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Is This Piece Of Debris Part Of Amelia Earhart's Lost Plane? (Video)

Amelia Earhart with the "Miami Patch"
TIGHAR
Amelia Earhart with the "Miami Patch"

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), led by Army veteran Richard E. Gillespie, may have discovered a fragment from Amelia Earhart's lost airplane.

The fragment in question, according to a TIGHAR news release, is a piece of aluminum aircraft debris dubbed the "Miami Patch" - discovered on "a remote, uninhabited South Pacific atoll."

The "Miami Patch" was a piece of aluminum used to repair part of Earhart's plane in Miami at the start of Earhart's quest to circumnavigate the globe. The "Miami Patch" replaced a "custom-made, special window on [Earhart's] Lockheed Electra aircraft."

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Gillespie told Discovery News:

“The Miami Patch was an expedient field repair. Its complex fingerprint of dimensions, proportions, materials and rivet patterns was as unique to Earhart’s Electra as a fingerprint is to an individual."

As Home Post reported in 2013, TIGHAR's Earhart Project operates under the assumption that Amelia Earhart landed, and eventually died, on Gardner Island. Gardner Island is now Nikumaroro in the Republic of Kiribati.

Piece of aluminum thought to be the "Miami Patch"
TIGHAR
Piece of aluminum thought to be the "Miami Patch"

In 2012, the Republic of Kiribati granted TIGHAR the exclusive right to conduct search and recovery operations related to Amelia Earhart's 1937 disappearance over the Pacific Ocean.

On July 14, 2012, TIGHAR discovered via sonar what could be the lost plane of Amelia Earhart:

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.

Discovery News reports TIGHAR is planning a new expedition to Nikumaroro slated for June 2015 to further investigate the sonar image with Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) technology.

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Until then, check out this video of the sonar image of what could be Amelia Earhart's lost plane:

Sonar of what could be Amelia Earhart's plane