In search for Amelia Earhart’s plane, tantalizing clue turns out to be tree debris

By Steve Gorman LOS ANGELES, Oct 19 (Reuters) US-based explorers who voyaged to a tiny South Pacific island seeking to solve conclusively the 1937 disappearance of famed aviator Amelia Earhart have determined that an object they suspected was wreckage from her plane was a cluster of washed-up trees. Leaders of the mission made the announcement on Monday. The team set out this month from Los ​Angeles for the archipelago nation of Kiribati on a $900,000 expedition backed by private donors and Indiana s Purdue University, long affiliated with Earhart ‌and her legacy. The objective was to learn whether an elongated, multi-pronged object detected by 2020 satellite imagery in the island s lagoon was a remnant of Earhart s long-missing twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10-E airplane. Such a finding would have decisively proven some scholars hypothesis that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, crash-landed on or near the coral-ringed atoll and perished as castaways there, hundreds of miles fr