Amelia Earhart’s disappearance has been a mystery for nearly 76 years, but a group of researchers working with the The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) believe they have found the wreckage of Earhart’s plane. In a record effort to fly around the world, Earhart vanished, leaving no trace, on July 2, 1937. Now, nearing her 116th birthday, a sonar-image taken just off the coast of Nikumaroro island (an uninhabited island in the southwestern Pacific Ocean) may be the ultimate clue to solving her disappearance.

The sonar image shows a 22-foot long anomaly on the slope of an underwater cliff; the narrow object is thought to be a piece of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra. As Ric Gillespie, the executive director of TIGHAR, told Discovery News: “What initially got our attention is that there is no other sonar return  like it in the entire body of data collected.” This latest fragment of evidence, along with several other artifacts collected by TIGHAR on ten previous expeditions, suggests that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were forced to land on the island’s coral reef and eventually died there as castaways.

According to the group’s website, the expedition was carried out in July of 2012 to test the speculation that Earhart’s aircraft  landed on the reef of the island but was eventually swept over the reef’s edge and broken up by the surf, only to sink near where the Bevington Object is seen in a grainy photograph from 1937.  If this hypothesis is correct, then aircraft wreckage should have been present on the reef’s slope. The team missed the anomaly by a few hundred feet because it was not identified as a “suspicious sonar target.” However, this March a member of TIGHAR’s online forum with no training in examining sonar images, Richard Conroy, recognized the anomaly in a sonar map posted in a report of TIGHAR Tracks.

Forensic imaging analysis has since been conducted and now shows that the man-made object corresponds with the dimensions and shape of possible landing gear from the wreckage of Earhart’s plane. Wolfgang Burnside, the president of Submersible Systems Inc. who invented and piloted the ROV used in the underwater search, told Discovery News that the object in question is “very promising, definitely not a rock, and it’s in the correct location on the reef.” The only way to know for sure whether the object is indeed wreckage from Amelia Earhart’s aircraft is to send another expedition to the island which will cost nearly $3 million, but as Ric Gillespie said “It’s a lot of money, but a small price to pay for finding Amelia.”