Earhart went missing on July 2, 1937, after attempting to become the first woman to fly across the world
Credit: Library of Congress/Getty; Nikumaroro/ Google maps
NEED TO KNOW
- A pilot, Justin Myers, believes he may have found Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane after zooming in on what seemed to be “man-made” objects on Nikumaroro Island through Google Earth
- Earhart was attempting to become the first woman to fly across the world at the time of her 1937 disappearance, with navigator Fred Noonan also on board
- “All I am saying is that these objects look like unfound plane wreckage, which strangely looks and measures the same as her aircraft,” Myers wrote in a blog post
A pilot believes he may have solved one of aviation’s most enduring mysteries.
After watching a documentary on the National Geographic Channel about Amelia Earhart’s final flight in 1937 before her Lockheed 10-E Electra plane crashed and was deemed lost at sea, Justin Myers’ curiosity led him to use Google Earth to see if he could locate the nearly 90-year-old aircraft wreckage near Nikumaroro Island in the South Pacific Ocean.
“I was just putting myself in Amelia and Fred’s shoes,” Myers told Popular Mechanics, noting that he pulled from his own experience to determine “where I would have force landed a light twin aircraft in their position, lost and low on fuel.”
Earhart was attempting to become the first woman to fly across the world at the time of her disappearance, with navigator Fred Noonan also on board.
Dr. Richard Pettigrew, executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute in Eugene, Ore., explained on the Today show in October 2025 that he believes Earhart attempted to land on the Nikumaroro northwestern reef flat when her plane sank into the Taraia Peninsula.
"I'm an archaeologist. I'm a scientist. I try to focus my attention on the evidence at hand in accounting for the evidence,” he said at the time. “There's such a huge amount of evidence that I believe we're on the right track."
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Credit: Bettmann Archive
After coming across an area where Earhart’s plane may have been buried under water-deposited sediment, Myers explained in a March 15 blog post, he zoomed in on Google Earth to discover a sandy section on the island, which was more than 50 feet long, and a “dark-colored, perfectly straight object” right next to it.
“It looked man-made, 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,” Myers wrote before going on to identify what seemed to be an exposed radian engine and a half-exposed wheel. “I was struggling to see this was anything other than the debris of a lost vintage aircraft that has been hidden away for years.”
While the zoomed-in images of debris aren’t quite enough to confirm his suspicions that he has successfully located Earhart’s long-lost plane, Myers said that he filed an official report with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s air crash investigation team.
“It would be very bold of me to say the objects in these Google Earth images are the remains of Amelia Earhart’s Electra 10E,” he continued. “All I am saying is that these objects look like unfound plane wreckage, which strangely looks and measures the same as her aircraft.”
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