3 Leading Theories About Amelia Earhart's Disappearance

On July 2, 1937, pioneering female aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan were nearing the end of their daunting 25,000-mile around-the-world flight. But they faced one final challenge. They needed to make a refueling stop on Howland Island, a two-mile-long speck of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Visibility was poor, and radio transmissions were garbled between Earhart’s Lockheed Electra and the Itasca, a U.S. Coast Guard ship circling the island. According to radio logs released in November 2025, Earhart’s final communication to the Itasca was sent at 8:43 a.m., roughly 20 hours into the flight from Lae, New Guinea.

"We are on the line 157 337 wl rept msg we wl rept…"

Earhart and Noonan were never seen or heard from again. The legendary pilot was declared dead 18 months later, but her disappearance remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the 20th century. Below are some of the leading theories about what happened to Earhart and Noonan.

There are several competing theories about Earhart’s disappearance, but the most likely scenario is that Earhart and Noonan simply ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean. One of Earhart’s final broadcasts said they were “running low” after failing to make visual contact with the island. The Coast Guard searched a wide area around Howland Island after her disappearance, but no fragments of the plane were found.

A second theory is that Earhart and Noonan crash landed on another small island 350 nautical miles south of Howland. Earhart’s last radio transmission indicated that they were going to keep flying along a line roughly northwest to southeast (157 degrees / 337 degrees). If they followed that path, they may have attempted a last-ditch landing on Gardner Island, an uninhabited atoll now called Nikumaroro.

Earhart and Noonan could have survived for a short time on Nikumaroro as castaways, according to studies by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). A week after Earhart’s disappearance, Navy planes spotted “signs of recent habitation” on Nikumaroro, unaware that no one had lived there for 45 years.

Also, bones recovered from Nikumaroro in 1940 were later found to have a high likelihood of belonging to Earhart. A TIGHAR expedition to the island even recovered fragments of a cosmetics jar that may have been Earhart’s freckle cream.

Another popular theory is that Earhart and Noonan were forced to land in the Japanese-controlled Marshall Islands. According to this scenario, Japanese authorities arrested them for espionage and took them to the island of Saipan, where they were tortured and executed.

Fueling this theory are stories from Saipan natives that two white people “who came from the sky”—including an “American lady flier”—were buried on the island. A 1960 newspaper article included in the Earhart files released in 2025, quotes a former Army sergeant who said he was shown the unmarked graves on Saipan in 1944 and believed they were Earhart and Noonan.