Posted on 08/07/2025 1:12:54 PM PDT by Red Badger
Using Google Earth, Justin Myers found some anomalies near Nikumaroro Island that he thinks are strikingly similar to Earhart’s lost plane.
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
* A pilot perusing Google Earth may have stumbled across the remnants of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E
* Inspired by a documentary on the final flight of Earhart and Fred Noonan, Justin Myers compared the measurements of anomalies in a Google Earth image to the components of the Earhart plane
* Thus far, no major institutions have made any effort to investigate his claims
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What would you do if you though you’d solved an unsolved mystery, but nobody wanted to listen?
That’s the predicament pilot Justin Myers currently finds himself in. With nearly a quarter-century in the air himself, he believes he’s uncovered the answer to one of aviation’s most enduring mysteries: where is the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E, the final plane she ever flew? All it took was Google Earth, and a little curiosity.
Unlike some who have tried to find the wreckage from Earhart and Fred Noonan’s ill-fated final flight in 1937, Myers was not a life-long Earhart obsessive.
“To be totally honest,” Myers told Popular Mechanics, “...my interest started after watching a documentary on the National Geographic Channel. It was the next day when curiosity about Nikumaroro Island took me to looking on Google Earth.”
With these zoomed in images from Google Earth, Myers deployed his piloting expertise to identify anomalies he believes indicate airplane parts
Nikumaroro Island is often posited as a final resting place for, if not Earhart and Noonan themselves, than at least the Electra they were flying in. “This theory,” Biography has previously noted, “...is based on several on-site investigations that have turned up artifacts such as improvised tools, bits of clothing, an aluminum panel and a piece of Plexiglas the exact width and curvature of an Electra window.”
But when Myers first looked up Nikumaroro, he wasn’t initially looking for a plane at all. “I was just putting myself in Amelia and Fred’s shoes,” he told PopMech. But as he stared at those overhead images, he started to employ his own experience as a pilot, to think about “...where I would have force landed a light twin aircraft in their position, lost and low on fuel.”
That’s when Myers noticed what he felt were some anomalies on the map. He detailed his observations in a blog post:
“I picked an area which would probably have been what I thought to be best considering the circumstances. I zoomed in and there was a long sandy-looking shape. [...]I measured the sandy section, which was over 50ft long, looked up the specifications of the Electra, and that measured 39ft. I laughed and thought ‘What do you think you are doing?’
However, to the left of the sandy section that had been eroded by the weather over many years was a dark-coloured, perfectly straight object. I used the measuring tool on Google Earth and to my surprise and mild little shiver it measured approximately 39 ft.”
Justin Myers’ labels, indicating the location of airplane parts he has identified
“It looked man-made,” Myers noted as he continued to examine the object, “...it looked like a section of aircraft fuselage, that was remarkable by itself, let alone the possibility it was Electra 10E NR16020, even though the measurements looked the same.”
In the coming days, as Myers poured over the images more, he made out what appeared to him to be even more airplane debris, including what looked like a partially exposed radial engine, and his approximate measurements all aligned with the dimensions of the corresponding parts of the Lockheed Electra 10E that Earhart and Noonan had flown.
But if these airplane parts could be seen from Google Earth images, why hadn’t anyone seen them before? Myers suggests to us that “...there was an element of luck in spotting that aircraft debris, as Mother Nature had revealed what had been buried on the reef for a long time. I managed to catch some photos before being covered over again by passing weather systems.”
So, Myers assembled his images and his measurements, and was ready to present his case. But just who do you present such a case to?
“I didn’t know really where to go with this,” Myers wrote in his blog post, “...so I wrote to the NTSB in the U.S., and they emailed me back saying it was not there[sic] jurisdiction, it was the ATSB, Australian Transport Safety Bureau. So, I filed an official report with the air crash investigation team in Brisbane.”
And then...radio silence. In the years since, there has been no real movement to take Myers’ theory beyond the theoretical. “I did have some communication with an expedition company in California,” Myers says. “However, I haven’t heard anything in a long time. I also contacted Purdue University a few years ago and recently, but unfortunately they never responded.”
So if Myers has found the solution to an enduring aeronautical quandary, why isn’t anyone inquiring further? Well, in the case of Purdue University, it’s not as though they’re not pursuing answers to Earhart’s disappearance at all: earlier this summer, PopMech reported that they had announced their own expedition to investigate an anomaly known as the Taraia Object, often speculated to be the downed Electra.
But it’s also an impediment to Myers’ outreach efforts that he is hardly alone in thinking he has found the final piece of the proverbial puzzle.
If you had a dollar for every person who’s claimed they’d found Amelia Earhart’s plane, you’d probably have enough money to fund an expedition to try and find it. Hopes for answers have hinged on everything from old photographs to the promise of modern-day technology. In the process, some people with wildly different theories have become prominent figures in the aircraft recovery community, which has resulted in bitter feuds and sometimes even lawsuits.
And of course, there’s the matter of “what happens if you’re wrong?”
In 2024, images from underwater drones operated by Tony Romeo’s Deep Sea Vision showed “contours that mirror the unique dual tails and scale” of the Lockheed Electra. At the time, Romeo had confidently stated that “you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that this is not an airplane and not Amelia’s plane.”
But after another expedition was launched to more closely examine that anomaly, Romeo was, in fact, convinced that it was not an airplane; because it was only an ordinary rock formation.
“I’m super disappointed out here,” Romeo remarked after the fact, “...but you know, I guess that’s life.”
For his part, Myers isn’t challenging others to “convince him” he’s wrong, though he does feel confident, based on his measurements, that what he’s found is more than just a naturally occurring phenomenon.
“The bottom line is,” he told PopMech, “...from my interests from a child in vintage aircraft and air crash investigation, I can say that is what was once a 12-metre, 2-engine vintage aircraft. What I can’t say is that is definitely Amelia’s Electra.”
And if it isn’t Amelia’s, we asked? Would Myers be disappointed?
“If this is not Amelia’s Electra 10 E,” he said, “...then it’s the answer to another mystery that has never been answered. This finding could answer some questions to someone who disappeared many years ago.”
If Myers found Amelia Earhart’s plane, it could bring him acclaim. If it’s a different downed plane he’s found, at the very least, it could bring closure to the family of whoever its pilot had been.
But time will tell if anyone with the funds to launch a search will take the leap of faith to see if there truly is a plane there at all.
AVIATION PING!...................
If he really believes it, Why not just go there?
Are those labels really correct?
That photo is nothing
His opinion..........
Bigfoot quality pictures.
Clear as mud...
I think I found it too. On the moon.
That is pretty creative photo interpretation.
“If he really believes it, Why not just go there?”
$$$
Gofundme might work
At least twice a year for decades, we get news that Amelia Earhart’s plane has been found.
Story #1,000,0001 about someone who thinks that they found Amelia Earhart’s lost plane.
Dark Side?................
Ping!................
Amelia Earhart deja vu all over again.
Looks like just a smudge picture, can’t tell anything from it.
The only way I could believe this would be if a panel of government experts issued a report saying it was false.
Purdue University is supposedly sending a team in the next few months to look at an object they’ve spotted in a photo.
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