Pilot claims Google Earth image may show Amelia Earhart's missing plane on Pacific island reef

A pilot with decades of experience flying thinks he may have found an image of Amelia Earhart's lost plane via Google Earth.

Justin Myers told Popular Mechanics recently he began looking through satellite images of Nikumaroro Island in the Pacific after watching a documentary on her final flight.

"To be totally honest, my interest started after watching a documentary on the National Geographic Channel. It was the next day when curiosity about Nikumaroro Island took me to looking on Google Earth."

When first looking at images of Nikumaroro, an uninhabited coral atoll in the Pacific, Myers said he wasn't trying to find the Lockheed Electra 10E. "I was just putting myself in Amelia and [her navigator] Fred's shoes."

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But then he tried to imagine, as a pilot, "where I would have force landed a light twin aircraft in their position, lost and low on fuel."

Once he zoomed into an area where he thought they might have tried to land, he noticed a "dark-coloured, perfectly straight object" that measured approximately 39 feet, the same as Earhart's plane.

"I used the measuring tool on Google Earth and to my surprise and mild little shiver it measured approximately 39 ft," he wrote in a blog post.

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"It looked man-made," he told Popular Mechanics. "It looked like a section of aircraft fuselage. That was remarkable by itself, let alone the possibility it was Electra 10E NR16020, even though the measurements looked the same."

Earhart was attempting to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe in 1937 when she and her navigator lost radio contact on July 2 while attempting to land on Howland Island in the Pacific, north of Nikumaroro.

Neither the pair nor their plane have been found, leaving nearly a century of professional and amateur investigators attempting to figure out what happened to them.

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Myers said as he continued to look at the satellite imagery, he thought he saw more plane debris, thinking he might have gotten lucky with his sighting.

"There was an element of luck in spotting that aircraft debris, as Mother Nature had revealed what had been buried on the reef for a long time," he said. "I managed to catch some photos before being covered over again by passing weather systems."

Myers wrote in his blog that he attempted to contact several agencies with his findings but was largely ignored.

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The National Transportation Safety Board said the island wasn't its jurisdiction, so he filed a report with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau but never heard anything back.

He also contacted Purdue University but never heard anything, and he contacted an expedition company in the state but said he hadn't heard back from them in a while.

Myers is hardly the first person to believe he figured out the mystery of the aviators' disappearance.

Last year, Purdue announced its own expedition to research the Taraia Object, a visual anomaly also on Nikumaroro that some think could be the plane's wreckage.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery also believes that Nikumaroro is where Earhart went down, based on a huge body of evidence and a dozen visits to the island between 1989 and 2019, according to Archaeologychannel.org. 

Tony Romeo, a former Air Force intelligence officer and CEO of Deep Sea Vision, made news a couple of years ago after sonar images from a 2023 expedition showed what looked like a plane on the seafloor near Howland.

But it was soon discovered to just be a natural rock formation with plane-like features.

Still, that hasn't deterred Myers in his findings.

"The bottom line is, from my interests from a child in vintage aircraft and air crash investigation, I can say that is what was once a 12-metre, 2-engine vintage aircraft," he told Popular Mechanics, adding the caveat that he's not sure it's Earhart's.

And even if it's not the famed pilot's plane, "then it's the answer to another mystery that has never been answered. This finding could answer some questions to someone who disappeared many years ago."