Original subtitles

Tonight, Amelia Earhart, the world's most famous female pilot, takes off on

final leg of a record -breaking flight.

Earhart is attempting to become the first woman to fly around the world.

flown 22 ,000 miles. She only has 7 ,000 miles left.

But Earhart never arrives at her next stop, a tiny island in the Pacific

Earhart, her navigator, and her plane vanish without a trace.

The Navy conducts a massive search by sea and air, but nothing is found.

Now, we'll explore the top theories regarding Amelia Earhart's doomed final

flight. There are many conflicting stories and, in the eyes of some,

We will never stop looking for Amelia Earhart. She was lost, of course, but

where did she go?

What really happened to Amelia and her navigator?

June 1st, 1937, 5 .57 a .m., Miami Municipal Airport in Florida.

World -famous pilot Amelia Earhart sets off on her most daring mission to date.

All eyes are on Amelia Earhart. She embarks on her quest to become the first

woman to fly around the world. At this point...

Earhart is not only one of the most well -known women in America, she's a

celebrity. Record first were no novelty to Aviatrix Amelia.

On May 20, 1932, she successfully spanned the Atlantic from Newfoundland

Londonderry, Ireland, the first woman to make the flight solo.

Amelia Earhart at this time is easily the most photographed woman on Earth.

might be the most famous woman on Earth. She is pursued everywhere. The press is

obsessed. Her feats of flying daring do are well known, and she is about to

embark on her most daring feat of flying yet, to circumnavigate the globe. Which

had been done before with various vessels, but never in an airplane around

equator, which is, of course, the widest part of the globe.

She's going to stay as close to the equator as possible, making this the

route that you could take.

She had already accomplished a lot of firsts.

but this would have established a new life for air travel in general, and the

world is really excited.

Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, take off in a Lockheed A -10

Electra. It will be legendary if she manages to complete this trip around the

world.

Born in Atchison, Kansas in 1897, Amelia Earhart is in her early 20s.

when her interest in flying is first sparked.

She takes her first lesson in 1921 when she's 24 years old.

She starts to fly, and she just falls in love with it. The freedom, the

adventure, the challenge, it becomes her passion.

Amelia Earhart demonstrates a real knack for flying, and it's only six months

later that she is able to purchase her own plane.

In October 1922...

She reaches an altitude of 14 ,000 feet. So within 18 months of starting to take

lessons, she's already broken the world's record for altitude flying for a

woman. Amelia Earhart is quickly coined Lady Lindy. There are plenty of

newspaper articles that put her portrait right next to Charles Lindbergh. In

1932, Lady Lindy becomes the first female pilot to fly solo across the

Ocean. Earhart had done it again, and frankly, no one was too surprised.

And in 1935, she becomes the first person, either male or female, to fly

Honolulu to California solo.

By this point, Earhart has set seven records for being a women pilot, speed

distance, and she is known across the nation, indeed across the world, as the

queen of the air.

America's Miss Amelia Earhart.

World's leading lady flyer. Now Earhart is planning her most ambitious flight

yet. What sets this mission apart is the route that she's taking, nearly 29 ,000

miles around the equator of the Earth. This has never been done before by man

woman. It's estimated to take about a month.

And this is going to be a true challenge for the queen of the air.

It's extremely dangerous.

They stop to refuel in South America, India, Asia.

And each time, it's a media sensation.

On June 29th, she and Noonan land in Ley, Papua New Guinea. They take a few

there to wait for favorable weather.

The next destination is Howland Island in the middle of the South Pacific.

The plan is for them to land and refuel at Howland, after which they'll continue

on to Honolulu, and then make the flight to Oakland.

And that's a flight that Earhart has made before.

On July 2nd, 1937, at around 10 a .m., Earhart and Noonan take off

en route to Howland Island.

The challenge is the stretch from Ley to Howland Island is the

longest of the entire trip.

Today, this trip would take a modern aircraft four or five hours.

Amelia Earhart is planning on 18 hours for her to travel this 2 ,500 miles.

This is a long flight with a very small target.

