The Taraia Object team — Archaeological Legacy Institute, Purdue Research Foundation and Purdue University — announced Monday 19 October, local time, that it found no conclusive evidence that wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10-E lies in the lagoon at Nikumaroro, Kiribati. The 2020 satellite anomaly is, they say, a collection of large trees deposited on the Taraia Peninsula sandspit. It is not an aircraft.

By the time they reached the site, much of the debris had broken up and washed away. A Y-shaped fragment remained, a fraction of what the images showed. The shine, long taken for metal, is a carbonate veneer, hardened coral sand. Other items there have the same glossy crust. Purdue is plain: it is not a smoking gun.

They did recover artefacts, including a steel tube about 30 inches long, from the lagoon near the peninsula. Those will be studied. The premise: what enters through Tatiman Passage, on the west, can cross the lagoon and settle on Taraia, opposite. That is a transport hypothesis, not an Electra identification.

Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan vanished on 2 July 1937 after leaving Lae, Papua New Guinea, for Howland, some 400 miles north-west of Nikumaroro. Purdue funded the aircraft, the “Flying Laboratory”. The team left Tarawa on 6 October, five days at sea, seven near the atoll, four onshore. Weather stretched the mission.

Pettigrew, of ALI: the goal was to learn what the Taraia Object was, and they did. Steve Schultz, of Purdue: they tested a hypothesis, they did not guarantee a result. They still hold TIGHAR’s castaway hypothesis — a landing on the reef, not a crash at sea. Radio bearings, bones from 1940 analysed in 2018, a shoe, a jar, the Bevington object. That is their file, not our verdict.

We have not written that the mystery is closed. Purdue says it will keep searching. The trees on Taraia are not the Electra. The rest stays open.

Image: Angela K. Kepler, Nikumaroro lagoon entrance, public domain, Wikimedia Commons. Not the Y-shaped fragment on Taraia.

Sources consulted: Search for Amelia Earhart’s plane continues after Taraia Object expedition on Nikumaroro rules out latest hypothesis — Purdue University; Amelia Earhart researchers leave remote atoll empty-handed after ‘plane debris’ found to be a clump of trees — The Guardian.