On June 1, 1937, famed American aviator Amelia Earhart left Miami with hopes of becoming the first woman to fly around the world. She had a reason to be optimistic, having successfully flown across the Atlantic five years earlier. However, her journey came to an abrupt end when she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, went missing near New Guinea, all the way in Oceania.

Amelia Earhart was already a celebrity at the time, her disappearance sparking the most expensive air and sea search the US government had ever conducted up to that point. Still, despite their efforts, the searchers proved unable to locate the remains of Earhart’s twin-engined, bus-sized Lockheed Electra plane, let alone Earhart herself.

Earhart with her Electra plane’s propeller, taken by Albert Bresnik at Burbank Airport in Burbank, California. Photo: Albert Bresnik/The Paragon Agency via AP.

The mystery of Earhart’s tragic disappearance came close to being solved in early 2024, when Deep Sea Vision, a deep water exploration company, released sonar images of what appeared to be an airplane lying on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, 100 miles off Howard Island, not far off from  Earhart’s last-known location.

Although the object could not be identified from the images, its general shape left little room for speculation. “One of the most unique [characteristics of the] aircraft were the distinctive twin vertical stabilizers on the tail,” Tony Romeo, Deep Sea Vision’s CEO, remarked at the time, explaining how the sonar had observed the same features.

Unfortunately, Romeo and his team cheered too soon. When, later that same year, explorers dove down to see the object for themselves, they discovered that the object – as organizations like the Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) suspected – was not an airplane, but simply an airplane-shaped formation of rocks.

One seemingly absurd yet surprisingly likely possibility is that Amelia Earhart was eaten by coconut crabs. Able to grow up to three feet in length, coconut crabs can be found throughout the area where she and her plane went missing. Nicknamed robber crabs, they have a pinch force of 3,300 Newtons, which – for context – is stronger than the bite of any land animal except the alligator.

A coconut crab wanders across Dolly Beach on Christmas Island, Indian Ocean, Australia. Photo by: Inger Vandyke /VW PICS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

Although the internet is flooded with videos of coconut crabs tearing apart seagulls, other coconut crabs, and—of course—coconuts, we don’t know if they’re capable of moving the remains of an entire human being.

To test this, researchers from the aforementioned International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery scattered large bones across the beaches of Nikumaroro island, near New Guinea, and found that it took less than two weeks before they had completely disappeared inside the coconut crab’s cavernous burrows.

“This tells us crabs drag bones,” one of the group’s members told National Geographic after the experiment, which took place in 2019, concluding that the coconut crab hypothesis—however bizarre—cannot be ruled out.

There are other theories as to what happened to Amelia Earhart, some more believable than others. One holds that Earhart was secretly an agent for the US government, and that she was taken captive by the Japanese military for trying to spy on their islands. Others believe that Earhart ended up on Nikumaroro, where remnants of an unidentifiable plane wreck were eventually discovered.

Photographic evidence of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan (seated with their back turned to the camera) in the Marshall Islands found in the National Archives by Les Kinney. Courtesy of Les Kinney/National Archives/History Channel.

One of the most intriguing theories concerns a photograph found in 2012, showing a group of people standing on a dock in what the writing on the back of the image tells us must be the Marshall Islands. The photograph is, in many ways, unremarkable, except for the fact that two of the people appear to be of Caucasian descent, one of them looking a lot like Amelia Earhart.

Although the photograph does not constitute conclusive evidence, some find it sufficiently convincing. “I think we proved beyond a reasonable doubt that [Earhart] survived her flight,” Shawn Henry, a former FBI director, told People magazine shortly after the photograph was published, going on to speculate that she was subsequently taken prisoner by the Japanese. 

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