Earhart's Plane and the Taraia Object Expedition: The Documentary

The shape in the lagoon

Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared on 2 July 1937 while flying to Howland Island in the Pacific. The official finding is that their plane went down at sea near Howland. One group of researchers has long argued that they reached Nikumaroro, an uninhabited atoll in Kiribati, and died there as castaways.

In 2020 a US Navy veteran, Michael Ashmore, noticed a dark shape in Nikumaroro's lagoon on Apple Maps, near a spit of land called Taraia. The Archaeological Legacy Institute, led by archaeologist Rick Pettigrew, said the object first appears in satellite images in 2015 and was the right size for the Electra's fuselage and tail. It became known as the Taraia Object.

What the expedition found

The institute ran the trip with Purdue University and the Purdue Research Foundation. A team of 17 sailed from Tarawa in early October on the Marin Mainiku, a voyage of about 830 nautical miles that took five days, and went ashore on 13 October. They surveyed the lagoon with a magnetometer, side-scan sonar and a sub-bottom profiler. Weather kept them on the ship for three days; in all they spent seven days near the island and four ashore.

On 19 October 2026, local time, the team said it had found no conclusive evidence of the Electra. In its own words, the shape was most likely a collection of large trees deposited along the sandspit. Much of that debris had broken up and washed away, leaving one Y-shaped piece, and the shine that had suggested metal came from a carbonate crust. It did recover a steel tube about 30 inches long and other items; when it reported, the tube had not been identified or linked to Earhart's plane.

Who paid to look

• The institute's expected budget for this first phase was about $900,000. No final cost was published; the team thanked private donors.
• The Purdue Research Foundation provided a $500,000 line of credit.
• Donors giving $25,000 or more were offered a berth on a larger ship planned for a 2027 dig.
• In 1936 a Purdue fund raised about $50,000 for Earhart's research. Purdue says she used $40,000 of it to buy the Electra, roughly $0.93 million in 2025 dollars.

Where her plane could be

Before the team landed, Ric Gillespie, co-founder of the research group TIGHAR, told Reuters the shape was a tree: "People see what they want to see." He believes the plane was swept off the reef into deep water, where Robert Ballard searched in 2019 without finding it. Sonar searches near Howland have covered more than 3,600 square miles, also without result.

The expedition team still backs the castaway theory and credits TIGHAR with most of the evidence behind it: 13 bones found on the island in 1940 and later lost, a disputed 2018 study that judged their measurements more likely than not to be hers, reported radio calls and a 1937 photograph of the reef. None of it is proof, and no confirmed piece of the Electra has been found there. Purdue says the search will continue, but no new expedition, date or budget had been announced.

A note on the facts

"Most likely large trees" is the team's own wording. Facts were checked on 21 October 2026. This is the second of two films; the first set out the case for the lagoon before the team arrived.