¶The latest mission looks to pin down whether her plane is on the same island.

¶“The evidence supporting the Nikumaroro Hypothesis remains compelling, and the only way to answer this question is to go to Nikumaroro, inspect the Taraia Object firsthand and follow the evidence wherever it leads,” Pettigrew said in a news release by Purdue University.

¶In archival satellite images, the mysterious image first appears in 2015, a year after a massive tropical storm shifted the sands. Ric Gillespie, an aviation accident investigator who has been writing about Earhart for decades, told Costello on TODAY in 2025 that the image captured by satellite is a downed coconut tree, not the famous plane.

¶This is pretty exciting and will be interesting to watch. I didn’t know about the Taraia Object (or Nikumaroro for that matter) until I watched Today’s reporting of this story this morning. Plane fuselage or coconut tree? We’ll see.

¶If the Taraia Object is indeed a plane, it stinks that the human remains found on the island in 1940 are long gone. Hopefully, in that case, enough survived to identify it as her plane.