Trump to Declassify Amelia Earhart Files

The American’s light aircraft vanished over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 during her attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world.

Conspiracy theories have abounded since her disappearance, as her body and the wreckage were never found by accident investigators.

These include unconfirmed speculation that her plane may have landed on a small island in the central Pacific or that she had been captured by Japanese forces.

Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had been expected to land at Howland Island in July 1937 to refuel during her quest to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe.

But the pair failed to arrive and were declared dead two years later, with US accident investigators concluding that the plane had crashed somewhere in the Pacific.

No remains were ever found.

Last year Tony Romeo, a former US Air Force intelligence officer who sold his property business to fund an $11 million deep-sea search for the missing plane, claimed to have taken a sonar image revealing its location.

His company, Deep Sea Vision, used an unmanned submersible to scan 5,200 sq miles of ocean floor with sonar technology in the suspected area of Earhart’s crash.

After reviewing data from the research voyage, the team discovered an image of a blurry, plane-like shape 5,000 metres down at the bottom of the Pacific.

Romeo, who posted the picture on Instagram, believes it shows Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.

The sonar image was taken about 100 miles from Howland Island, halfway between Australia and Hawaii.

Romeo’s mission follows previous attempts to solve the mystery.

In 1999, Dana Timmer, an America’s Cup sailor, led a deep-water search near Howland Island. Although a promising shadow was spotted on sonar, Timmer was unable to raise the cash to go back and verify his find.

Ten years later, a team put together by Ted Waitt, founder of the Gateway computer company, conducted a new Pacific search but to no avail. “We’re confident we know where Earhart isn’t,” the team announced afterwards.