The disappearance of Amelia Earhart 87 years ago over the central Pacific Ocean is still one of aviation history’s biggest mysteries.

In the decades that have passed, countless speculations concerning her whereabouts have surfaced, but now, a deep-sea exploration team looking for her small plane’s wreckage may have discovered another piece of information.

A firm out of Charleston, South Carolina called Deep Sea Vision announced this week that it has obtained what seemed to be a photograph from sonar in the Pacific Ocean of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra airplane.

Tony Romeo, a former pilot and intelligence officer in the United States Air Force, took a sonar picture of an item like an airplane last month while it was sitting on the Pacific Ocean floor.

Romeo said to the publication that it might have been the most thrilling thing he had ever done. Romeo went on, describing his feelings as those of a ten-year-old on a treasure hunt.

Dorothy Cochrane of the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution told the Wall Street Journal that the position seen in the sonar image might be precise.

A 16-person crew with a state-of-the-art autonomous underwater drone that scanned over 5,200 square miles of the floor during September and December enabled the discovery.

Romeo went on to say that later this year, the Deep Sea Vision team plans to investigate the region where the photos were taken.

Romeo has reportedly already spent $11 million funding the search, as reported by WSJ and Today. Romeo was also formerly employed as an intelligence officer for the U.S. Air Force.

Crews utilized the Kongsberg Discovery HUGIN 6000, whose Deep Sea Vision is touted as the most sophisticated unmanned underwater drone, to locate the debris.

Romeo, whose brothers and father are all pilots, said that he had always been fascinated by the narrative and that everything in his life had come together at the perfect time.

He continued by saying that although he had only actually started around 18 months ago, he had been considering and researching this for a long time because he was leaving real estate and looking for a new hobby.

 

Romeo’s team intends to go back to the location later this year or early in the following year with a remote-controlled car and camera to take better pictures of the potential wreckage site.

Romeo said there was a lot they needed to know about it and that the confirmation would come next. It also appeared that there was some damage. He clarified that by this he meant that it had been sitting there for 87 years.

What Happened To Amelia Earhart In 1937?

In 1937, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to take off around the world when she and navigator Fred Noonan took off from Miami in a Lockheed Electra 10-E.

However, Amelia Earhart and Noonan lost radio contact close to the Howland Islands, which are roughly 2,000 miles southwest of Hawaii, with only 7,000 miles remaining in their journey.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery reports that they made 29 more stops, the last of which was on July 2 at 10 a.m. local time in Lae, New Guinea, where they stopped to refuel.

About eighteen hours later, Amelia Earhart and Noonan were expected on Howland Island, which was roughly 2,500 miles distant from Lae.

While waiting for fuel, the Coast Guard cutter Itasca heard audio communications from Amelia Earhart more frequently as her signal grew stronger.

However, according to the Smithsonian Institute’s examination of official documents, there was no two-way communication because neither Earhart nor Noonan understood Morse code.

The National Women’s History Museum states that despite intensive searching in the area, Earhart, Noonan, and their plane were never located.

The fact that none of their bodies nor their plane have been found conclusively more than a century later makes them one of history’s greatest mysteries and has given rise to a myriad of speculations about what might have happened.

Also Read: A “Dangerous” Alligator Killed The 85-Year-Old Grandmother, Family Sues