The island is about 1 20th the size of Manhattan, in the middle of the Pacific.

So with few, if any, other landmarks to help guide the route, this is looking

for a needle in a haystack.

There's nothing at Howland Island. It's just an airstrip that was only very

recently built. It's about two miles long and about a half a mile wide.

And a Coast Guard cutter, the USS Itasca, is stationed in the vicinity to

guide her into the island.

To find Howland Island, let alone land on it, is going to call on all

of her piloting skills and all of Fred Noonan's navigational skills to make it

success.

But Fred Noonan is up to the challenge.

Noonan is a celebrated navigator. He had been in charge of...

mapping all of the trans -Pacific routes for Pan American Airlines.

There's no GPS then, so he's got to use technology that is comparatively

primitive. He had been a sea captain, and he could use a sextant, which is a

centuries -old form of navigation that doesn't require all of his modern

technology to be working in order for them to be successful.

Because he has a sex sense, he can use dead reckoning, he can use the stars to

navigate, even if all of this modern technology fails.

Noonan's ability to navigate by the stars is a reason he and Earhart fly

by night.

If they're going to make this trip, an 18 -hour trip, obviously some of it is

going to be at night.

And they want to time it so their approach to Holland Island is during

daylight. One of the safety measures in place was a U .S. Coast Guard ship

called the Itasca, and they had radio communication, and also it was capable

shooting up a black plume of smoke that would show them the way.

Four hours after takeoff, Lay receives a message from Earhart.

She says, height 7 ,000 feet, speed 140 knots, everything's okay.

Three hours later, a total of seven hours into the flight.

She reports position 4 .33 south, 159 .7 east,

height 8 ,000 feet over cumulus clouds, wind 23 knots.

When the tower gets that message, it's clear that Amelia Earhart and Fred

are exactly where they're supposed to be.

By 7 .18 p .m., Earhart is out of range of the Ley Airport and still too far.

from the USS Itasca at Howland Island.

She isn't heard from again until over two hours later. They received that

transmission on the USS Itasca, but everything still seems to be going

to plan.

But there are starting to be concerns about the amount of fuel because the

is running into major headwinds, and that also means a loss of fuel

Around 2 .45, Itasca's radio operator receives a message from Earhart's

report that it's cloudy and overcast.

This is a great sign. This means that the Itasca can begin to broadcast its

radio signals to guide the plane to Howland Island. But for an unknown

it's clear that while Earhart can communicate with the Itasca, she isn't

receiving any of their messages.

So this continues for six hours with the same frustrating results.

She is way behind schedule.

And this is, of course, a huge factor when we are considering how much fuel

needs to land.

The Itasca, as planned, sends off its heavy smoke signal, which should be

visible within 40 miles any direction.

20 hours into the flight at 8 .43 a .m., the Itasca receives a message from

Amelia saying, we are on the line 157 -337.

We will repeat this message.

We will repeat this on 6210 kilocycles.

Wait listening on 6210 kilocycles.

We are running on north -south.

And the sound of her voice is starting to get thin. It's starting to get a bit

panicked.

At that moment, because she says, I'm going to switch over to this different

frequency, I'm switching over.

She never does. We never hear her on 6210.

which suggests that her engine sputtered, went off, flamed out, and at

point she's gliding the plane into the water.

This is the last message that Earhart will ever send.

By 9 a .m., all the radio operator on the Itasca can hear is static.

When Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan fail to arrive on Howland Island, there is

just a really dismal realization that the worst may have happened.

The flight's taking considerably longer than expected, at least two hours

longer. By the time she sends her last message, it's likely that the Electra

running on fumes.

It's also been suggested that the fuel tanks were not full. It was common

practice for pilots to take off with less than a full tank because weight

mattered considerably, especially on long flights.

The Electra can hold 1 ,150 gallons of fuel.

But we have some evidence in the form of a letter from Earhart where she

suggests that she might be able to make the flight unless maybe 950 gallons of

fuel, which would give her just a little over 20 hours of flying time.

