An explorer thinks he has found Amelia Earhart's plane. Experts are not convinced.

It is one of the greatest enduring mysteries in aviation history: the disappearance of Amelia Earhart after taking off from Lae, New Guinea, on July 2, 1937, in a Lockheed 10-E Electra.

Earhart was trying to become the first woman to fly around the world. She and a navigator, Fred Noonan, were headed to Howland Island, a small coral atoll in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, to refuel. But they were never seen again.

For years, many have tried to find the wreckage of their plane, but failed. Now the head of a maritime robotics company believes he's done it, though some experts remain deeply skeptical.

Tony Romeo, the CEO of Deep Sea Vision, says a sonar image his company captured during an expedition last year appears to show an aircraft resting about three miles deep on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, somewhere within a 100 mile radius. kilometers. of Howland Island. He does not want to give the exact location.

He said he believes it is Earhart's plane because the image appears to show the two distinctive fin stabilizers on the back of her plane and its dimensions are “very close” to those of her sleek twin-engine Lockheed.

He said his 16-person crew found the image in their data on the last day of their expedition, after scanning 5,200 square miles of the ocean floor between New Guinea and Howland Island.

“We haven't found anything in 100 days,” Mr. Romeo said in an interview this week. “We were a bit at each other's throats. And you know, there it is. It appears on the screen. And you know, you realize in that moment that we were the first to see Amelia's plane in about 86 years. It was an incredible moment.”

Archaeologists who have used similar technology to search for underwater wrecks said they were far from convinced the statue was actually a plane, let alone Earhart's.

“The image is really exciting because it clearly shows an airplane or something that looks like an airplane,” said Megan Lickliter-Mundon, an underwater archaeologist who has searched for sunken planes.

But to confirm it is actually a plane, researchers would need to take additional sonar images from different angles, she said. Then they would have to use a remotely operated vehicle with a video camera to see if the plane has any serial numbers or markings that would identify it as Earhart's.

After more than 80 years in the ocean, it would be surprising if the plane were as intact as it appears on the sonar image, said Dr. Lickliter-Mundon.

“But who knows?” she said. “Nothing is final until you have more information and a visual picture.”

Andrew Pietruszka, an underwater archaeologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, said the image, reported by The Wall Street Journalcould be “noise” in the sonar system or a geological feature on the ocean floor.

“There is no way to say with certainty that this is even an airplane,” said Dr. Pietruszka, who has searched for World War II aircraft. “To me, at best you could say you have a promising target that could be an airplane, and at best it could be Amelia Earhart's airplane.”

Piotr Bojakowski, an assistant professor of nautical archeology at Texas A&M University, said he was “quite skeptical” that it was Earhart's long-lost Lockheed. He said it may have been the wreckage of a World War II plane.

“There are a lot of plane crashes around all those islands,” said Dr. Bojakowski. 'Could it be American? Could it be Japanese? Could it be something else? All we know now is that it looks like an airplane.”

Mr Romeo said he was planning another expedition sometime in the future to take underwater video of the site, which he said will confirm it is Earhart's plane, hopefully with the registration number, NR16020, still visible on the wing.

“I want the world to see it,” he said.

A former Air Force intelligence officer whose father was a pilot, Romeo, 43, said he had been fascinated by Earhart's story since childhood.

A pioneering aviator, she was the first woman to make a non-stop solo flight across the United States in 1932. She was also the first woman to make a non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, also in 1932. She was a pioneering aviator. authorspeaker and fashion designer.

To launch Deep Sea Vision in 2022, Mr. Romeo said, he sold his investment properties and bought a $9 million underwater drone capable of scanning the ocean floor. He said the company, based in Charleston, S.C., will search for other wrecks under private contract.

Earhart's disappearance has inspired similar expeditions over the years, as well as bizarre theories that she was captured by Japanese agents or returned to the United States and lived under a different name.

Susan Butler, a Earhart biographersaid she believed Earhart and Mr. Noonan had run out of fuel and crashed into the ocean off Howland Island.

“The only question is where the plane crashed,” she said.

While the search may not be over, James Delgado, an underwater archaeologist based in Washington, D.C., said he commended Mr. Romeo for undertaking the expedition.

“I will always be in the corner of anyone who goes out and looks for answers,” he said. “It is still early at this stage. But if it were me, because it's curiosity, I would want to go back and see what it is about cameras.”