What happened to Amelia Earhart and her long-lost airplane? It's one of the world's biggest mysteries -- and it's going to remain that way.
An exploration company that claimed to have found the wreckage of Earhart's plane at the bottom of the central Pacific Ocean has now confirmed that the potential discovery of a lifetime was just a rock.
"This outcome isn't what we hoped for," Deep Sea Vision CEO Tony Romeo said in a statement, adding that the team planned to search for another 30 days and scan about 1,500 square miles of seabed.
"The global response to our initial discovery has been truly inspiring, a testament to Amelia and the pull of her incredible story," he said.
In 2023, a team of underwater archaeologists and marine robotics experts set out with an underwater drone, searching for Earhart's Lockheed 10-E Electra, which disappeared during her infamous doomed 1937 flight around the globe. The team was working off the "Date Line theory" of her disappearance nearly 87 years ago.
Originally theorized in 2010 by Liz Smith, a former NASA employee and amateur pilot, the Date Line theory attributes Earhart's disappearance to simply forgetting to turn the calendar back one day as she flew over the International Date Line. Smith suggested that Amelia's navigator, Fred Noonan, miscalculated his celestial star navigation by simply forgetting to turn back the date from July 3 to July 2 as they flew across the Date Line, creating a westward navigational error of 60 miles.
The Deep Sea Vision team came to believe that after 17 hours of exhausting flying, it was quite plausible that Noonan could have made such an error, so they set off on the monumental task of finding the lost plane.
For 90 days, the team searched across 5,200 square miles of the Pacific Ocean floor, more than all previous searches combined -- and there it was. Sonar images captured an "aircraft-shaped object" that researchers thought could be Earhart's plane resting 16,500 feet below the Pacific Ocean near Howland Island.
Romeo was convinced he had solved one of the world's greatest mysteries, even telling NBC's "Today" show, "You'd be hard-pressed to convince me that's anything but an aircraft, for one, and two, that it's not Amelia's aircraft."
Recently, the Deep Sea Vision team returned to the location on a second expedition to capture more detailed high-resolution sonar images of the plane-shaped object. However, they were sorely disappointed to find that the object was simply just "an unfortunate rock formation."
Despite the dead end, Romeo said the company is committed to continuing its search for Earhart's plane and plans to spend another month at sea.
Earhart was the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Her fate has been the source of speculation and conspiracy theories since her mysterious disappearance in 1937. She remains a defining icon of her generation, women's rights and a pioneering spirit of early aviation.