The leaders of Purdue University’s expedition to determine if the so-called Taraia Object on Nikumaroro is in fact Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane have concluded, after about two days of radio silence to the outside world, that the object is not Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10-E.

Evidence gathered at the Taraia Peninsula on Nikumaroro confirmed that the visual anomaly first seen in satellite imagery in 2020 was likely a collection of large trees deposited along the peninsula’s sandspit. By the time the team arrived at the site, a good portion of the debris had fragmented and washed away, leaving only a single Y-shaped segment — a fraction of the anomaly’s original size observed in imagery when the Taraia Object hypothesis was developed. The fragment’s reflective surface, long associated with the idea that the object was a metallic substance, was due to its carbonate veneer. Other items found by the team were similarly coated with a shiny concretized amalgam of coral sand.

Interestingly, Ric Gillespie, founder of TIGHAR — who long advocated the idea that Earhart and Noonan had landed on Nikumaroro and wrote a book to the effect — called it in a YouTube video in December where he said that the Taraia Object was not the plane. He thinks the plane slid off the Nikumaroro reef and is long gone.

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