Amelia Earhart and the Nikumaroro Lagoon Evidence: The Documentary

The last flight and the island theory

On 2 July 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were flying the 2,556 miles from Lae, in New Guinea, to Howland Island. At about 8:43 in the morning the Coast Guard cutter Itasca logged what became her last message, a navigation line given as 157 337. The Navy and Coast Guard searched from 2 to 18 July, more than 250,000 square miles by the Navy's figure, at a cost of roughly $4 million. They found nothing, and the official conclusion was that the plane ran out of fuel and went down at sea near Howland.

The 157 337 line runs past Nikumaroro, a small atoll in Kiribati about 400 miles south-southeast of Howland. Since 1989 the research group TIGHAR has led more than a dozen expeditions there, arguing that Earhart landed on the reef and died as a castaway.

The clues, strong and weak

• In 1940, 13 bones were found on the island. A doctor in Fiji judged them male, and the bones were later lost.
• A 2018 study by Richard Jantz found the recorded measurements more similar to Earhart than to 99% of a 2,776-person reference sample. He called them more likely than not hers, which is not proof.
• Radio calls were reported for days after the disappearance; some believe they came from a plane on land.
• A 1937 photograph of the reef shows an object that one analyst thinks looks like landing gear.
• A sextant box once linked to Noonan was traced to a 1939 Navy survey, and no confirmed piece of the plane has ever been found on the island.

The Taraia Object

In 2020 a Navy veteran, Michael Ashmore, noticed a pale shape in the lagoon on Apple Maps, near a point of land called Taraia. Rick Pettigrew of the Archaeological Legacy Institute says it first appears in satellite images on 27 April 2015, about a month after a powerful cyclone, and that it is the right size for the Electra's fuselage and tail. His theory is that the plane landed on the reef, the tide floated it off, waves tore away the wings and engines, and the fuselage drifted through a passage into the lagoon and sank.

The skeptics

Ric Gillespie of TIGHAR still believes Earhart died on the island but says the shape is a tree. TIGHAR members who studied the images said it is too small and the wrong shape, since a wrecked Electra would form a cross at least 22 feet wide. Ashmore now labels his own image debunked. Researchers who think the plane sank near Howland note that sonar searches there have covered an area about the size of Connecticut without finding it, and a plane-shaped sonar image reported in 2024 turned out to be rock.

The 2026 expedition

A team of 17 sailed from Tarawa in early October 2026 on the Marin Mainiku, about 830 nautical miles, planning to photograph the site, survey it with a magnetometer and sonar, push a probe into the sediment and then dredge. The test, in the institute's terms, was aircraft aluminium with the shape and rivet patterns of an Electra. This film was published on 11 October 2026, before the team reached the lagoon, when nothing had yet been found. The expedition later reported that the object was most likely a collection of large trees, a result covered in our follow-up film.