IN January 2024, an adventurer announced that he might have discovered Amelia Earhart’s long-lost aircraft. Tony Romeo, a pilot, is a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer and commercial real-estate investor from Charleston, S.C. He has funded his search, which has cost him over $11 million. His high-tech gear included an underwater drone, which was launched aboard a research vessel in September 2023 from Tarawa, Kiribati, a port near Howland Island, “a dot of land between Australia and Hawaii where Earhart was last expected to land” in July 1937 to refuel. In December 2023, according to the Wall Street Journal, Romeo “returned…with a sonar image of an aircraft-shaped object resting on the ocean floor. He believes it’s Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra, and experts are intrigued.”
He has returned to the site for a “closer look.” Says the Journal: “Turns out what he found was a rock.”
“I’m super disappointed out here, but you know, I guess that’s life,” Romeo told the Journal last week. He said he and his crew got high-resolution photographs and sonar images of the object they previously thought might be Earhart’s iconic Lockheed 10-E Electra. But the new images revealed that the object was an “unfortunate rock formation” in the shape of a plane on the Pacific Ocean seafloor, the Journal reported.
Andrew Pietruszka is an underwater archaeologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego. He leads deep ocean searches for lost U.S. military aircraft and the soldiers who went down with them. In a separate interview, he told the Journal, “If they had found [Earhart’s plane], I would have been very surprised. It’s very hard to find things on the sea floor even with all the modern technology that we have.”
On July 2, 1937, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared while attempting to fly around the world. They were supposed to land and refuel on Howland Island. The last credible radio transmission attributed to Earhart was heard on July 7, 1937. The U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Navy conducted searches for her aircraft, but it was never found, nor were Earhart or Noonan.
Since then, their disappearance has given rise to several theories, some of which involve the Marshall Islands and Saipan when both were still under the Japanese flag. Marshall Islanders have claimed they saw the aircraft land, and Earhart and Noonan in Japanese custody. On Saipan, local residents said they, too, saw Earhart, who supposedly spent several days in the Garapan prison after being brought to the island by the Japanese. Some say she was later executed by the Japanese. Others say she died of malaria or dysentery.
In 1987, the Marshall Islands issued a set of four postage stamps to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Earhart’s last flight. One of the stamps depicted her plane’s crash landing at Mili Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Another stamp showed her plane’s recovery by the Kōshū, a survey ship of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
In 2017, it was reported that a photograph had been found in the U.S. national archives purportedly showing Earhart, Noonan and their plane in the Marshall Islands in 1937. But according to Japanese blogger and researcher Kota Yamano, the photograph was published in a 1935 Japanese travel book — two years before Earhart’s disappearance.
In the CNMI, local author Marie P. Castro has recounted the stories of local residents, who said they saw Earhart on Saipan in 1937. She said the eyewitnesses — Matilde Arriola San Nicolas, Ana Villagomez Benavente and Maria Cruz — were considered creditable people of high integrity in the community. “They had nothing to gain from their testimonies,” she added. “A sighting of Amelia Earhart would have stuck out and made an indelible and unforgettable impression upon the locals,” Castro said. Her group, Amelia Earhart Saipan Memorial Monument Inc., aims to erect a monument on Saipan commemorating the aviation pioneer. Funding the project is a challenge, however.
To be sure, the most widely accepted theory among historians is that Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific Ocean near Howland Island. But no one can prove it. Some experts say the Japanese capture theory lacks verifiable evidence. But they can’t disprove it.
All this reminds me of a thought experiment called “Schrödinger’s Cat,” which showcases the oddities of quantum theory.
According Sara A. Metwalli, “Schrödinger’s Cat…states that if you seal a cat in a box with something that can eventually kill it, you won’t know if the cat is alive or dead until you open the box. So, until you open the box and observe the cat, the cat is simultaneously dead and alive.”
In the case of Earhart’s disappearance, the only way to learn what really happened to her is to find indisputable evidence of her fate.
We have to, in a manner of speaking, look inside truth’s box.
But for 87 long years now, we can’t even find the box.
Variety editor Zaldy Dandan is the author of the novel, “How I Learned What Really (Probably) Happened to Amelia Earhart,” which is available at Joeten Susupe and amazon.com/.
