STUMPED

Amelia Earhart Mystery Deepens After Island Search

It appears the mystery remains unsolved.

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A U.S. expedition hoping to solve the mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance has left a remote Pacific island empty-handed. The explorers found suspected wreckage of her plane, which turned out to be a clump of washed-up trees, the Guardian reported. “Unfortunately, we weren’t able to find that smoking gun,” said Steve Schultz of Purdue University, which partly sponsored the trip. The 17-person team spent four days on Nikumaroro in the Pacific Island of Kiribati, chasing an elongated white object seen in 2020 satellite images and an apparent metallic glint in aerial video. Purdue said the shine came from a carbonate coating, not metal. The team also found other items coated in the same shiny crust of coral sand. Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished in 1937 while attempting to fly around the globe at the equator, prompting one of the largest air and sea searches in human history. It isn’t the first time the remote atoll has dangled hope before those searching for Earhart. During past expeditions, they found a woman’s shoe from the 1930s, glass from a cosmetics jar of freckle cream, and signs of a castaway’s camp.