After flying 20 hours and 13 minutes, it would make sense that she would have

run out of fuel shortly after and crashed into the ocean.

ditches that plane in the vicinity of Howland Island, someone would have seen

it. But the fact is, there was no report of the plane going down. There's no

debris found on the water. There is no fuel that's bubbled up to the surface.

She just seems to have disappeared.

When Amelia Earhart doesn't arrive on Howland Island on July 2, 1937, the U

Navy and Coast Guard begin searching an area of the Pacific Ocean.

Roughly the size of Texas.

For the public, when they hear that Amelia Earhart has not arrived on

Island, it would be like if one of the biggest stars on the planet at this time

suddenly disappeared.

The story of a brave woman of the air enters the shroud of mystery.

She had so many fans around the world who were paying attention to this

And when she doesn't turn up on July 2nd, people are following the

people are listening to the radio for any kind of update.

Where is Amelia Earhart?

The Itasca anchors off of tiny desert island.

The Itasca begins their search for Amelia Earhart within an hour of losing

contact with her.

They had established communication with her, and they had the best idea of where

to start looking.

The U .S. Navy deploys 62 planes from the aircraft carrier USS Lexington,

sails from Hawaii, 1 ,700 nautical miles from Howland Island.

And that's just the beginning.

You've got an aircraft carrier, several Coast Guard ships, the USS Colorado,

other vessels end up joining the search, as many as 4 ,000 sailors engaged in

this effort.

At a cost of maybe $4 million, which would be equivalent to about $75 million

today, on July 19th, after 17 days of searching an area that was 150

,000 square miles, the search is called off.

Given the resource that's devoted to the search, given that they are using every

technology available, it may seem surprising that they were not able to

any wreckage.

Many people believe that even though it would be difficult and it may take a lot

of time, we should have been able to find some trace of either her or her

and none was ever found.

Maybe there's a reason why there was no evidence on the surface of the ocean.

Maybe Earhart and Noonan make it to land.

Theorists point out that there's still no proof that she crashed into the

Pacific Ocean. She is well -known, well -trained, highly acclaimed pilot with a

very experienced navigator.

Some theorists suggest that once they realized they couldn't find Howland

Island, they had in fact changed their destination to a different island

The closest island to Howland is Baker Island, just 40 miles away.

Baker Island was looked at from the air, but no one saw anything as big as the

Electra. It was just sand and trees.

The next most logical island nearby, where she may have gone, is 400 miles

away, and it's called Gardner Island.

To call it an island is almost a stretch.

It's tiny, it's four and a half miles, it's sandbars, it's palm trees, and

totally uninhabited.

Gardner is the sandbar.

It's really an oval -shaped sandbar with some water in between it, and there is

no place to land.

Amelia was a very experienced pilot, and she was very familiar with this

particular aircraft, the Electra 10E. Even out of fuel, she would be able to

glide it and make a soft landing either on the sandbar or land it on the water

and then hop out with Mr. Noonan.

Navy planes do search Gardner Island from the air. Now, they report what they

call signs of recent habitation, but no aircraft, no signs of life.

The planes fly over the island in pairs. They don't see SOS written in the sand,

no smoke, no fresh human activity that would suggest somebody was in distress.

And so they conclude that this isn't a viable location for Earhart to have

up. But three years later, in 1940, a new discovery suggests those planes may

have overlooked something.

British colonial officer Gerald Gallagher is leading an expedition on

island, scouting it for possible settlement, when he finds a terrifying

A human skull.

Continued search of the island turns up other things.

Bone fragments, a portion of a woman's shoe, they find a bottle of herbal

alcohol, and they find...

A box, empty, but made to contain a U .S. Navy sextant.

We know that Noonan flies with a sextant. So this has Gallagher thinking

stumbled upon Amelia Earhart's human remains.

The bones that are discovered on Gardner Island are then sent to an expert on

Fiji, Dr. D .W. Hoodless, who examines the skull.

the tibula, and the other small bone fragments that were discovered.

He determined that the bone fragments were from a male, short, maybe about 5

'5", and quite stocky, middle -aged, 45 to 55.

