00:00July 2nd, 1937. The most famous pilot alive takes off into a Pacific dawn and never lands.
00:09Amelia Earhart vanishes with her navigator over the open ocean. And just days ago,
00:16a search team returned from a remote island with stunning news.
00:21Earhart was attempting the impossible to circle the entire globe. By that summer,
00:28she had already flown 22,000 miles in her silver Lockheed Electra.
00:34Her navigator was Fred Noonan, among the finest in the world. Ahead lay the hardest leg,
00:422,500 miles of empty ocean, from New Guinea to tiny Howland Island. A Coast Guard ship,
00:51the Itasca, waited at Howland, listening hard. Earhart's voice broke through the static.
00:59We must be on you, but cannot see you. Gas is running low. Then, silence.
01:07The search that followed was the largest in history. Nine ships, 66 aircraft, $4 million.
01:16They found nothing. No wreckage. No oil slick. Only empty sea.
01:25In 1939, she was declared legally dead. But the mystery refused to die.
01:32Did her plane crash and sink? Or did she reach land? A lonely atoll called Nikumaroro.
01:40On Nikumaroro, searchers found eerie clues. A woman's shoe, glass bottles from the 1930s,
01:49a cosmetics case, and bones, discovered in 1940, that vanished before science could test them.
01:58Then in 2020, satellite images revealed a plane-shaped shadow in the island's lagoon,
02:04the Tariya object. Hope exploded across the world. Had the wreck been found at last?
02:12Just days ago, a 17-person expedition backed by Purdue University reached the island after a
02:19five-day voyage. They examined the object up close. Their verdict? No conclusive evidence.
02:25Only trees and debris. Eighty-nine years later, the mystery endures. Crash? Castaway? Something stranger
02:37still? Amelia Earhart flew into the unknown, and the unknown never gave her back.
