A grainy line in a sonar image taken off the coast of Nikumaroro Island could be the wing of the plane Amelia Earhart was flying when she vanished during her mission to fly around the world in 1937, Discovery News first reported.
An organization named The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) is best known for their search for details behind Earhart's mysterious disappearance. They believe they've made a groundbreaking discovery in their search.
"It looks unlike anything else in the sonar data, it's the right size, it's the right shape and it's in the right place," TIGHAR wrote on their website.
The organization took photos in July 2012 of the underwater area surrounding the island, which was already widely believed to be Earhart's final landing spot. According to Discovery News, TIGHAR posted the photos online and sought help from the general public as to what they contained. It was not until March that a member of TIGHAR's search forum pointed out the wing.
"Once you know what to look for, the anomaly is painfully obvious," TIGHAR said.
"What initially got our attention is that there is no other sonar return like it in the entire body of data collected," Ric Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR, told Discovery News. "It is truly an anomaly, and when you're looking for man-made objects against a natural background, anomalies are good."
In July 2012, TIGHAR researchers went to Nikumaroro to test a hypothesis that Earhart and her Navigator, Fred Noonan, landed safely on the island's coral reef and died on the island as castaways. Then, according to the hypothesis, the plane would have fallen off the reef and broken apart as it fell down an underwater cliff.
TIGHAR used torpedo-shaped Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) and a Remote Operated Vehicles (ROV) in the July expedition to try and find the remnants of the plane. After technical difficulties and an unforgiving environment, the team abandoned their search for Earhart's Lockheed Electra aircraft.
However, the sonar data they brought back has now led them to a fund-raising project that could send them back to the island, this time with the biggest piece of evidence in their search to date.
Gillespie told the New York Daily News their funding goal is $3 million, but even that would not guarantee anything. He said recovering the aircraft would be risky because the aluminum would be unstable because of salt-water corrosion. He said if anything were to be recovered, it would have to go straight into a tank full of solution.
"Then you bring that home and everyone goes crazy," he said. "That's how we would handle that but the big problem right now is raising the money to get back out there."
