When Tony Romeo and his team saw a bright yellow shape resembling a cross on their computer, they thought they had solved one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century.
Of course, this grainy image must be of Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane, 16,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.
But after a second expedition to the site, Romeo announced this week that the find was lower than they expected.
It was a pile of rocks.
When the Deep Vision crew first saw the grainy image on the left, they thought it was the plane flown by Amelia Earhart in 1937. A higher-resolution image shows it is a rock formation.
(Provided by Deep Sea Vision)
“I’m very disappointed,” Romeo told the Wall Street Journal.
Crews from Romeo’s company Deep Sea Vision drove their state-of-the-art submersible close to the possible wreckage. According to a company statement, they hope the famous Lockheed Electra 10E Special (serial number 1055) turns out to be an “unfortunate” geological formation.
Romeo, who remains at sea and unavailable for comment, has been fascinated by Earhart since he was a child, and finding the pilot’s plane would be the culmination of a dream realized in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since her disappearance in 1937, Earhart has come to represent the power of such dreams. She was a talented pilot, a fearless superstar who attempted to circumnavigate the globe and encourage “other women to be more independent in thought and action.”
Two months after setting off from California, she and her navigator Fred Noonan began the most challenging part of the journey, arriving at a small airport on an island between Papua New Guinea and Hawaii. Important gas station.
They never succeeded.
A framed 1937 photograph of Amelia Earhart and the goggles she was wearing in her first plane crash, on display at Clars Auction Gallery in Auckland in 2011.
(Ben Margot/AP)
Their sudden and unexplained disappearances have long puzzled aviation experts and helped establish Earhart’s place in American culture. Some believe she survived the crash landing and scoured neighboring islands. Some say she fell into the sea.
While Romeo, a former real estate entrepreneur from Charleston, South Carolina, was skeptical about the initial discovery, he was excited because he and his team may have accomplished what dozens of other expeditions have failed to accomplish.
“Why can’t six random people solve aviation’s biggest mystery?” Romeo told The Times this year. “We’re not Robert Balazs. We’re not James Cameron. We’re just six guys who liked this story and formed a company to solve this problem.
Deep Sea Vision made its first sea voyage from Papua New Guinea in September 2023, launching a $9 million Hugin 6000 submersible equipped with Doppler, magnetometer, echo sounder and sidescan sonar.
Over the course of 100 days, they combed more than 2,500 square miles of ocean. When they returned home empty-handed, the previous day’s exploration data, which had been unreadable, was finally cleared.
A bright yellow shape resembling an airplane emerged from the grainy black-and-white images of the ocean floor produced by sonar. The image was marred by interference, but Romeo thought he could make out two vertical stabilizers on the tail. In media interviews, he never disclosed the location of the discovery.
After returning home, Romeo began raising funds for a second trip to confirm that the cross-shaped object was indeed Earhart’s plane. He told The Times that the three-month voyage cost the company about $15,000 a day.
To help defray the costs, should the discovery be confirmed, he invited selected media outlets, including The Times, to bid for exclusive use of the photos. The Times rejected the proposal.
Romeo plans to have the fuselage raised and ultimately installed in the Smithsonian Museum.
Amelia Earhart poses with her Lockheed Vega aircraft, which helped many pilots set flying records in the late 1920s and 1930s.
(Bateman/Bateman Archives/Getty Images)
As promising as Deep Vision’s claims were—according to Romeo, they attracted the attention of billions of people around the world—some experts were never convinced.
Dave Jourdan, president and founder of Nauticos, made four expeditions to find Earhart’s plane, and his assessment at the time proved to be correct: “It could be an airplane. It could be a bunch of rocks that look like airplanes.”
Deep Sea Vision is now expanding beyond its original mission, working with “foreign governments, international organizations and companies” interested in its underwater technology.
But Romeo didn’t give up.
Over the next month, he and his crew will continue their search, covering more than 1,500 square miles of uncharted ocean. Romeo feels confident that the answer to Earhart’s disappearance lies somewhere.
