Amelia Earhart Plane Found? 2013 Sonar Scan May Reveal Missing Aircraft

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery may have finally solved the biggest aviation mystery of all time (after "What's the deal with airline food?"): What happened to the plane of Amelia Earhart? TIGHAR believes they have found the missing aviator's famed plane using sonar.

The group of experts took an expedition to the island of Nikumaroro- the spot which they had determined, more than a decade previous, was likely to be the area of Earhart's disappearance- in 2012. While there, the group took sonar images of the waters surrounding the island and found what they call an "anomaly."

"It's exciting. It's frustrating. It's maddening," reads the TIGHAR website. "There is a sonar image in the data collected during last summer's Niku VII expedition that could be the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra. It looks unlike anything else in the sonar data, it's the right size, it's the right shape, and it's in the right place."

If our theory about what happened is correct"-that theory being that Earhart's plane landed on reef flats but soon washed into the sea-"this is exactly what we would expect to see in just the place we would expect to see it," the group's executive director told Deutsche Welle.

However, for the time being, TIGHAR is staying put. The group can't go and explore the site until they settle their debts from the 2012 expedition and raise enough capital for a new one. They are taking donations at their website.

What do you think? Is this the remains of Amelia Earhart's plane?