A Search Team May Have Finally Found Amelia Earhart After 75 Years

75 years after Amelia Earhart disappeared, people are still looking for her. In fact, just last month, a search team started a search expedition only to leave without discovering Amelia's wreckage. Or so they thought. The team recently took a closer look at the underwater images they captured and now think they may have found her.

And to consider the low moment in July after The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), the search team behind the expedition, had to shut down the expedition early and walk away thinking it had failed (the expedition cost $2.2 million). Luckily, the team kept keeping on. TIGHAR looked at all the underwater footage they shot and compared it to previous data on Earhart and think they've stumbled upon gold. Or at least, they're very hopeful that this is Amelia Earhart's wrecked Lockheed Electra. Ric Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR, told the Los Angeles Times:

"We have man-made objects in a debris field... in a location where we had previously reasoned where airplane wreckage should be... We don't want to oversell this. We have lots of clues... It looks like it might be the right stuff, but we need a lot more work done, and ultimately we're going to have to go back and recover it."

In the image at the top, Jeff Glickman, the group's forensic scientist, says it shows what appears to be "the fender, possibly the wheel and possibly some portions of the strut" near the Pacific island of Nikumaroro (an island many have long theorized Amelia Earhart crashed at). What might be even more interesting is how Gillespie describes another ongoing investigation about a jar—which they believe to be a freckle cream that Earhart may have carried—repurposed as a cutting tool that was found on Nikumaroro to Discovery News.

It shows signs of having been used as a cutting tool—so the jar does seem to have been associated with the castaway who died there... The question, therefore, would seem to be whether the castaway who had a jar of American women's freckle cream was someone other than Amelia Earhart. We don't know who that would be."

The mystery continues. [CNN, Los Angeles Times, Discovery News]

via gizmodo.com