Explorers and investigators have been in search of Amelia Earhart's plane since its mysterious disappearance back in July 1937, after both she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, set off on a journey around the world. Her mission: to be the first woman to do so successfully.
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However, fate had other plans for both passengers of the Lockheed 10-E Electra plane. Amelia only had 7,000 more miles to travel before accomplishing her major feat as the first woman to traverse the globe by airplane, when the plane suddenly disappeared over the Pacific Ocean between New Guinea and Howland Island.
The plane and the bodies of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were never to be found. Until a discovery back in January through the use of sonar imagery, revealed the formation of an aircraft similar to Amelia's Electra plane, invoking excitement and hope for researchers who had been looking for her for nearly 90 years.
What had become one of the most exciting and well-documented research discoveries regarding Amelia Earhart's disappearance, has just been dashed as reported by CNN. Researchers and explorers have recently revealed that the image on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean seafloor is nothing other than rocks stacked on top of one another.
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High Hopes Lead to Disappointment as Sonar Imagery's Detection Reveals Rocks Rather Than Amelia Earhart's Plane
Nearly 11 months after sonar imagery revealed a 'plane-shape' on the floor bed of the Pacific Ocean, approximately 16,000 feet underwater, the ocean exploration company in charge of the search for Earhart's plane, Deep Sea Vision, expressed their profound disappointment when that discovery turned out to be a natural rock formation rather than Earhart's Electra aircraft.
"We'd gone 100 days without finding anything," Chief Executive of Deep Sea Vision, Tony Romeo told the paper. "We were kind of at each other's throats. And, you know, there it is. It pops up on the screen. And you know, you realize at that moment, we were the first ones to have seen Amelia's plane in something like 86 years. It was an incredible moment."
"Talk about the cruelest formation ever created by nature," he said. "It's almost like somebody did set those rocks out in this nice little pattern of her plane, just to mess with somebody out there looking for her."
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The Search Still Continues for Amelia Earhart and Her Missing Aircraft
Aerial photo of the coast of New Guinea with jungles and deforestation
Deep Sea Vision is not throwing in the towel yet. Even after their exciting discovery turned somber, they are still on a mission to locate Earhart and her missing airplane. So far, they have searched nearly 7,700 square miles of ocean floor in hopes of finally finding her.
A few theories have played out over the years regarding the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart and her plane, and what caused them to disappear.
The U.S. government and Smithsonian have expressed their theory: that Earhart's plane ran out of fuel, and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. But, due to search and rescue efforts failing to locate the plane or find the bodies, that theory has not held up.
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Another theory points to Earhart's plane 'vanishing' over the Bermuda Triangle off the Florida coast of the Atlantic Ocean, but that theory was quickly debunked due to Earhart's tracking data and her proximity to New Guinea, disappearing before she arrived there.
The other theory: Earhart's plane crashed approximately 1,000 miles away from Howland Island, nearer to the Marshall Islands, where she and Fred Noonan were captured by the Japanese. That theory was also dismissed by investigators.
Earhart and Noonan were spies for Japan. This is another outrageous theory proven to be inaccurate.
And, finally, a theory that played out in the books, "Amelia Earhart Lives" by Joe Klaas and "Amelia Earhart Survived" by Col. Rollin C. Reineck. In both books, speculation that Earhart survived World War II, returned to the United States, and chose to live under a new identity, under the name Irene Bolam, passing away peacefully in 1982.
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That theory was thrown out in a court of law after the actual Irene Bolam filed a lawsuit against the publishing agency for $1.5 million, indicating that she was not Earhart, and had proof she wasn't.
"Utter nonsense," Irene Bolam called the book in an interview with the Times before her passing. "A poorly documented hoax."