He thought he had found Amelia Earhart’s plane. It was a pile of stones

When Tony Romeo and his team saw bright yellow shape resembling a cross on their computer, they thought they had solved one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century.

Of course, the grainy image had to be Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane, 16,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

But after a second expedition to the site, Romeo announced this week that the discovery was smaller than they had hoped.

It was a pile of stones.

“I’m very disappointed,” Romeo. told the Wall Street Journal.

The crew of Romeo’s company, Deep Sea Vision, piloted their modern submersible apparatus closer to possible wreckage. They hoped it would be famous Lockheed Electra 10E Specialserial number 1055, according to the company, turned out to be a “failed” geological formation.

Romeo, who is still at sea and unavailable for comment, has been obsessed with Earhart since childhood, and the discovery of the aviator’s plane could be the culmination of a dream come true since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since his disappearance in 1937, Earhart has come to embody the power of such dreams. A talented aviator, daredevil and dashing superstar, she tried to circumnavigate the world and encourage “other women to be more independent in thought and action.”

Two months after leaving California, she and her navigator Fred Noonan began the most difficult leg of their journey – to a small airfield – an important refueling stop – on an island halfway between Papua New Guinea and Hawaii.

They never managed to do this.

Their sudden and unexplained disappearance has long irritated aviation experts and helped cement Earhart’s place in American culture. Some claim she survived the crash landing and searched nearby islands. Some say she fell into the sea.

Although Romeo, a former real estate entrepreneur from Charleston, South Carolina, remained somewhat skeptic about the initial discovery, he was encouraged that he and his team may have achieved something that had eluded dozens of other expeditions.

“Why can’t six random guys solve aviation’s greatest mystery?” Romeo told The Times this year. “We are not Robert Ballards. We are not James Camerons. We’re just six guys who love this story and created a business to tell it.”

Deep Sea Vision first went to sea in September 2023 from Papua New Guinea, launching a $9 million Hugin 6000 submersible equipped with a Doppler, magnetometer, echo sounder and side-scan sonar.

In 100 days, they combed more than 2,500 square miles of ocean. They headed home empty-handed when the data from the previous day’s study, which was initially unreadable, was finally cleared.

A brighter yellow shape resembling an airplane emerged from the grainy black and yellow sonar image of the ocean floor. The image was blurred by static, but Romeo thought he could make out two vertical stabilizers on the tail. In interviews with the media, he never revealed the location of the find.

Returning home, Romeo began collecting money for a second trip to confirm that the cross-shaped object was indeed Earhart’s plane. Three months at sea cost the company about $15,000 a day, he told The Times.

To cover costs, he invited select media outlets, including The Times, to apply for exclusive use of the photographs if the find was confirmed. The Times rejected the offer.

Romeo planned to raise the fuselage and eventually install it in the Smithsonian Institution.

As promising as Deep Sea Vision’s announcement has been, which Romeo says has attracted the attention of billions of people around the world, some experts have not been convinced.

An assessment of the time from Dave Jourdan, President and Founder Nautikoswho organized four expeditions to search for Earhart’s plane was right: “It could be a plane. It could be a pile of rocks that looks like an airplane.”

Deep Sea Vision is now moving away from its original mission and working with “foreign governments, international organizations and corporations” interested in its underwater technologies.

But Romeo doesn’t give up.

He and his team will continue their search for another month, covering more than 1,500 square nautical miles of uncharted ocean. Somewhere out there, Romeo is sure, lies the answer to Earhart’s disappearance.