A team led by Purdue University has launched the latest Amelia Earhart lagoon object search, traveling to the remote Pacific island of Nikumaroro to examine a shape in a lagoon that researchers believe could be the wreckage of Earhart’s long-lost plane. The expedition, which began this week, is investigating what has become known as the Taraia Object, a visual anomaly that has appeared in satellite photos dating back to 1938, according to CBS News.
Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937, while attempting to become the first woman to fly around the world. She and navigator Fred Noonan had covered 22,000 miles in a Lockheed 10E Electra and had 7,000 miles left when they vanished during a leg from Lae, New Guinea, to tiny Howland Island, according to CNN.
What The Expedition Is Doing
The team combines researchers from Purdue University and the Archaeological Legacy Institute, an Oregon-based organization. Archaeologist Rick Pettigrew, who leads the effort and also founded the Archaeological Legacy Institute, said the expedition has one job on this trip.
“We have a singular focus, which is to examine the object and make that identification. That’s a critical piece of information upon which everything else depends,” Pettigrew said, according to CNN.
Steve Schultz, a senior vice president at Purdue University who is serving as a field assistant on the expedition, pointed to the university’s own ties to Earhart as part of the motivation. “We owe it to Amelia’s legacy at Purdue to follow the evidence,” Schultz said, according to CBS News. Earhart lectured at Purdue before her final flight, and some of her belongings are still on display in the university’s archives.
Why The Lagoon Theory Draws Attention
Nikumaroro sits roughly 400 miles southeast of Howland Island, the spot Earhart was trying to reach when she went missing. Pettigrew believes Earhart and Noonan landed on the island and camped there, surviving for some time afterward, according to CBS News. That idea lines up with the long-running castaway hypothesis, which has drawn multiple prior expeditions to Nikumaroro. CBS News reported that 1930s relics and human skeletal remains were found on the island over the years but were lost over the decades, meaning they are not available for the current team to re-examine directly.
Not everyone in the Earhart research community is convinced the Taraia Object has anything to do with her disappearance. Ric Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery and author of the 2024 book “One More Good Flight: The Amelia Earhart Tragedy,” told NBC News in 2025 that he does not think the object is related to the search. His organization has conducted its own expeditions to Nikumaroro based on the castaway theory.
The current search also follows a pattern of promising leads that did not pan out. In 2024, a separate expedition captured a sonar image that appeared to resemble a plane on the sea floor, but researchers later determined it was a rock formation.
What The Search Can And Cannot Settle
Pettigrew’s team has framed this trip narrowly: identify what the Taraia Object actually is. That alone would not resolve how Earhart and Noonan died or settle competing theories about their final days, since the island’s earlier relics and remains are no longer available for study. Dorothy Cochrane, an Earhart expert and retired curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, has studied the case extensively, though the sources do not detail her view of this specific expedition.
The scale of interest in finding an answer traces back to the original search effort. The U.S. government launched what CNN described as its largest-ever search for a lost aircraft between July 2 and July 18, 1937, after Earhart vanished. Planes flew over the uninhabited Howland Island during that search but spotted no sign of her or Noonan.
Why The Mystery Still Matters
Wendy Rover, a member of The Ninety-Nines, the international organization for women pilots that Earhart helped establish, said the pull of the unanswered question remains strong nearly nine decades later. “Amelia Earhart was out there. She was going through that exact same thing.
So yeah, what happened? What did happen? I would love to know,” Rover said, according to CBS News.
No timeline for completing the Taraia Object examination has been announced. The expedition’s immediate next step, as Pettigrew described it, is simply determining whether the shape in the lagoon is connected to Earhart’s plane at all before any broader conclusions can follow.
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