Deep sea explorers who say they found Amelia Earhart’s plane share discovery

ATCHISON, Kan. (WDAF) — It’s one of the greatest unsolved mysteries ever, but we might now be on the verge of discovering what happened to Amelia Earhart ‘s plane.

Earhart was born and raised in Atchison, Kansas , and her love for planes and flying drove her to break barriers for female pilots.

On June 1, 1937, she and navigator Fred Noonan made an attempt to fly around the world in a Lockheed Electra 10-E plane, but somewhere over the Pacific, they lost radio contact and were never heard from again.

Since then, many have shared theories about what happened to them, from running out of gas and crashing in the water to landing on a Japanese island and being killed by the Japanese who thought she was a spy.

But now, a group of explorers say they’ve found her plane 16,000 feet deep in the Pacific Ocean, and they have the sonar picture to prove it.

A company called Deep Sea Vision uses advanced sonar technology to see the ocean floor miles below the surface.

They say the image they captured exactly matches the dimensions of Earhart’s plane and it’s in the area where she is believed to have crashed.

They spent 80 days scanning the ocean floor with an underwater drone.

“It’s a different type of dive,” said Deep Sea Vision Project Manager Lloyd Romeo. “We’ll go down even closer and of course it’s really dark down there, as dark as it gets, so you laser, a very powerful laser, of course, you laser the plane and then you have the camera scan the area around it.”

These explorers are in Atchison this weekend for the annual Amelia Earhart Festival and they are giving a free talk at the Fox Theater, where they will explain how they found what is believed to be her plane.

Find out more about the recent discovery right here.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to Fox 8 Cleveland WJW.