Pictures of amelia earhart body found

• A piece of metal debris found in the western Pacific is deemed to be from a World War II plane, not Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra.
• The mystery of what happened to Amelia Earhart has made little progress in recent years.
• A group searching for the plane’s whereabouts believe a photo may offer the next clue worth pursuing.

We may never know what happened to Amelia Earhart, but it seems we’ll always have another clue to investigate. And another theory to debate.

Just as scientists ruled out one long-thought promising piece of metal debris as belonging to the famed pilot’s plane, a group spearheading a search for her downed Lockheed Electra aircraft in the western Pacific surfaced another clue to start investigating.

The search for Amelia Earhart never ends.

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The mystery started in July 1937. Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were already six weeks and 20,000 miles deep into a trip around the world, but about 1,700 miles southwest of Honolulu, Hawaii, the pair’s planned stop at Howland Island in the Pacific never happened.

The Lockheed Model 10-E Electra missed the mark of the 2.5-square-mile island in the vast ocean. Not only are we not certain why the plane never made it to the island, but we also don’t know where it went instead.

With little proof ever unearthed to answer either question, that has left a limitless array of theories. As is often the case with these legendary mysteries, the most basic explanation—the Electra crashed into the ocean and sunk after Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel—isn’t the most alluring.

So, we have plenty of other theories, including the one that says Earhart and Noonan landed on the coral reef barrier surrounding Gardner Island, now known as Nikumaroro Island, about 350 nautical miles southeast of Howland. Distress radio calls from that island shortly followi

A pilot and explorer believes he has solved one of aviation's greatest mysteries and discovered the location of Amelia Earhart's plane.

Tony Romeo, a former Air Force intelligence officer and the CEO of Deep Sea Vision, sold commercial real estate to fund his deep-sea search of the Pacific last year.

He combed the ocean floor with sonar technology in the suspected area of Earhart's crash in a bid to find the aircraft, which vanished in 1937.

His team reviewed sonar data in December caught by an underwater drone from the research voyage and found an image of a blurry, plane-like shape Mr Romeo believes is the lost aviator's twin engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.

The image was taken about 100 miles from Howland Island, halfway between Australia and Hawaii.

Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had been expected to land there in July 1937 to refuel during her bid to be the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe.

But they never arrived and were declared dead two years later, after the US concluded she had crashed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, and her remains were never found.

Mr Romeo is adamant the plane he has found is Earhart's, despite the blurry quality of the photograph, telling Sky News sister station NBC News: "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.

"There's 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."

Mr Romeo's team plan to return to

Bones discovered on a Pacific island are likely the remains of international aviator Amelia Earhart, according to an anthropology professor at the University of Tennessee.

Richard L. Jantz used bone measurement analysis to determine that the skeletal remains, including a humerus, radius, tibia, fibula and both femora, found on Nikumaroro Island in 1940, match estimates of Amelia Earhart’s bone lengths.

Earhart was more similar to the Nikumaroro bones than 99 percent of the individuals in a sample of 2,776 individuals, Jantz said in a research article.

“This strongly supports the conclusion that the Nikumaroro bones belonged to Amelia Earhart,” he writes.

Jantz’s analysis refutes an earlier assessment by Dr. D. W. Hoodless that the bones belonged to a middle-aged stocky male who was about 5 feet, 5 [1/2] inches tall.

“When Hoodless conducted his analysis, forensic osteology was not yet a well-developed discipline. Evaluating his methods with reference to modern data and methods suggests that they were inadequate to his task; this is particularly the case with his sexing method. Therefore his sex assessment of the Nikumaroro bones cannot be assumed to be correct,” the study’s abstract reads.

The bones have since been lost, and Jantz’s study was based on a collection of their measurements.

Their origins have long been a source of debate.

Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared on July 2, 1937, during a flight from Papua New Guinea to Howland Island in the Pacific as part of an attempt to fly around the world.

Speculation swirled around the disappearance of Earhart, who was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

Jantz’s research supports the theory that the aviation pioneer died a castaway after landing her plane on Nikumaroro.

Jantz based his analysis on three main criteria, including the ratio of the femur’s circumference to its length, the angle of the femu

NEW YORK — Bones found in 1940 on a western Pacific Ocean island were quite likely to be remains from famed aviator Amelia Earhart, a new analysis concludes.

The study and other evidence "point toward her rather strongly," University of Tennessee anthropologist Richard Jantz said Thursday.

Earhart disappeared during an attempted flight around the world in 1937, and the search for an answer to what happened to her and her navigator has captivated the public for decades.

Jantz's analysis is the latest chapter in a back-and-forth that has played out about the remains, which were found in 1940 on Nikumaroro Island but are now lost.

All that survive are seven measurements, from the skull and bones of the arm and leg. Those measurements led a scientist in 1941 to conclude the bones belong to a man. In 1998, however, Jantz and another scientist reinterpreted them as coming from a woman of European ancestry, and about Earhart's height. But in 2015, still other researchers concluded the original assessment as a man was correct.

Now Jantz weighs in with another analysis of the measurements, published in January in the journal Forensic Anthropology.

Related: Questions raised over unearthed 'Amelia Earhart' photo

For comparison, Jantz used an inseam length and waist circumference from a pair of Earhart's trousers. He also drew on a photo of her holding an oil can to estimate the lengths of two arm bones.

Analysis showed "the bones are consistent with Earhart in all respects we know or can reasonably infer," he wrote in the journal article. It's highly unlikely that a random person would resemble the bones as closely as Earhart, he wrote.

In a phone interview, Jantz noted that some artifacts found on the island also support the possibility that the bones came from Earhart.

"I think we have pretty good evidence that it's her," he said.