AN explorer believes he found Amelia Earhart's plane 87 years after she vanished on a mission to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe.
Tony Romeo, a former Air Force intelligence officer and CEO of Deep Sea Vision, shared images of what he claims is Earhart's plane on the ocean floor.
In July 1937, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noon, planned to land on Howland Island to refuel during their 2,500-mile flight around the world, however, they disappeared.
Two years later, she was declared dead.
Investigators in the United States concluded that her plane crashed in the Pacific Ocean, but her remains were never found.
Andrew Tate 'tried to lure ex-Playboy model to Romanian lair' before his arrest
“For her to go missing was just unthinkable,” Romeo said. “Imagine Taylor Swift just disappearing today.”
Explorer Romeo sold his commercial real estate properties to fund an 100-day, $11 million deep-sea expedition last year.
His team of underwater archaeologists and marine robotics experts used high-tech gear to search 5,200 square miles of ocean floor.
While underwater, he searched Tarawa, Kiribati, a port near Howland Island, using sonar technology.
From the moment he started his trip, Romeo was confident that he and his team were going to solve “the perfect riddle,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
“We always felt that a group of pilots were the ones that are going to solve this and not the mariners,” he said.
He and his pilots tried to visualize Earhart's strategy and noted different clues about her direction, location, and fuel levels based on radio messages.
Then, Romeo and his team developed a search area based on where they thought Earhart was most likely to have crashed.
While they were looking through sonar data in December, they came across images from a drone they deployed of a blurry, plane-like shape.
Discovered roughly 100 miles from Howland Island and halfway between Hawaii and Australia, Romeo believes the drone captured Earhart's twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.
Inside US's most remote town 2.4 miles from Russia where only 77 people live
He is confident that he found the pilot's aircraft due to its unique shape.
“You’d be hard-pressed to convince me that’s anything but an aircraft, for one, and two, that it’s not Amelia’s aircraft,” he told NBC News.
“There are no other known crashes in the area, and certainly not of that era in that kind of design with the tail that you see clearly in the image,” he said.
Romeo and his team want to continue researching the prospect and return to the area within the next year to try and get better images of the potential crash site.
“The next step is confirmation, and there’s a lot we need to know about it," he said.
"And it looks like there’s some damage. I mean, it's been sitting there for 87 years at this point."
The former real estate investor is proud of his work so far and admits he enjoys the thrill of it.
“This is maybe the most exciting thing I’ll ever do in my life,” he said.
“I feel like a 10-year-old going on a treasure hunt.”