Earhart was in her late 30s, petite and slim, and Noonan was also a very slim

man. So neither of them matched the profile of a short, stocky, middle -aged

man.

In any event, this is regarded as...

Conclusive, this could not have been the remains of either Noonan or Earhart.

That opens up the question, where else could she be? Did she crash?

Did she make an emergency landing?

Where did she go?

These questions remain unanswered for decades.

Then, in 1960, a radio journalist forwards a shocking theory.

For decades after Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, Vanish in the

middle of the Pacific Ocean, speculation swirls that there's more to the story.

How does the celebrated pilot just disappear? And there's no evidence of

plane. Did she just get swallowed up by the Pacific Ocean, or is there another

explanation?

As is often the case when a celebrity disappears without a trace, speculation

abounds that maybe the official explanation is not.

A truthful one. This is certainly the case with Amelia Earhart.

The question of where she has ended up fascinates a CBS radio newsman

named Fred Gerner. He spent years investigating this. He looked through

document he could get his hands on.

And in 1966, Gerner comes out with a book called The Search for Amelia

in which he advances a really interesting theory.

According to Gerner, In 1937, Amelia Earhart had never truly intended

to land on Howland Island and that she was part of a secret government mission

to actually spy on the Japanese in the lead -up to World War II.

The Chinese forces tried desperately to stem the surging tide of the invasion.

Japan had been at war with China since 1931 when they invaded Manchuria, and in

1937 they're poised to invade mainland China.

Japan has colonies in the Marshall Islands and the Marianas Islands.

There are reports that the Japanese are fortifying these islands with the

expectation that they're going to face the U .S. Navy at some point. Of course,

any kind of surveillance of Japanese military activity would be incredibly

valuable to the U .S. government. And how better to acquire that surveillance

material than from the air? But you can't just fly a plane into Japanese

airspace and expect it not to get shot down.

Garner claims to have interviewed dozens of...

World War II veterans as well as high -ranking officials, the U .S. military,

and people in the Pacific Islands.

And he comes to the conclusion that Earhart's final flight was, in fact,

covertly designed by the U .S. military, an elaborate ruse.

So what was really surveillance activity was disguised as a celebrity, record

-breaking, world -circling flight.

The theory goes that Amelia Earhart was instructed to land her plane as far away

from Howland Island as possible. This would then trigger the massive search

was conducted after she went missing.

The idea being that the Navy isn't really searching the South Pacific for

Earhart. What they're doing is trying to survey Japanese military activity.

If that theory is true, it's brilliant. You could never get that close to

Japanese territory in secret.

But if you're searching for Amelia Earhart, you can basically spy out in

public.

For those who believe that Amelia Earhart is actually a spy, it's the only

you could explain.

why Franklin Roosevelt was willing to commit such a massive amount of

both money and manpower, to finding a single aviator who was missing in the

Pacific.

Proponents of the spy theory also point to a number of strange details that

suggest Earhart may have deliberately avoided detection.

The Electra was equipped with the latest in radio technology.

It had...

all of the most modern and up -to -date two -way communication devices.

She was also scheduled to make a radio contact every hour. But in her 20 -hour

flight, she only does that seven times.

Why would somebody who was supposed to check in every hour only check in after

four hours and then another three hours?

Maybe she was up to something else, goes the theory.

Remember when Amelia Earhart was having that communication issue with Itasca

where they could hear her but she couldn't hear them?

Was that a glitch or was she purposely being evasive?

Five hours into her final flight, Earhart reports her position as 150 .7

and 7 .3 south.

Which doesn't make sense because that's only about 200 miles from Leigh and by

this point she should.

be over 400 miles away.

So for those inclined to believe this theory, this is a key piece of evidence.

False location reports that make it harder for her to be tracked, for some

people, could only mean one thing, by mission.

According to the theory, they lay low for a while, and then once the search

ends, they are quietly relocated and given new identities.

Earhart, and probably Noonan as well,

lived out the rest of their lives as somebody else.

