Amelia Earhart discovery was rocks, not her plane | News | postandcourier.com

Tony Bartelme, senior projects reporter for The Post and Courier, has earned national honors from the Nieman, Scripps, Loeb and National Press foundations and is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. [email protected] 843-790-0805

Sonar images of an object identified by a Deep Sea Vision expedition in 2023. It turned out to be rocks.

A South Carolina exploration company's stunning revelation this year that it possibly found the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's long-lost plane turned out to be an aircraft-shaped rock formation.

Tony Romeo, founder of Deep Sea Vision, said in a statement to The Post and Courier that his team recently was in the area of his once-promising target.

But new sonar images from the company's underwater drone revealed a bunch of rocks, not Earhart's Lockheed 10-E Electra.

"This outcome isn't what we hoped for," Romeo said in the statement, adding that his company 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," his statement said.

In interviews with The Post and Courier earlier this year, Romeo described his lifelong fascination with Earhart's disappearance in 1937.

Amelia Earhart climbs out of her plane at Oakland Airport in Oakland, Calif., after completing her 18 hour, 2,400 mile flight from Honolulu on Jan. 14, 1935.

He said he sold his Charleston-area real estate company’s assets in part to mount an expedition near Howland Island, a spit of sand in the central Pacific where Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, planned to refuel but never made it.

His company set off in 2023 with an underwater drone, eventually mapping an area the size of Connecticut. The explorers discovered a shape 16,000 feet below the surface that had the same dimensions as Earhart's plane.

He made the surprise announcement in January, telling The Post and Courier, "We think it could be her plane," but that "it also could be a rock."

The revelation generated international headlines, even though the images were grainy. Romeo said that during the first expedition, the drone's camera failed and that he would have to mount another expedition to prove whether it was Earhart's plane or not.

LAST FLIGHT: Near the end of her circumnavigation attempt in 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator planned to land on Howland Island in the South Pacific, a 2,600-mile flight.

After Romeo's announcements, some skeptics told The Post and Courier that more proof was needed before the Amelia Earhart mystery could be solved.

Dorothy Cochrane, aeronautics curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, told the newspaper when she saw Deep Sea Vision's images, she thought it could be a plane or something else.

“We don’t really know. It’s a sonar image,” she said at the time. “But when you have an image that crops up like that, you need to do some further research to see what you have.”

Tony Romeo sits at a table in his home with a model of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E Special, tail number NR16020, on Wednesday, January 3, 2024, on Sullivan's Island before sharing a discovery regarding the disappearance of the famous aviator.

In interviews with The Post and Courier earlier this year, Romeo spoke about the challenges of balancing the excitement of solving an enduring mystery with the possibility of it being a bust.

He also said he expected the discovery to generate controversy, and that he was "absolutely open" to the idea that it might not be her plane, or that it might be another lost aircraft. He said it was all part of "the riddle of Amelia."

At the same time, some of his other public statements were more definitive. Immediately after his original announcement, he told the "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.”

Romeo's team recently set off on a second expedition and took 10 days to reach its target, the company's statement said.

The crew used the same Hugin 6000 underwater drone it did last year, this time sending it about 15,000 feet below the surface for a closer look.

High resolution sonar images then revealed "an unfortunate rock formation" shaped like an aircraft.

Despite the disappointment, the company is committed to continuing its search for Earhart's plane, its statement said. The team plans to spend another month at sea.

For now, Deep Sea Vision's false alarm joins a long line of debunked hypotheses and false finds over Earhart's missing plane. Some have floated ideas that Earhart and Noonan were captured by the Japanese on another island.

Others believe the duo missed Howland Island and tried to land at another one. The truth remains hidden below the waves.

Reach Tony Bartelme at 843-790-0805

Tony Bartelme, senior projects reporter for The Post and Courier, has earned national honors from the Nieman, Scripps, Loeb and National Press foundations and is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. [email protected] 843-790-0805