(NEXSTAR) – An underwater exploration company has regretfully announced that an image they previously believed to show Amelia Earhart’s lost plane was actually just a big rock.
“After 11 months the waiting has finally ended and unfortunately our target was not Amelia’s Electra 10E (just a natural rock formation),” the company, Deep Sea Vision, wrote on its Instagram account earlier this month.
Earlier this year, the company had thought they may have solved the 90-year mystery into Earhart’s disappearance in late January, after capturing a sonar image of an underwater object that they estimated to be the same size and shape of her Lockheed Electra E-10 aircraft, and in the location where it is believed to have gone down.
In July, Deep Sea Vision Project Manager Lloyd Romeo told NewsNation that they had since spent months scanning the ocean floor with underwater drones at a depth of about 16,000 feet.
“We’ll go down even closer and of course it’s really dark down there, as dark as it gets, so you laser, a very powerful laser, of course, you laser the plane and then you have the camera scan the area around it,” Romeo said.
Deep Sea Vision has yet to give up its efforts to find Earhart’s plane, the company said this month.
“As we speak DSV continues to search — now clearing almost 7700 square miles… the plot thickens with still no evidence of her disappearance ever found,” reads their latest Instagram post on the subject.
Back in 1937, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan left Miami in a Lockheed Electra 10-E plane on a journey that would make Earhart the first woman to fly around the world. But with just 7,000 miles left on the trip, Earhart and Noonan lost radio contact near the Howland Islands, nearly 2,000 miles southwest of Hawaii.
Earhart, Noonan, and their plane were never found, despite extensive searching in the area, according to the National Women’s History Museum.
There have been numerous attempts to locate Earhart’s plane over the last few decades. Last year, a forensic imaging specialist began analyzing an underwater photo taken in 2009 near Nikumaroro Island that many speculated to show an engine cover from Earhart’s plane. There are also theories that Earhart didn’t crash into the ocean at all, but instead landed on an island in the South Pacific; some researchers claim that bones found on the island are likely Earhart’s.
But speaking with Nexstar’s NewsNation, science journalist Jeff Wise urged caution about jumping to conclusions, saying, “People are just really hungry for any kind of clue; they’re so hungry that maybe they’ll look at random pictures and see a shape that maybe reminds them of some part of an aircraft.”
NewsNation’s Zaid Jilani contributed to this report.