A veteran pilot believes he found Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane on a remote Pacific island with the help of Google Earth nearly 90 years after she vanished.
Justin Myers claims he identified evidence in the GPS images indicative of a wrecked small airplane wasting away on the island of Nikumaroro, long speculated by researchers to be a possible final destination for the aviation icon and her legendary Lockheed 10-E Electra.
Myers, who spent nearly 25 years flying, said he only joined in the Earhart mystery fervor after watching a documentary on her and her navigator Fred Noonan’s doomed 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe.
When he started scouring the satellite images, he said he “was just putting myself in Amelia and Fred’s shoes,” he told Popular Mechanics.
Using his own experience as a pilot, he began to consider “where I would have force landed a light twin aircraft in their position, lost and low on fuel,” he said.
But as he stared at those overhead images, he started to bank on his own experience as a pilot, to think about “where I would have force landed a light twin aircraft in their position, lost and low on fuel.”
Myers keyed in on a flat area of Nikumaroro — a tiny island of Kiribati located between Hawaii and Fiji near the center of the Pacific Ocean — and noted a dark-colored object exactly 39-feet in length, matching the length of Earhart’s aircraft.
He continued to meticulously analyze the area and believed he found more debris from the airplane, including the engine, according to a blog post of his findings.
“The bottom line,” Myers told Popular Mechanic, “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.
“What I can’t say is that is definitely Amelia’s Electra.”
Last year, the ongoing mystery gained new traction after researchers at Purdue University claimed a 1938 aerial photo provides “very strong” evidence that another anomaly on Nikumaroro, known as the “Taraia Object,” could be Earhart’s downed plane.
The footage of the strange metallic object located underwater in a lagoon on the island of Nikumaroro — was captured a year after the pioneer aviator disappeared.
A 15-person crew of researchers was scheduled to visit the island in November to investigate further, but the trip was postponed until 2026.
