A South Carolina man believes he has discovered the plane Amelia Earhart was flying when she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
Former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer Tony Romeo turned his fascination with the legendary pilot into an adventure when he embarked on an ambitious search for Earhart's lost plane.
Romeo, who sold his commercial real estate investments to fund his search, managed to capture a sonar image of a plane-shaped object on the ocean floor in December.
Earhart and her Earhart's Lockheed 10-E Electra disappeared at the height of their fame, a mystery that has spawned decades of searching and conspiracy theories.
Earhart's record-breaking achievement as a pioneering female pilot at the dawn of the aviation age made her an international celebrity.
Earhart and her Earhart's Lockheed 10-E Electra disappeared at the height of their fame
Romeo, who sold his commercial real estate investments to fund his search, managed to capture a sonar image of a plane-shaped object on the ocean floor in December
She was the first woman to fly solo and nonstop across the U.S. mainland and the Atlantic Ocean, and the first person to fly solo from Hawaii across the Pacific to the mainland.
“This may be the most exciting thing I will ever do in my life,” Romeo told the Wall Street Journal.
“I feel like a ten-year-old going treasure hunting.”
“It was simply unthinkable that she would disappear,” Romeo said.
Adding, “Imagine if Taylor Swift just disappeared today.”
Romeo spent $11 million to finance the trip and purchase the high-tech equipment needed for the search, including a Hugin underwater drone made by the Norwegian company Kongsberg.
The expedition departed Tarawa, Kiribati, a port near Howland Island, in early September with a 16-person crew aboard a research vessel.
The unmanned submersible scanned 5,200 square miles of seabed in 36-hour missions.
Earhart's disappearance is a mystery that has spawned decades of investigation and conspiracy theories
In 1932, Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic alone
On June 1, 1937, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan left Miami, Florida, for a flight around the world. They disappeared after a stop in Lae, New Guinea, on June 29, 1937, with only 7,000 miles of the journey remaining
Experts are unwilling to definitively name the find and have requested clearer images with details such as a serial number matching Earhart's plane
Finally, about a month after the search began, it had captured a fuzzy sonar image of an object the size and shape of a plane resting about 5,000 meters underwater within 100 miles of Howland Island.
However, the image went unnoticed until the team found it while scanning the data about 90 days into the journey.
Romeo is now planning a counter-exhibition to get better pictures of the mysterious object.
Some experts are intrigued by Romeo's discovery, including Dorothy Cochrane, a curator in the aviation department of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.
Cochrane told the Journal that the location of the sonar image roughly matches where experts have suggested Earhart may have crashed.
However, experts are not ready to give a definitive name to the find and have requested clearer images with details such as a serial number that matches Earhart's plane.
“Unless you physically look at it, you can't say for sure what it is,” Andrew Pietruszka, an underwater archaeologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told the Journal.
Romeo is not the first to undertake journeys to find the missing plane, half a dozen adventurers and enthusiasts have spent millions on the unsolved mystery.
Expeditions were launched in 1999, 2002, 2006, 2009 and 2017.
The Wall Street Journal estimates the missions cost a total of at least $13 million after adjusting for inflation.
“It's the only thing I've ever looked for in my career and not found,” said Tom Dettweiler, a sonar expert who was involved in two of the searches and was part of the team that found the Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland. Canada, in 1985.