Amelia Earhart was a superstar long before the term was ever coined.

The famed aviator set multiple flying records, serving as a model of independence for girls and women in a male-dominated world. She was a 1930s-era influencer, starring in radio spots, endorsing products and hobnobbing with the world’s elite. She drew crowds wherever she went, including several times in Baltimore, even flying First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to Baltimore one night in 1933.

So when Earhart and the plane she was trying to fly around the world vanished in the South Pacific 88 years ago, the event sparked a global frenzy. The madness hasn’t stopped yet.

A team of 14 explorers will depart for Nikumaroro, a remote speck of an island halfway between Australia and Hawaii, on Nov. 4, in search of the downed aircraft. It will hardly be the first such venture — the U.S. Navy conducted a 17-day search in 1937, and dozens have led expeditions since — and most in the famously quarrelsome world of Earhart enthusiasts expect this one to come up empty.

The leader of the venture, archeologist Richard Pettigrew, acknowledges the doubters. But his analysis of the long Earhart saga convinces him that he and his team from Purdue University are about to solve what some have called “the greatest aviation mystery of the 20th century.”

Whatever the outcome, Pettigrew said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun, he can’t miss this opportunity to test his theory: that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, died as castaways on this tiny atoll 400 miles from their intended destination — and that the shiny object visible in a newly reexamined satellite photo is Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10-E.

“We have a lot of evidence to go on, and I believe the chances are 9 out of 10 that it’s Amelia’s plane, but we won’t know until we go in there and take a look at it,” he said.

A rapid climb, a sudden fall

A great deal is known about Amelia Earhart, which should surprise no one, given her celebrity during her lifetime and the books, articles, documentaries and podcasts that have chronicled her exploits.

She was born in 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, and grew up an adventure-seeking child. She caught the aviation bug in her early 20s, juggled jobs to pay for flying lessons, and advanced quickly enough to set a world record for altitude reached by a female pilot (14,000 feet) at age 25.

She would become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic in 1928, the first to do it solo four years later, and with no little urging from her husband, publisher-promoter George Putnam, undertook the first around-the-world flight by a female pilot in 1937.

It was on the last leg of her intended 29,000-mile journey that Earhart and her flight companion, navigator Fred Noonan, failed to reach their destination on July 2, a fleck of land less than a mile square in size known as Howland Island. At about 9 a.m., they lost radio contact with the USS Itasca, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter moored nearby and assigned to bring her in. They were never seen again.

What exactly happened is still a matter of fierce debate.

Mainstream historians embrace the simplest explanation: that the plane, which was likely carrying enough fuel to reach Howland, hit empty even as Earhart sought to spot Howland and find the right frequency to hear the Itasca. They believe the plane crashed and sank in 18,000 feet of shark-infested waters.

Dorothy Cochrane, the retired curator for aviation for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington and Chantilly, Va., said most known facts support the hypothesis — including that Earhart was flying into the sun that morning and had never bothered to learn Morse Code, a communications method that would have established a link to the Itasca.

Laurie Gwen Shapiro, a documentary filmmaker and journalist, spent five years researching Earhart’s life for her latest book, “The Aviator and the Showman,” and also believes her plane rests at the bottom of the Pacific. For all her importance and flying achievements, Shapiro said, Earhart’s sense of adventure sometimes eclipsed her skills and preparedness.

“They ran out of fuel and crashed,” she said in an interview with the Sun. “It was a tragedy waiting to happen.”

For others, the matter is not so cut-and-dried.

Competing ‘myths’

Researchers have sidelined a theory some accepted for years: that the pair somehow flew 700 miles to the northwest, crashed in the Marshall Islands, and was captured and executed by Japanese troops. Or that Earhart, who was friends with President Franklin and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, was conducting a U.S. spying mission. Or that she survived and lived a long life under an alias.

Pettigrew has a different contrarian view. As director of the Archeological Legacy Institute, a research and media nonprofit based in Oregon, he has spent decades tracking the work of one of the most prolific — and, some would say, most controversial — of all Earhart aficionados, an amateur aviation historian named Ric Gillespie.

