(West Lafayette, IN) – The Purdue Research Foundation believes they might have a positive lead on how to find Amelia Earhart’s lost plane.
On July 2, 1937, Earhart disappeared over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the world. Her navigator, Fred Noonan, was with her and he also disappeared.
Steve Schultz is the senior vice president and legal counsel for Purdue University and legal counsel for Purdue Research Foundation. He says a new expedition to recover the plane used by Earhart will soon be underway. The Purdue Research Foundation is joining the Archaeological Legacy Institute in an expedition to Nikumaroro Island, located in the central South Pacific.
“So we’re announcing that Purdue Research Foundation is joining an expedition to go to Nikumaroro Island, which is in the Republic of Kiribati in the central South Pacific, to identify whether something in the lagoon of that island called the Taraia Object is the lost 10-E Electra flown by Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, when they were lost on July 2, 1937. And we’re going there on Nov. 1 or thereabouts, and we will spend six days going there by boat sailing from Majuro in the Marshall Islands, spend five days on the island, and this will be for the purpose of identifying whether that object is the Electra,” said Schultz on Wednesday.
He says they first have to identify whether this artifact located in the lagoon of the island is the Electra.
“But if it is, we’d like nothing more than to bring the remains of the Electra back to Purdue, which is consistent with Amelia Earhart’s wishes. She had always said that she wanted to bring the flying laboratory back to West Lafayette for students to study when she completed her historic flight. And so, when Purdue was approached about the idea of an expedition going to this island to explore and confirm this theory, Purdue Research Foundation thought it was worthwhile to do because, in some ways, we’re coming full circle, given that it originally funded her flight around the world,” said Schultz.
In 1935, Earhart became a visiting faculty member of Purdue University as an advisor in aeronautical engineering and a career counselor to female students. She was a member of the National Woman’s Party and an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.
“No other hypothesis that I’m aware of can put together contemporaneous radio bearings taken in 1937 at the time of her disappearance; radio transmissions that were heard in the days after her disappearance; 40 years of artifacts collected on Nikumaroro Island since the late 1980s; and, most recently, satellite imagery discovered in 2020, but now since traced to prior images that were first discovered, were first seen in 2015. No other theory that I’m aware of can put Amelia and Fred Noonan on that island, but I think this one just might do it,” said Schultz.
Earhart was declared legally dead in 1939. Noonan was declared dead in 1938.
(Story by Network Indiana)
