Amelia Earhart’s disappearance has been a mystery for decades. It’s known that on May 20, 1937, on a Lockheed Electra aircraft, she and Fred Noonan, a navigator, were supposed to land in July 1937. However, due to a peculiar turn of events the flight was unsuccessful. Two years later, Amelia Earhart was pronounced dead after the U.S. concluded that she crashed in the Pacific Ocean.
Despite what the U.S. conclusion was it didn’t stop others from coming up with theories about her disappearance. Some of these theories were that she landed safely on the wrong island, she was a spy, and she stole another woman’s identity. “The one about her [having] a fake identity,” commented Warren Norbeck, a junior at CdM, about his favorite theory on the disappearance.“I like the theory that she landed safely and was alive and took [another person’s] identity, which was pretty wild,” voiced Giang Tran, a junior at CdM.
These theories led Tony Romeo, a former Air Force intelligence officer and CEO of Deep Sea Vision, to conduct an expedition to locate the plane. According to NBC News, Romero’s “team reviewed sonar data in December caught by an underwater drone from his research voyage and found a startling image: a blurry, plane-like shape Romeo believes is Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.”
This finding would prove the theory about the plane crash in the Pacific Ocean to be correct, while the others are untrue. “I think it would be an important discovery because it’s something that we’ve always wondered about, and it would give closure to her relatives, “Tran remarked.
With the sudden advancements in technology, to be used in future expeditions and findings. Tran shares that another possibility would be, “if there are other things that disappeared in the past. We could use technology to find those things and uncover what happened [to] help correct history if we have to. Maybe in the future accidents and stuff where we lose things in the ocean.”
The disappearance had been a mystery for decades; this discovery of the plane’s disappearance uncovered what happened on May 20th and it could a gateway to more future expeditions in uncovering other cases.