Researchers hoping to solve the mystery of the disappearance of aviator Amelia Earhart in 1937 say a sonar image that was taken from just past the shore of a remote Pacific island could be a piece of wreckage from her plane, according to Reuters.
A forensic imaging specialist on the research team that looked at the island of Nikumaroro last year in a search for the plane say the image could represent a wing or part of the fuselage of the plane Earhart was flying.
Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, departed from Papua New Guinea on July 2, 1937, as she attempted to fly around the world along an equatorial route. They disappeared and emergency searchers were unable to find them.
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) said that it needs to send an expedition back to the island to verify that the image represents a piece of Earhart's plane.
"It looks unlike anything else in the sonar data, it's the right size, it's the right shape and it's in the right place," a member of TIGHAR's online community wrote in a statement on the site.
"The resolution on the sonar does not suffice to conclusively determine what it is," Jeff Glickman, the forensic imaging specialist for TIGHAR, told Reuters in a phone interview. "It is unique, and suggestive of being man made.
"It is in the right place, but whether it's a fuselage or a wing is difficult to say," Glickman said. He also added the possibility that the image is part of a boat that is unrelated to Earhart.
The executive director of TIGHAR, Richard Gillespie, has theorized that Earhart's plane was washed off the reef by surf after Earhart and her navigator landed on the island. He says circumstantial evidence makes a case for his theory that Earhart and her navigator died as castaways on the island.
Previous items that have been discovered are a jar of an anti-freckle cream that was popular in the 1930s, a clothing zipper from that decade, a bone-handled pocketknife of the same type that Earhart carried and piles of fish and bird bones that indicate someone trying to survive.
Currently, TIGHAR doesn't know when the research team will be able to return to the island.
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