There are other theories that hold that, yes, Earhart did survive past her

purported death in July of 1937, but under very different circumstances,

circumstances that would prevent her from communicating at all with the

world.

In January of 1939, 18 months after Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific

Ocean, she is officially declared dead.

But still the search for answers goes on. By now, most people believe the

official story that the aviator fell victim to navigational issues, crashed

sank. But there is yet another credible theory that Amelia Earhart ended up a

thousand miles from where she was supposed to land only to end up a

While he's writing his book.

Fred Gerner speaks with a Navy veteran who had been stationed on the Marshall

Islands during World War II. The Navy veteran named John Mahan claims that he

had spoken to two Marshall Island natives who had been told by two U .S.

military officials that they had seen Japanese soldiers transporting two

captured U .S. aviators. One man, one woman.

Warner also tells another story about another Marshall Island native who told

two U .S. Navy officers that a Japanese friend had told him about a white lady

pilot who had crashed near the Jaluit Atoll, was taken prisoner.

He claims that a Japanese boat picked her up and took her away, maybe to

Kwajalein, maybe to Saipan.

Amelia Earhart is not only the most celebrated woman pilot, but she is one

very few female pilots.

To see a white woman aviator in the Marshall Islands, completely unheard of.

else to account for this story?

For a white woman to have been shot down or captured by the Japanese in the

Marshall Islands in 1937 requires a lot of people to be making stories up. So

there is... an element through the story that forces you to ask, was there in

fact a woman flying in the Marshall Islands? And if there was, who was it?

Even some U .S. government officials find the story convincing.

Admiral Chester Nimitz, who was overall naval commander in the Pacific, is

interviewed by Goerner in 1965.

Goerner quotes Nimitz as saying, I want to tell you Earhart and her navigator

did go down in the Marshalls and were picked up by the Japanese.

For the admiral of the Pacific Fleet to make a statement of that magnitude has

suggested to some that the U .S. government knew or had information about

Amelia's disappearance. You wouldn't expect an admiral, particularly Admiral

Nirmitz, to make a statement like that unless he had some pretty good evidence.

Some say that Amelia died of dysentery while she was in captivity.

Some say that she was executed on the island of Saipan.

Others say that Fred Noonan was also executed after Amelia Earhart died.

But the fact is, we just don't know.

Gerner also talked to a couple of U .S. Army veterans who had been stationed in

the Marianas Islands.

They said that they were shown items that belonged to Earhart and that they

shown where Earhart and Noonan were buried.

And when Gerner goes to investigate this lead, he meets with... Some pretty

significant resistance from the U .S. military.

He makes four trips to Saipan to try to figure out what happened to Earhart and

Noonan. Doesn't really find any conclusive evidence.

Decades later, all of this is just hearsay. It's myth and legend.

But in 2015, something like a piece of evidence maybe turns up.

At Mili Atoll in the Marshalls, a native led investigators to a site where he

claimed that Earhart went down a reef where he claimed the plane crashed and

was then salvaged and drug across the beach and then carried away by the

Japanese. So there is no evidence. But the investigators decide to search

anyway, and they discover a small piece of metal.

a rectangular piece of aluminum was found that may have been apart from the

plane.

It's painted red, and it's known that at least part of the Electra was painted

red. And under that red paint, a yellow chromium primer, which was known to be

used in the 1930s and 1940s.

And it looks as though it's the cover plate.

for an auxiliary power unit that would have been found on a Lockheed Electra

made during this time.

In addition to that, there was a round piece of aluminum that they conclude is

dust cover for landing gear for a Lockheed Electra.

It is certainly a fascinating discovery, but there is just no way to know if

what they found is an actual piece to this Amelia Earhart puzzle or if it is

just an unrelated artifact.

Rather than speculate on new leads, some investigators take a deeper dive into

old theories.

Experts start to go back and re -evaluate and re -determine if maybe

old leads were in fact correct.

Amelia Earhart's final radio message to the USS Itasca is one of the biggest

clues in her unsolved disappearance.

But what if that wasn't actually her last transmission?

Soon after Earhart's disappearance, well before she's pronounced dead, ham radio

operators in the United States begin reporting to have received transmission

from Amelia Earhart.