As head of the International Group for Aviation Recovery (TIGHAR), a nonprofit he founded in 1985, Gillespie has led 12 expeditions to Nikumaroro, written two books on Earhart, and become as sure of the “Nikumaroro Hypothesis” as institutional historians are of theirs.

He believes Earhart and Noonan overshot Howland that morning, continued flying about 400 miles to the southeast, conducted an emergency landing on Nikumaroro (then known as Gardner Island), and lived as castaways for at least a week before succumbing to the elements.

Beyond that, he’s convinced the plane was swept to sea and “chewed to pieces” in violent surf.

Gillespie, of Oxford, Pennsylvania, an hour northeast of Baltimore, points to the more than 130 people who reported hearing distress calls from Earhart on short-wave radio in the days following her disappearance. (He says he and his team have verified 57.)

His team has discovered artifacts on Nikamaroro they believe belonged to Earhart — a pocketknife, a cosmetics jar, even skeletal remains they say match her known measurements. (Each claim sparked media firestorms and garnered donations to his operation).

If he’s right, the Electra had to have had enough fuel to travel 400 miles further than most believe. As many have pointed out, crewmen on the Itasca heard a brief radio snippet of Earhart saying “(we) cannot see you, but gas is running low” just as the plane appeared to be approaching Howland. (Coast Guard radio transcripts support the point.)

Gillespie said it’s now understood that Lockheed designers advised the crew ahead of time to conserve fuel throughout the flight by adjusting the plane’s “manifold pressure” (the relative mix of fuel and gas) as needed, and, assuming they did, they could have had four hours’ worth left.

“That’s another myth, that she was out of fuel,” he said. “She had plenty of fuel. Next myth!”

From Trump to Taraia

President Donald Trump ordered his administration to declassify all government records related to Earhart last month, but the move did little to settle the debate. The FBI’s files were already available online, and so was a trove of information at the National Archives.

Those records don’t confirm what years of Gillespie’s team’s evidence had already convinced Pettigrew — that the Nikumaroro Hypothesis is plausible. Unlike Gillespie, he believes remnants of the Electra survived.

In 2020, when an Earhart enthusiast from California reexamined an Apple Maps photo of Nikumararo and spotted what seemed to be an elongated object below the surface of the lagoon in the island’s center, Pettigrew decided to act.

Satellite photos taken between 2009 and 2024 showed that the suspected plane — now known as the Taraia Object — first became visible in March 2015, shortly after a historic cyclone is known to have swamped the area. Pettigrew believes the storm swept it to that spot and cleared away enough sediment to bring it into view.

He reached out to Purdue, where Earhart had taught aeronautics and counseled female students in the 1930s. The school’s research nonprofit, the Purdue Research Foundation, had financed much of her 1937 attempt, and the same group agreed to join the university — home to the world’s largest collection of Earhart papers, artifacts and memorabilia — and Pettigrew’s team to finance the $900,000 expedition.

Expedition members plan to depart Oct. 30 and Nov. 1 for Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, about 2,300 miles southwest of Hawaii. Leaving Majuro on Nov. 4, they will sail the 1,200 miles in six days to Nikumaroro, a densely vegetated island in the Republic of Kiribati.

They’re to spend five days on the atoll using remote sensing technology at the site, get a photographic record, and dredge for a clearer view. If it’s the Electra, they’ll return another time for a full-scale excavation.

For his part, Gillespie says the object is just a fallen pandanus tree. Smithsonian’s Cochrane believes the Electra never came to the area. Filmmaker Shapiro questions the whole premise of the expedition.

“I’m telling you now — there’s no plane in that lagoon,” she said.

As for Pettigrew, he knows nothing is certain, but his research tells him they’re about to end the mystery that has intrigued the world since before World War II — and that even if he’s wrong, it’s worth the effort.

“With the information we have in front of us right now, we have to go there and look,” he said. “I know that without any doubt.”

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