Purported Amelia Earhart Crash Site Turns Out to Be Something Else

The search for Amelia Earhart's missing airplane continues nearly a century after her death. 

Back in January, South Carolina-based imaging company Deep Sea Vision shared an exciting update that its technology might have found the wreckage of Earhart's Lockheed Model 10 Electra plane. But after more investigation, it turns out it was nothing more than a rock formation coincidentally shaped like a plane. 

"Talk about the cruelest formation ever created by nature," Deep Sea Vision CEO Tony Romeo lamented to CNN. "It’s almost like somebody did set those rocks out in this nice little pattern of her plane just to mess with somebody out there looking for her."

Earhart's plane is believed to have gone down near Howland Island, a remote spit of land in the Pacific Ocean roughly halfway between Hawaii and Australia, in July 1937. A monument on the uninhabited island commemorates the area as the final resting place of Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan. 

Deep Sea Vision expressed their disappointment in an Instagram post showing what the team believed was the plane wreck. "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 wrote. "As we speak DSV continues to search, now clearing almost 7,700 square miles. The plot thickens with still no evidence of her disappearance ever found."

It was a sad setback, to be sure, but the company isn't giving up yet. In fact, they've already started searching some new areas for any evidence of Earhart's presence. 

"I hope this inspires other people to maybe go look for her or at least learn about her and her story," Romeo said. “I want to see the plane found. She’s out there. She didn’t just disappear into thin air."

Thankfully, Deep Sea Vision is able to laugh about their discovery that ended up being nothing. Shortly after declaring the latest find to be a dud, the company shared that it was heading to American Samoa for a sea floor mineral project; while unrelated to the Earhart search, they began selling T-shirts poking fun at the failure with an image of the plane-shaped rock formation and the promise "We find rocks."