Many of these are dismissed as cruel hoaxes, but there are some which deserve

additional scrutiny because of the details transcribed by the radio

After... Earhart's disappearance about 5 ,000 miles from Howland Island. A

young, 16 -year -old civilian ham radio operator named Dana Randolph reports

hearing the voice of a woman at about the same time that Amelia Earhart would

have been in distress.

Randolph lives in Rock Springs, Wyoming, and is listening on a commercial radio

set with short wave bands connected to a special antenna he's just installed.

At about 8 o 'clock in the morning, He hears a female voice saying, this is

Amelia Earhart.

Ship on a reef south of the equator, station KH9QQ.

And then, according to the report, the signal just dies away.

Dana and his father share this information with a local government

operator. This operator tells them that, given the frequency involved, it is

possible for them to have heard a transmission from halfway around the

So this government radio operator takes down the information and forwards it to

Washington, D .C., but what happens to that information after that is unknown.

There's another message that reaches a 15 -year -old girl in St. Petersburg,

Florida. This girl's name is Betty Clank. Her and her dad are interested in

radio. Her father has just installed a new antenna, which enables her to get

signals from farther away.

She's listening soon after the disappearance and scanning through

she gets a message saying, this is Amelia Earhart.

Betty hears the message shortly after news of Amelia Earhart's disappearance

made public. She knows Earhart's voice from newsreels and is certain she is

listening to the famous aviator as her plane fills with water. For the next

couple of hours, Betty listens to what she describes.

as a male and a female voice that are growing increasingly distressed,

continually giving their distress calls and their location information, and that

both of their voices sound strained and frightened.

Betty starts writing down the messages and getting as many of the numbers as

can. What Betty describes is a bad situation that is quickly getting

worse.

Purportedly, this is Noonan and Earhart.

talking back and forth in the plane as it begins to fill with water, and they

try to plot how it is they're going to not only get out of the wreckage but

survive.

Their father comes home, and he hears the final messages.

He's convinced that this is real, and so they report it to the Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard, though, assures them that the Navy is in the area, the search

is underway, there's nothing to worry about.

How might we explain the fact that two separate radio operators, amateurs, were

able to receive transmissions reportedly from Amelia Earhart? You could say that

Betty and Dana heard about Amelia Earhart's disappearance and decided to

the bandwagon for their 15 minutes of fame. But Betty and Dana did not know

other, and they lived thousands of miles apart.

In 2011...

Earhart researchers compare when the radio transmissions were received by

Betty Klink and Dana Randolph.

They began to detect what they say is a pattern, that these transmissions were

happening at certain times of the day, at low tide on Gardner Island.

Low tide would only happen at night or early morning, and that just happens to

be when these purported transmissions from Earhart were received back in the

States.

In order to use the radio, the plane's engine needs to be on.

But in order for the plane's engine to be on, it could not be even partially

submerged in water.

If the Lockheed was stuck on a sandbar or an atoll, only

when the water had receded would they have been able to start up the engine,

thus allowing them to transmit that message.

So that means that they could only turn the plane on at low tide.

Many researchers believe Earhart was navigating toward Gardner Island when

vanished.

Earhart's final documented message by the radio is, KHAQQ to Itasca,

we are on the line, 157337. So this is a navigational indicator that the plane

is flying on a northwest to southeast route.

And it cuts right through Howland Island.

But if they can't find Howland Island...

Are they northwest of it or are they southeast of it? Northwest, there's

but open ocean. But southeast, Baker and Gardner Islands are not too far away.

If she ended up on Baker Island, search crews would have found her pretty easily

because it's so close. So that leaves us once again looking at Gardner Island.

Three months after Earhart's disappearance, a British official who

Gardner Island to see its suitability for a colony.

finds evidence that somebody had been camping there overnight.

Did it ever cross his mind that it may have been Earhart and Noonan? Maybe not,

because that report simply got shelved.

In 2018, the issue of the bones found on Gardner Island comes back

up again.

