Sep 28, 2026 · 34 min · 11 segments
In the final episode of “Finding Amelia,” we’re talking to Steve Schultz, Purdue University’s senior vice president and general counsel. As a field assistant on the search expedition to identify…
For nearly nine decades there have been many search attempts, and so why do you all think that this is the one that will get it right?
So probably the biggest search attempt was the largest search and rescue mission in American history.
I, uh, actually went to find this 'cause I was curious how much it cost the United States to conduct that search for more than half a month in July 1937.
That was the cutter that was sitting off Howland Island, which was again their target.
They were gonna refuel in Howland and then head to Hawaii the next day, and the Itasca immediately began searching for her when they lost radio contact.
It was soon joined by the USS Colorado, which had some planes that it launched and flew over the neighboring islands and searched the sea around Howland, and then later the USS Lexington joined, and it had something like 65 planes that essentially over the course of that 16-day period or so, they searched a, an area the size of Texas-
Because everybody loved Amelia, and she was friends with the Roosevelts, so there was a huge outpouring in an attempt to find her, and by the way, a huge impact when everybody realized she was lost, including here at Purdue.
The records show that President Elliott and obviously the whole campus community was devastated by her loss.
So that was the first attempt, and then later efforts have been really devoted, until the Nikumaroro hypothesis, have been devoted to what are called, like, deep sea searches.
The most recent ones were by Deep Sea Vision, a firm that thought that it identified through some satellite imagery and some sonar technology something very deep below the surface, a few hundred miles from Howland.
Upon further investigation, that ended up being a rock outcropping at the bottom of the ocean.
And then more recently and concurrently really with our efforts, another deep sea theory is being searched by a company called Nauticos.
And what they have done is they've tried to narrow that search field, so no longer thinking that we have to look around an area the size of the state of Texas.
Let's mimic the technology that Amelia and Fred would've had, and using that, let's try to identify a more narrow area of the ocean where they would've gone down.
For nearly nine decades there have been many search attempts, and so why do you all think that this is the one that will get it right?
So probably the biggest search attempt was the largest search and rescue mission in American history.
I, uh, actually went to find this 'cause I was curious how much it cost the United States to conduct that search for more than half a month in July 1937.
That was the cutter that was sitting off Howland Island, which was again their target.
They were gonna refuel in Howland and then head to Hawaii the next day, and the Itasca immediately began searching for her when they lost radio contact.
It was soon joined by the USS Colorado, which had some planes that it launched and flew over the neighboring islands and searched the sea around Howland, and then later the USS Lexington joined, and it had something like 65 planes that essentially over the course of that 16-day period or so, they searched a, an area the size of Texas-
Because everybody loved Amelia, and she was friends with the Roosevelts, so there was a huge outpouring in an attempt to find her, and by the way, a huge impact when everybody realized she was lost, including here at Purdue.
The records show that President Elliott and obviously the whole campus community was devastated by her loss.
So that was the first attempt, and then later efforts have been really devoted, until the Nikumaroro hypothesis, have been devoted to what are called, like, deep sea searches.
The most recent ones were by Deep Sea Vision, a firm that thought that it identified through some satellite imagery and some sonar technology something very deep below the surface, a few hundred miles from Howland.
Upon further investigation, that ended up being a rock outcropping at the bottom of the ocean.
And then more recently and concurrently really with our efforts, another deep sea theory is being searched by a company called Nauticos.
And what they have done is they've tried to narrow that search field, so no longer thinking that we have to look around an area the size of the state of Texas.
Let's mimic the technology that Amelia and Fred would've had, and using that, let's try to identify a more narrow area of the ocean where they would've gone down.
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