Researchers Travel Five Days to Remote Pacific Island to Confirm Amelia Earhart's Plane Is Trees

THE FOREIGN DESK (BASEMENT) — I have spent a long career filing dispatches from places I have never been. So I know a long-distance assignment when I see one, and I salute the research team that just traveled five days by sea to look at some trees.

The trees are on Nikumaroro, a remote atoll in Kiribati. For six years they were something far more exciting: a shiny shape in a lagoon on the Taraia Peninsula, first spotted on satellite imagery in 2020. Some people hoped it was the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra, which vanished over the Pacific in 1937.

It was not the Electra. Purdue University, which has a leading role in the study, said the so-called Taraia Object “was likely a collection of large trees deposited along the peninsula’s sandspit.”

I want to stress how far these people went for that sentence. Five days at sea. Then several more days stuck on their own ship, because rough seas and strong winds would not let them land. Then four days onshore. I once waited forty minutes for the basement vending machine to drop a granola bar, and I still talk about it.

By the time the team reached the object, most of it had broken apart and washed away, the university said. One Y-shaped segment remained. It is hard to prove a pile of trees is an airplane when the trees have already left.

The object had been hiding in plain sight. Purdue said it is visible in photography going back to 1938. That means it sat in the same lagoon for nearly 90 years, through every expedition and every documentary, waiting patiently to be wood.

Project director Rick Pettigrew was gracious about it. “This mystery has been ongoing for 90 years and the mystery continues,” he said, speaking from near the site. “The island has been holding on to its secrets and it continues to do so.”

I know the feeling. My basement holds on to its secrets too, mainly where the stapler went.

The search will go on, because it always does. Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared while trying to reach Howland Island, a tiny coral island about 400 miles from Nikumaroro. One long-running theory says they landed on Nikumaroro instead. Pettigrew said he believes someone will eventually find conclusive evidence there.

I wish them well. That region is beautiful, I am told, and very far away. I am told this by a postcard. It is on my wall, next to a map of that region with a pin in it, which marks where I would go if anyone ever stamped my passport.

In the meantime, the pigeon on my window ledge has been staring at the same patch of gravel since Thursday. I have not ruled out an airplane.