as Earhart’s plane, and the Taraia Object remains an object of interest rather than evidence that has been inspected and confirmed on site.
Amelia Earhart’s Connection to Purdue University
Edward Elliott, who was Purdue’s president from 1922 to 1945, brought Amelia Earhart to campus as a career counselor for women, and had her live in the women’s residence hall for part of each semester. During her time at Purdue, Earhart also advised the aeronautical engineering department and used the university’s new airport, which was the only one of its kind at a U.S. college or university at the time.
“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,” Mung Chiang, Purdue’s current president, said in a statement. “Today, as a team of experts try again to locate the plane, the Boilermaker spirit of exploration lives on.”
Purdue played a pivotal role in helping Earhart attempt to circumnavigate the globe with navigator Fred Noonan. The university helped fund her Lockheed Electra 10E through the Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research, with Purdue trustee David Ross leading the effort alongside major contributors like J.K. Lilly, Vincent Bendix, Western Electric, and the Goodrich and Goodyear companies.
As a thank you for the support, Earhart planned to donate the plane to Purdue upon her return, hoping it would help further scientific research in aeronautics.
Earhart’s connection to Purdue has continued long after her disappearance. In August 2025, the roughly 10,000-square-foot Amelia Earhart Terminal opened at Purdue University Airport, alongside resumed United Express service operated by SkyWest.
“Both Earhart and her husband and manager, George Putnam, expressed their intention to return the Electra to Purdue after her historic flight,” Steven Schulz, senior vice president and general counsel of Purdue University, said in the original expedition announcement. “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.”
Strong Skepticism
Finding Earhart’s plane won’t be easy, especially on an island that has already drawn searchers for decades. Ric Gillespie, executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has traveled for a dozen on-site searches for over three decades.
While he agrees Nikumaroro is likely where Earhart landed before passing, he told NBC that he’s come up empty plenty of times before. “We’ve looked there in that spot, and there’s nothing there,” he said about the Purdue effort. “I understand the desire to find a piece of Amelia Earhart’s airplane. God knows we’ve tried. But the data, the facts, do not support the hypothesis. It’s as simple as that.”
Newsweek also reported that Gillespie disputed the object’s match to the Electra, while Dorothy Cochrane of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum said the object needed more photographing before stronger claims could be made.
Pettigrew, who has worked on searching for Earhart’s plane for years, said objects continually shift in and out of sand coverage. Gillespie said a plane wouldn’t get covered by sand, but would have gotten buried with coral.
There has also been a separate Earhart development outside the lagoon search. After a September 26, 2025 directive to declassify Earhart-related government records, the National Archives created a dedicated release page and posted four tranches of files between November 2025 and January 2026, totaling 10,155 pages. While those records may feed the larger Earhart debate, they don’t identify the Taraia Object or settle the Nikumaroro claim.
The History of Amelia Earhart
The mysterious final flight of Amelia Earhart captured the world’s imagination in 1937, just as it continues to today. Earhart and Noonan were six weeks and 20,000 miles into their global journey when they failed to make their scheduled landing at Howland Island, located approximately 1,700 miles southwest of Honolulu.
The 2.5-square-mile island proved difficult for Earhart’s plane to find amidst the vast ocean. There’s no concrete evidence that points to why the plane never made it to the island, or where it went instead.
The absence of definitive proof has given rise to a multitude of theories about the fate of Earhart, Noonan, and their plane.
The most widely accepted theory suggests that Earhart and Noonan simply crashed into the ocean and sank after running out of fuel. Another credible theory posits that the duo landed on the in-question coral reef around Gardner Island, now called Nikumaroro Island, located 350 nautical miles southeast of Howland.
Earhart, a Kansas native, began her ascent to fame in 1922 when she piloted her bright yellow Kinner Airster biplane, “The Canary,” to a then-record height of 14,000 feet for female aviators. By 1923, Earhart had earned her pilot’s license, becoming the 16th woman to do so from the Federation Aeronautique. While financial struggles forced her out of flying, she returned to aviation in 1927.
Then residing in Massachusetts, Earhart jumped at the opportunity to be the first woman to partake in a transatlantic flight. Although just a passenger on the 1928 adventure led by pilot Wilmer “Bill” Stultz, her subsequent book chronicling the experience catapulted her into the spotlight.
Following her initial fame, Earhart embarked on her own pioneering flights. In 1932, she made history as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, navigating a nearly 15-hour journey from Newfoundland to Northern Ireland.
She continued to add a series of impressive flights to her global résumé, all culminating in what was to be her most monumental flight of all: an ambitious bid to be the first person, period, to circumnavigate the globe along the equator.
Now, almost 100 years after Earhart first took to the skies, the search to solve the mystery of her final flight on July 2, 1937, isn’t just about locating a lost aircraft. It’s about honoring a legacy that shaped modern aviation.
Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.