Now, the bones themselves are long gone at this point, but an anthropologist at

the University of Tennessee uses software.

entering all the measurements and information that had been taken down

earlier, and finds that the original investigator was wrong, that

this well could have been a human female skeleton, and that it is

more like Amelia Earhart than 99 % of bones could have been.

Unfortunately, the bones were discarded as medical waste, so we'll never know.

because those bones were thrown away.

Without those original bones to analyze, it's just too inconclusive.

However, new evidence has developed that leads us in a completely different

direction.

It's been more than 80 years since Amelia Earhart disappeared, and the

for her lost plane is heating up once more, thanks to a private expedition.

Tony Romeo is the founder and CEO of Deep Sea Visions, an underwater

company that's based in the United States.

In the fall of 2023, using his own new state -of -the -art technology, he

begins to scour the seafloor in the vicinity of where Earhart is purported

have gone down.

We said to ourselves, it's been 86 years since Amelia's disappeared. We have a

really good trail of evidence as to where she went down.

The technology is available today to do a deep water search.

Why not take a shot at this?

We mobilized out of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, not too far from where she

took off from. We intended to cover about 5 ,000 square miles. We did that

about 100 days of searching, and we scanned an area around Howland Island

the size of Connecticut.

Tony Romeo conducts the search of the area using an autonomous vehicle that

travels. 18 ,000 feet below the surface, about 160 feet from the ocean floor,

taking sonar images as it goes.

It shoots out these powerful pulses of sound, and it goes back and forth,

looking off to the side about a mile. So you've got about a mile swath as it

does each turn. And it looks at the reflection when it comes back to the

system, and it paints an image of what it's looking at.

When Romeo and his team head home in December 2023, they review the sonar

received by their underwater drone and find a startling image.

They find something at a depth of 16 ,000 feet, about 100 miles off the coast

Howland Island, an image that looks a whole lot like a small twin -engined

aircraft.

And it was just incredible. And I remember sitting down.

I think this is it. This is the first time our plane's been seen in 80 -some

years.

The measurements of the Lockheed Electra, that's not secret information.

He compares what this image is to the size of that plane and the vertical

stabilizers that he sees on it, and they're pretty much a match.

Could this be some other twin -engine plane?

Well, there are no reports of a crash of a plane of that design anywhere close

to there. For that reason, he becomes convinced that it's actually the plane.

But Romeo and his team aren't celebrating just yet.

There was some stuff that we were skeptical about.

It is blurrier than we would like. It was taken at quite some distance from

sonar. So the resolution isn't as good as what we would have hoped.

But we suspect very strongly that it's a plane.

The other really strong possibility is that it's just a natural formation

a cruel trick of nature that looks just like a plane.

Ten months later, in October 2024, Romeo and his crew return to the site and

send their submersible down.

Again.

And this time, the pictures they take are much clearer.

Hopes that Amelia Earhart's long -lost plane had been found were dashed this

week. Researchers scanning the Pacific Ocean for the wreckage thought they had

found it last year, but upon further inspection, it's just a natural rock

formation shaped like a plane.

It was obviously a real disappointment, no question about that. We really

thought we had a very promising target, but we didn't go with the champagne

bottle open.

Despite the disappointing setback, the researchers vowed to search on. The

says they've covered nearly 7 ,700 square miles so far in their efforts to

the ill -fated plane.

It's a really small target, right? I mean, and it's a really big ocean. But

the ability of deep sea sonar systems to scan the seafloor, it's just a matter

of time until all the major mysteries of the ocean are solved, including finding

Amelia's plane.

Why are we so interested in what happened to a woman who disappeared 80

ago? Well, she was a superstar.

She was somebody who was known by everyone, and there were a lot of people

cheering for her to finish this round -the -world voyage.

To suddenly find such a huge source of inspiration to have vanished, the

question of what happened to her will be a question that we will never, ever be

satisfied not knowing.

Romeo plans to return to the site sometime in the near future. Until then,

fate of history's most famous female pilot will remain the unfinished final

chapter of her legendary career.

I'm Lawrence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.