For dozens of explorers, Amelia Earhart is the one who got away — seemingly permanently.
However, a commercial real estate investor from Charleston, South Carolina, believes he might finally have found a vital piece of the 87-year-old puzzle.
The pioneering female aviator, a household name at the time, disappeared with her flight navigator on what was to be a record-setting trip around the world in 1937.
Despite many attempts and millions of dollars spent over nine decades, neither Earhart’s remains nor the wreckage of her plane have ever definitively been located.
But Tony Romeo, a pilot and a former US Air Force intelligence officer who sold all his commercial properties to pay for his search, told The Wall Street Journal he thinks he found part of Earhart’s plane resting on the ocean floor.
Romeo says that his sonar image of an aircraft-shaped object in the Pacific Ocean may well be Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra — and experts who have viewed the image say it’s worth investigating.